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Freaks: All Equals in Strangeness

tod-browning-on-the-set-of-freaks-L-DHqJQq
Tod Browning with members of the cast on the set of Freaks

This article contains spoilers.

I recently answered a few questions about Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) on Radio 4’s Today programme on the occasion of the film’s re-release in cinemas. Set in a circus, Freaks tells of the love of midget Hans for beautiful trapeze artist Cleopatra, and the revenge of the other deformed performers when they find out that she has only married him for his money. The brief radio spot centred on whether the film’s representation of disability was offensive. As it was not possible to go into much detail in such a short time, this article is a follow-up, expanding on the issue in greater depth.

It is interesting that 73 years after its release and numerous positive reviews, it is still the question of the film’s exploitative character that was the focus of the Radio 4 spot. The fact that some of the initial American reviews and audience reactions were very negative, and that the BBFC refused to grant it a certificate in 1932, effectively suppressing it for 31 years, seem to have been enough to lastingly colour the perception of the film. Also detrimental was the exhibition of the film on the grindhouse circuit after the war by exploitation king Dwain Esper, under the title Forbidden Love. It was only after the film screened at Cannes in 1962 that the BBFC allowed a limited release with an X certificate in the UK the following year.

And yet, the early responses to the film were more complex and mixed than this may suggest, and it was even a box-office success in a number of cities in its full-length version, before it was cut by producer Irving Thalberg from 90 to 64 minutes, with a happy resolution tacked on at the end. More importantly, the reasons for which the film was vilified by some critics at the time would be deemed utterly unacceptable now, and demonstrate exactly the kind of intolerant, insensitive attitude towards difference and disability that director Tod Browning intended to fight. The Variety review started with praise but found fault with the story: ‘Freaks is sumptuously produced, admirably directed, and no cost was spared. But Metro failed to realize that even with a different sort of offering the story still is important. Here it is not sufficiently strong to get and hold the interest, partly because interest cannot easily be gained for a too fantastic romance.’ In a passage that has now been cut from the text published on the Variety website, it went on to state: ‘It is impossible for the normal man or woman to sympathize with the aspiring midget.’

This sort of ambivalence was found in many of the contemporary reviews. Richard Watts, Jr., wrote in the New York Herald Tribune: ‘It is my impression that Freaks is, in its quite repulsive fashion, a dramatic and powerful motion picture. It is obviously an unhealthy and generally disagreeable work, not only in its story and characterization, but also in its gay directorial touches. Mr. Browning can make even freaks more unpleasant than they would be ordinarily. Yet, in some strange way, the picture is not only exciting, but even occasionally touching… Mr. Browning has always been an expert in pathological morbidity, but after seeing Freaks, his other pictures seem but whimsical nursery tales.’

Also symptomatic of the time’s attitude to disability, The Film Daily found the reality of the performers’ deformities an obstacle to the enjoyment of the film: ‘It is a most unusual production, made at the time when the horror cycle appeared to be in full sway, and as a picture of this type it was produced with expert hands. But the nature of its theme makes its chances problematical. First, the fact that the ugly human monstrosities in this picture are that way in reality, whereas in other films the audience knew it was all make-believe seems to induce a different and not pleasant reaction.’

Contributing to the problem was the critics’ view of cinema as entertainment rather than art, as one of the articles on Freaks published in the trade journal Harrison’s Reports suggests: ‘Any one who considers this entertainment should be placed in the pathological ward in some hospital.’ And the Louisville Times: ‘I cannot believe such a show will entertain any but the morbidly curious, or those poor souls with jaded appetites who are even looking for a new thrill.’ (This view of cinema has been one of the grounds for the BBFC’s decision to cut or ban films in the UK, including A Serbian Film a few years ago.)

