Terrore nello spazio. Another inspi- ration may have been Roger Corman, who has said that he was influenced by readings of Freud while making his Edgar Allan Poe films for AIP. While Corman’s Poe films are inno- vative in their attention to psycho- logical detail and sexual metaphor, their actual Freudian content is sim- plistic and, as Corman has since admitted, possibly misunderstood.7 Set in 1907 (we are left to deduce this by ourselves, from the dates on cemetery headstones), Operazione paura delves into matters of the sub- conscious and paranormal as no other horror film had done before. In 1907, Sigmund Freud’s The Inter- pretation of Dreams was still a com- paratively new book, inspiring a new generation of doctors to enter into the practice of psychoanalysis and map the uncharted wilderness which Freud termed “the subconscious.” In Operazione paura, the source of evil is subconscious, but this is not as yet a familiar term to the supersti- tious people of Karmingen, to Inspec- tor Kruger, or to Dr. Eswai, who is merely a forensic surgeon—that is, a medical detective or, more pre- cisely, a death detective. Between Kruger, Eswai, and the townsfolk, the film presents a cross-section of the human animal, divided between the consciousness of law and medi- cal science and the mistier, subcon- scious terrain of fear and supersti- tion, neither of which is fully apprised of the true laws governing reality. That all three principals are equally in the dark about what’s going on is evi- dence of Bava’s personal anti-intellec- tual stance; it acknowledges that there are some areas of existence in which logic and education are not necessar- ily an advantage, and may make us more stubbornly unreceptive to the truth.
ESWAI’s first encounter with Melissa.
6 An inspired, Surrealist line, but perhaps also the result of an imperfect translation. In Italian, the word argento is synonymous with money and silver; the act of lodging silver in the heart of an agent of evil is an age-old concept.
7 Hear the audio commentaries Corman provided
for the DVD releases of his films The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and X— The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963).