Tod Browning was most certainly a film artist who created a powerful and singular world of dark, disturbing poetry and bizarre beauty, exploring the marginal, misshapen, misfit corners of humanity. Yet he was also an entertainer. At the age of 16 he ran away from his well-to-do family to join a circus. For a number of years he did various jobs there, including performing in an act called ‘The Living Hypnotic Corpse’, before acting in slapstick short films in Hollywood. His directorial work includes comedies and exotic dramas, as well as the first horror film produced by a major Hollywood studio, Universal’s 1931 Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, which was a big box-office success. This enabled him to make Freaks for MGM the following year, but the financial failure of the film derailed his career. However, he managed to make Mark of the Vampire in 1935, and, more importantly, the masterpiece of fantastique cinema The Devil Doll in 1936.

Tod Browning’s background goes some way towards explaining the richness and complexity of Freaks, and the tenderness he felt for his characters. His work at the circus gave him a deep understanding of, and affinity with, the deformed members of his cast (the circus was the setting for a number of his films). His insistence on casting real ‘freaks’ gives the film a gritty documentary aspect that deepens and adds substance to the strange and nightmarish atmosphere. His respect for his cast is also demonstrated by the fact that he insisted that his performers had other talents and were not simply cast for their deformities. Early scenes show the sort of prejudice and taunting that the characters constantly come up against. Later sequences portray the characters in their daily lives: the armless Frances O’Connor eating dinner with her feet; the birth of the Bearded Lady’s baby; Siamese twins Violet and Daisy Hilton with Daisy’s fiancé. Some of these scenes, such as the courtship of the sisters, are full of humour and lightness, which adds another level to the representation of the characters. Others, such as when Prince Randian, a man without arms or legs billed as ‘The Living Torso’, lights a cigarette, will have audiences stare in disbelief and wonder at the skill and ingenuity involved in performing a seemingly impossible act. Some will argue that featuring such scenes is no better than the exploitative freakshows that treated people with deformities as mere attractions. Indeed, one of the problems Freaks has had to face in its reception is that, as a film about freakshow acts, it has been confused with the freakshow itself. There is no denying that these scenes have a spectacular quality, but it is a spectacle presented to elicit not uncharitable curiosity or horror, but admiration for the inventive manner in which the characters deal with the difficulties of daily life.

Watch the original trailer for Tod Brownings’s Freaks:

These scenes are also important for another reason: they contribute to the fact that the disabled characters never appear as passive, weak, dependent people, but as fully functioning, mobile, autonomous human beings, including those with the most challenging deformities. In keeping with this, they are given a full range of emotions, from love and desire to violence and vengefulness. It is very clear that the film’s sympathy lies with the ‘freaks’, and that physical deformity is not equated with wickedness, rather the opposite: the villains of the story are the characters associated with physical perfection – the tall, blonde Cleopatra and her strongman lover Hercules. But Tod Browning does not offer a facile, simplistic vision of the disabled characters as poor helpless victims of their villainy, and he gives them the power to act on their emotions, including the darkest ones. The extraordinary final scene, in which the ‘freaks’ wreak their revenge on Cleopatra and Hercules during a dark stormy night, menacingly crawling under the trailers towards their victims, is made all the more creepy and nightmarish by the deformities of the characters. This has been seen as exploitative by some as a scene that re-establishes the association of physical deformity and villainy. But this simply ignores that the scene is part of a whole, and that Freaks shows the many facets of its characters. By presenting a morally complex, physically active portrayal of fully rounded characters, Tod Browning treats his disabled characters exactly as any able-bodied character. This refusal to paint a worthy, sanitized view of disabled people as all-good unfortunates to be pitied may well be one of the reasons for the discomfort the film has caused in some viewers and critics.

Another thing worth noting is that most films that deal with disability will only have one disabled character, an anomaly among the norm, an exception among the majority. Freaks remains deeply unusual in that the majority of its cast is disabled or suffering from a deforming illness. The circus is their world and there it is the able-bodied characters who are the exception. The film gives visibility, legitimacy and screen presence to a large number of people who would have been ignored by the film industry. Tod Browning introduced the reality of disability and deformity in the midst of a Hollywood obsessed with physical perfection (MGM was Greta Garbo’s studio). The protests of MGM personnel during the shooting are revealing of contemporary social attitudes to disability and the sort of reaction the cast would have had to face on a daily basis. The studio executives refused to take their lunch with the performers because they could not stand the sight of them, which meant that most of the Freaks cast had to eat outside in a tent especially set up for them. This shocking aspect of the production highlights how subversive the making of such a film was in the context of the time.

Throughout his work Tod Browning was interested in the blurry line between what is considered normal and what is seen as abnormal, and one of the implications of Freaks is that that line is easily crossed. It is something that he explored in The Unknown (1929), a film that provides an essential point of comparison with Freaks. In this silent film also set in a circus, Lon Chaney plays Alonzo, a knife-thrower who pretends to have lost his arms in order to woo the pretty ringmaster’s daughter Nanon (Joan Fontaine), who has an uncontrollable phobic fear of hands. There is a stunning scene, remindful of the scene in Freaks when Frances O’Connor eats and drinks with her feet, in which Lon Chaney lights a cigarette with his feet, his arms lying motionless by him, having become so used to pretending to be a cripple that he forgets to use his arms in private. The Unknown is the fascinating tale of how a man, seemingly ‘normal’, falls for a girl with an ‘abnormal’ sexuality, acts ‘abnormal’ to seduce her and then really becomes ‘abnormal’ in his desperation to secure her, only to find out that she has become ‘normal’ and now wants a ‘normal’ partner – again, a strongman.

Watch a clip from Tod Browning’s Unknown:

Emphasizing the idea that the line between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ may not be as clear-cut as it may seem, it is suggested in Freaks that the ‘tall people’ may not be as fully endowed as they should be, and therefore are ‘abnormal’ too in a fashion. In a spirited quip to Venus, Phroso the clown reveals that he is impotent (‘You should’ve caught me before my operation.’). And in a scene that was edited out, the sexually frustrated Venus wants to look for ‘a couple of sailors’ and ‘have some fun’ (which became ‘falling in love – getting married – having kids’), which would place her very much outside the moral conventions of her time and therefore make her a social outcast.

Both The Unknown and Freaks are as much about sexual abnormality as they are about physical and social abnormality, and it is perhaps its sexual undertones that made Freaks so unsettling to early viewers, despite the fact that many of these scenes were cut out. The characters of Lon Chaney in The Unknown, Venus and Phroso in Freaks, are about sexual excess or lack, and the impossibility of making individual desires coincide. Throughout his films, Tod Browning shows much sympathy for misguided, mishandled, mismatched, miscalibrated desires and the terrible, tragic acts they lead people to commit. Hans’s desire for Cleopatra is poignant because, despite his childlike appearance, he is a man, as he constantly reminds everyone, and she does not treat him like one, as exemplified most dramatically in the humiliating wedding scene where she carries him on her shoulders in a grotesque cavalcade around the deserted banquet table. For this, she will pay dearly, and will be made ‘one of them’ after being horribly mutilated by Hans’s friends (the violence has been cut out in the film as it stands). Her punishment for scorning his manhood is to be stripped of her beauty. As for Hercules, in the original version he was castrated by the deformed characters, making the sexual element of the film very explicit. The seemingly ‘diminished’ characters are able to take away the potency of the traditional virile strongman. Sexual and social power are aligned here and the ending depicts a subversive act of revenge by the powerless ‘abnormal’ against normative potency.

And yet, amid the darkness, there is also a humorous and lighter side to the strangeness of human desire: in a scene where Siamese twin Violet is kissed by her suitor, sister Daisy is seen to visibly enjoy the pleasure of the kiss. It is a lovely scene that celebrates the wondrousness of human life and an openness to all the shapes and forms that it may take. And so the answer to the question ‘Is the film offensive?’: no, certainly not, because it paints an exceptionally complex, nuanced, multi-layered portrayal of human beings on the margins of mainstream society that refuses to kow-tow to conventions and offer any facile reassurances.

Virginie Sélavy

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Pete Walker’s Flesh and Blood Show

House of Whipcord
House of Whipcord

The House of Walker – a season of Pete Walker films presented by Cigarette Burns

Screening dates: 1-29 November 2014

Venue: Barbican, London

Director: Pete Walker

UK 1970-1976

Pete Walker will be in attendance for the screening of House of Whipcord on 22 November 2014

Barbican website

Brighton-born independent director Pete Walker blazed a stylish and successful trail of mayhem through the flailing British cinema industry of the 1970s with a string of ‘terror’ pictures which delved further into the dark side of the human psyche than Hammer dared venture.

Beginning his filmmaking career in the early 1960s producing short ‘nudie-cutie’ films, graduating to sexploitation features, and soon spotting a gap in the market for grimy, gritty contemporary horror features, Pete Walker was a gifted director on an unashamed mission to provide cinema-going punters with the lurid thrills they wanted – as far as he was able given the constraints of British censors and slender budgets.

The son of flamboyant music hall comic Syd Walker, Pete was something of a showman himself, and delighted in playing the pantomime villain of the British film industry, outraging the moral majority – especially self-appointed guardian of British morals, Mary Whitehouse, and tabloid newspaper readers – with his oft-grisly, taboo-busting films. He once told Film Illustrated: ‘I don’t want people coming out of the cinema saying “what a lovely well-made picture”… the truth is that people don’t go to see lovely, well-made pictures.’ They may not have been lovely – it isn’t generally the first word that springs to mind when you consider Pete Walker’s films – but they were consistently well-made – and in contrast with much British movie-making at the time – highly profitable. What’s more, they still pack a punch today.

He hit his stride in the early 1970s, when he began to focus more exclusively on what he called his ‘terror’ pictures rather than comedy and sexploitation. Walker’s self-financed films (the profits from one would finance the next) bore the distinctive signs of an exploitation auteur. Shunning the now-hackneyed period settings of Hammer Gothic, Walker’s work was relentlessly up to date – sharply zooming in on a gloomy, grey, glum Britain, adrift in an austere, uncertain decade, the acid-tinged optimism of the 1960s an increasingly distant memory. Amidst the sex and violence, Pete’s films were shot through with bleak cynicism, and an uneasy air of disquiet. Short on happy endings, ambiguous in their political slant, and not suggestive of any easy answers, Walker’s best features reflected the awkward tension between permissiveness and repression in that fascinating decade, as youth and establishment collided, and often dwelled on the idea of corruption at the heart of seemingly respectable social institutions, like the Catholic Church, or the Prison Service. But these were no dreary political pieces; they were made to make money, and Walker optimised the exploitation content, working closely with excellent screenwriters including David McGillivray and Michael Armstrong. There was sex, there was repression, there was perversion, there was violence; but amidst all this bleakness, there were also Hitchcock-inspired flashes of sharp, dry, jet-black humour.

There are many lurid delights to savour in the Pete Walker canon. You might begin a whistle-stop tour through his back catalogue with Man of Violence (1970), one of his formative early works, a splendidly amoral gangster tale, where it’s hard to tell the goodies from the baddies. Described by Walker as a ‘Bogart-style spoof’, it was – of course – torn to pieces by critics at the time, but now fascinates both as a sleazy period piece and a piquant ingredient in the Brit-gangster melting pot that would shortly afterwards serve up Mike Hodges’s Get Carter (1971).

After that, why not move on to The Flesh and Blood Show (1972), an atmospheric, bloody multiple-murder whodunit set in a suitably spooky old theatre at the murky end of the pier – shot on location in Brighton – and starring a picture-postcard selection of young heartthrobs of the time: Ray Brooks, Robin Askwith, Luan Peters and Jenny Hanley. Who will survive? Who will snuff it? It’s splendid stuff, and as the title suggests, there’s plenty of flesh and plenty of blood.

Watch the trailer to House of Whipcord (1974):

You’re on to the bona fide classics once you get to House of Whipcord (1974), a remarkably moody, brooding, brutal prison drama. In this dreadful establishment, young women are punished for ‘permissive behaviour.’ Forced to swap their Carnaby Street gladrags for hessian tunics by unhinged, corrupt prison governor Mrs Wakehurst (Barbara Markham), they receive regular whippings from the cruel wardress (played to perfection by gimlet-eyed Sheila Keith, who was a Walker regular). Oppressively shot on location in the Forest of Dean, creepy, chilling, pessimistic and relentlessly bleak, this is top-drawer Walker. It even impressed critics – eager to unearth allegories in his work – to Pete’s surprise and wry amusement.

You can’t go wrong with Frightmare (1974) either, perhaps Walker’s masterpiece, which gleefully combines lurid, critic-baiting cannibalistic thrills and gory exploits with a power drill (wielded by Sheila Keith, joined here by Rupert Davies), with a gently persuasive subtext about the ineffectuality of psychiatry. It was extreme stuff, as far as British cinema was concerned, and – as usual with Pete’s films – provoked some negative press. Of course, that’s the kind of publicity money just can’t buy, and the director made the most of it, plastering the bad reviews across his advertisements like badges of honour. ‘A despicable film,’ sniffed The Observer; Pete cheerfully whacked it on the poster in big letters, and another coachload of punters flocked to see it. The film remains the director’s personal favourite.

Watch the trailer to Frightmare (1974):

Corruption in the church is the theme of House of Mortal Sin (1975), particularly the perverse desires of nasty Catholic Priest Father Meldrum (Anthony Sharp); it all ends badly, and no one is saved; while The Comeback (1977) features singer Jack Jones – playing a singer trying to revitalise his recording career – caught up in a bizarre murder mystery involving a highly Hitchcockian knife-wielding transvestite, who looks a lot like Norman Bates’s mum. It’s a gorily entertaining oddity indeed… they just don’t make ‘em like that any more, alas.

Watch the trailer to House of Mortal Sin (1976):

Calling it quits after shooting his most traditionally Gothic horror, The House of the Long Shadows (1983), which entertainingly teamed Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, John Carradine and the aforementioned Sheila Keith, Pete Walker gave up filmmaking and invested his money in property – notably buying a chain of cinemas in the Isle of Wight. Pete didn’t want to make films for the home video market, as he later confessed: ‘My love was the cinema. It was darkened auditoriums and shadows on a screen and shared experiences.’ Pete Walker’s love of cinema shines through all of his work; and the years have not diminished his finest features. Now, as then, when a Pete Walker ‘terror’ picture is playing, the auditorium is surely at its darkest.

Vic Pratt

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Aldo Lado: Beyond giallo

Short Night of Glass Dolls
Short Night of Glass Dolls

Although he doesn’t have the status of Italian filmmaking pioneers and favourites like Mario Bava, Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci, Aldo Lado is often considered one of the most interesting directors in Italian cult cinema, mainly because of a handful of giallo-inspired thrillers he directed in the early 1970s: Short Night of Glass Dolls (La corta notte delle bambole di vetro, 1971), Who Saw Her Die? (Chi l’ha vista morire?, 1972) and Night Train Murders (L’ultimo treno della notte, 1975). Prior to his directorial debut, Lado worked as a scriptwriter, contributing to Maurizio Lucidi’s Hitchcock-inspired giallo The Designated Victim (La vittima designata, 1971), among others.

Like Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970), Short Night of Glass Dolls is a remarkable debut feature, and one that shows a talent already well-developed. The film was co-written by Lado himself and Ernesto Gastaldi, the genre’s pre-eminent scriptwriter, responsible for a number of classic gialli, including most of Sergio Martino’s films.

Unlike the majority of giallo films, Short Night of Glass Dolls is not constructed around elaborate set-piece murders, although it does feature a typical giallo hero in Jean Sorel’s Gregory Moore, an American journalist living in Prague. When his girlfriend (Barbara Bach, The Spy Who Loved Me) disappears in the middle of the night Moore begins questioning anyone who might have spoken to her on that last evening, as well as looking into several similar disappearances. In a bizarre twist, all this is related by Moore in a series of flashbacks as he lies on a mortuary slab, having apparently died from heart failure. While the doctors try and figure out why his ‘corpse’ is still warm and why it hasn’t gone into rigor yet, Moore looks back on recent events in an effort to understand what’s happened to him.

In most giallo films the journey is more important than the destination, and the pay-off is often something of a disappointment, although some of the finest efforts manage to construct a climax worthy of the rest of the film (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, for example). Short Night of Glass Dolls definitely falls into the latter camp and features one of the genre’s most memorable conclusions, both in resolving the mystery of the girl’s disappearance and in Moore’s eventual fate. Although it appears to be inspired by a classic episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Lado takes the film in another, more exotic direction, one which it is doubtful that Hitchcock could have conceived of.

Watch the trailer for Short Night of Glass Dolls:

Although it’s very successful in purely horror terms, Short Night of Glass Dolls also works on a number of different levels. It can be assessed as an overtly political film, with an American journalist struggling to solve a mystery in a society that does not tolerate dissent and hides its secrets behind a corrupt bureaucracy. Because of this approach Lado was able to secure funding from pro-western sources; ironically, he also received financial support from pro-communist groups, who interpreted the film as a parable about the way the wealthy, upper-class elite prey upon the working classes like parasites. On a more abstract level, it’s also concerned with the fleeting nature of youth, and its exploitation by those desperate to recapture their own youthful vitality. This theme is reflected in Lado’s frequent references to butterflies, whose brief lifespan has made them a popular metaphor for youth and mortality. After the director’s original title, Malastrana, was rejected by the producers, it was changed to Short Night of the Butterflies, an appropriate enough choice, but that was altered because it was considered too similar to the title of another giallo released at roughly the same time, Duccio Tessari’s The Blood-stained Butterfly (Una farfalla con le ali insanguinate, 1971).

Despite its continued critical acclaim Short Night of Glass Dolls has not been widely influential, but does seem to have inspired a handful of later films. Both Sergio Martino’s All the Colors of the Dark (Tutti i colori del buio, 1972), which was also (co-)scripted by Ernesto Gastaldi, and Francesco Barilli’s The Perfume of the Lady in Black (Il profumo della signora in nero, 1974) feature secret groups and sinister activities. In contrast with Lado’s film, they focus upon female characters played by actresses with a solid giallo heritage, Edwige Fenech and Mimsy Farmer, allowing both films to portray their heroines’ collapsing mental state, much like Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). Neither film is entirely successful; All the Colors of the Dark is compromised by a hysterical central character and doesn’t stand up to Martino’s other gialli, while a solid performance from Farmer in The Perfume of the Lady in Black isn’t enough to remedy a slow-moving plot and a largely event-free first hour.

Lado’s second film was another giallo, but a more traditional one, this time co-written by Lado, veteran scriptwriter Massimo D’Avak, and Francesco Barilli. Although it’s not as effective or original as Short Night of Glass Dolls or Night Train Murders, Who Saw Her Die? is still an interesting example of the genre, with a few unusual aspects that make it worth watching. A compelling introductory scene shows a child being murdered by someone in a black veil. Four years later, sculptor Franco (played by George Lazenby, the forgotten Bond) and his estranged wife Elizabeth (Anita Strindberg, Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, 1971) are living separate lives in Venice. When their daughter Roberta (Nicoletta Elmi, Deep Red, 1975) is found murdered, Franco tries to track down her killer, uncovering a web of paedophilia and sadomasochism.

With a grieving father exploring the baroque and otherworldly city of Venice, trying to understand his daughter’s death, it’s not surprising that many commentators have seen connections between Who Saw Her Die? and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), although Lado’s film came out more than a year before Roeg’s. It’s never been established whether Roeg was familiar with Who Saw Her Die?, but the similarity of certain shots, locations and events suggest that he might have been. While Lado’s film is respectable enough, Don’t Look Now is still the superior film.

Watch the trailer for Who Saw Her Die?:

Like Short Night of Glass Dolls, Who Saw Her Die? is a window into a world of clandestine societies with secret agendas, and it’s also concerned with the themes of youth and mortality. The final revelations are less effective here, partly because they’re considerably less exotic, but also because it’s an altogether more traditional film, one that rarely strays from the established giallo pattern. It’s certainly technically accomplished, boasting excellent cinematography from Franco Di Giacomo, who had recently worked on Dario Argento’s long-elusive third giallo, Four Flies on Grey Velvet (4 mosche di velluto grigio, 1971). Like all of Lado’s early films, it boasts an excellent Ennio Morricone score. The composer downplays the jazz-rock tendencies and abrasive strings that characterise most of his giallo soundtracks in favour of choral pieces that predominantly feature children’s voices. This works for the most part, tying well into the film’s subject matter, but some of it seems too light for the material. Ultimately, despite its qualities, Who Saw Her Die? doesn’t stand up to Lado’s other films.

The final effort in Lado’s loose giallo-esque trio is 1975’s Night Train Murders, an unofficial remake of Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972). One of the most notorious exploitation films ever made, The Last House on the Left depicts the rape and murder of two young girls, and the subsequent bloody revenge taken by the parents of one of them. Although Craven wrote the script, the movie takes its plot and its central themes from the Ingmar Bergman classic The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukä;llan, 1960). Despite its notoriety, Craven’s film was a commercial success and gave rise to its own sub-genre, the ‘rape-revenge film’, including Meir Zarchi’s misogynistic I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Takashi Ishii’s mournful Freezer (2000) and Lado’s Night Train Murders, arguably the finest of the movies inspired by The Last House on the Left.

Night Train Murders begins with school friends Margaret and Lisa, played by Irene Miracle (Inferno, 1980) and Laura D’Angelo; having stayed with Margaret’s parents in Munich, they are travelling to Italy to spend Christmas with Lisa’s family. Although their journey starts out well enough, the presence of two pretty young girls attracts the attention of thug Blackie (Flavio Bucci, Suspiria, 1977) and his junkie friend Curly (Gianfranco De Grassi, The Church, 1989). Margaret and Lisa switch trains to escape from them, only to discover their attackers have done so too. By this time Blackie and Curly have been joined by a well-dressed Woman (Macha M&#223ril, Deep Red) whose obvious status and wealth conceal a nature every bit as sadistic and brutal as her new friends. They imprison the girls in a deserted carriage and subject them to a barrage of sexual, physical and psychological abuses. Eventually Lisa dies at their hands, and Margaret tries to escape out of the carriage window, but ends up dying on the rocks below. The three killers leave the train at the next stop and unwittingly accept an offer of a lift from Lisa’s parents, who have come to the station to pick up the girls. When they discover what has really happened, they turn upon the killers with surprising ferocity.

Although it devotes less screen time to the protracted rapes and assaults than most films of its kind Night Train Murders still makes for extremely uncomfortable viewing, thanks to a number of scenes that raise the bar for cinematic nastiness. The effect is compounded by the fact that Lado takes his time with Margaret and Lisa, allowing the viewer to understand and sympathise with them before their ordeal begins, roughly halfway through the film. They’re sweet, good-natured girls about to cross over into womanhood, but still childlike in many ways: secretly stealing cigarettes, flirting with boys and exploring their own nascent sexuality. It’s this innocence that draws Blackie, Curly and the Woman to them, with the corruption and destruction of this innocence being their primary motivation, as if rape and murder (and their own personal sexual satisfaction) were secondary considerations. All three of the killers seem genuinely surprised when one of the victims dies; this incident shatters the folie &#224 trois, and they soon begin to turn on each other.

Blackie and Curly are garden-variety thugs. Under the opening credits we see them snatching purses, beating up a market stall Santa, slicing up an expensive fur coat and jumping onto the train to escape from the police. They leer over Margaret and Lisa, attack a navy officer who attempts to help them and generally make a nuisance of themselves. No motives are provided, although Curly is a drug addict, which in a horror movie means he’s capable of anything. The well-dressed Woman is a different matter. We know she is intelligent, well informed and clearly wealthy. Beneath that respectable veneer she’s also a merciless sadist with a high sex drive (she carries pornographic photos in her handbag) and a dominant personality. Blackie’s attempt at rape quickly becomes consensual, with the Woman taking the lead over her surprised would-be attacker. Blackie and Curly revel in violence, but the Woman derives a sexual thrill from watching the rape and torture of two young girls. Her obvious intellect and imagination make her capable of acts of depravity that her cohorts could not conceive of.

Watch the trailer for Night Train Murders:

The Woman’s monstrous sadism is well hidden beneath a middle-class exterior, however, just as her face is concealed by her veil. Blackie and Curly look the part, but few would suspect the Woman of being responsible for a pair of vicious murders. One of the core aspects of the rape-revenge movie is the meting out of justice (or vengeance) upon the responsible parties, but Night Train Murders is one of the few films of its kind in which not all the killers are punished. [SPOILER] Instead the Woman (wearing her veil again) is able to claim that she had been kidnapped by the two thugs, and the credits roll after Lisa’s father has killed Blackie and Curly, with no apparent intention of killing her at all. It’s an incredibly cynical ending, but one that’s in keeping with the rest of the film. [END OF SPOILER]

Set in Germany and Italy, Night Train Murders takes place against a background of violence and revolution. Europe is still reeling from the last war, in which Munich played an integral role. Not everyone has managed to move on yet, as we can gather from the cabin full of German businessmen in suits, happily singing the archetypal Nazi hymn, the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, even though it’s been illegal for 30 years. Like the Woman, their secrets hide beneath a semblance of respectability. Meanwhile Italy is locked in the middle of the ‘Anni di piombi’, the Years of Lead, a two-decade period characterised by political turmoil and violent unrest. The nihilism and anger of young people like Blackie and Curly is being channelled towards political ends, although whether the end result will be any different remains to be seen. Margaret and Lisa’s train is stopped after a tip-off that a bomb has been placed upon it, forcing them to take another train and eventually bringing them into contact with the trio of killers.

Despite some flaws – Lisa’s parents, played by veterans Enrico Maria Salerno (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and Marina Berti (What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, 1974), are essentially just cardboard cut-outs – Night Train Murders is still one of the best Italian cult movies from the 1970s, and comfortably superior to almost every other rape-revenge film, with the exception of Wes Craven’s trailblazing original. It even inspired its own knock-off, Ferdinando Baldi’s awful Terror Express (La ragazza del vagone letto, 1979), which pads its brief running time with soft-core sex scenes that try to be controversial or shocking but usually end up being laughable instead. At the other end of the spectrum, Franco Prosperi’s Last House on the Beach (1978) was another stylish, well-made rape-revenge movie based on a story by Ettore Sanz&#242, who co-scripted Night Train Murders and What Have They Done to Your Daughters? The last twitch of the Italian rape-revenge cycle was Ruggero Deodato’s House on the Edge of the Park (La casa sperduta nel parco, 1980), a rather unpleasant film that cemented Deodato’s reputation as one of the most extreme Italian exploitation directors. It’s the opposite of the taut, economical plotting of Night Train Murders, and a somewhat ignoble end to one of the more notorious aspects of Italian cult cinema.

Jim Harper