that Floriana arrives at the villa dressed as Red Riding Hood, but soon reveals herself to be every bit the wolf in disguise. Although Gastaldi was disappointed with the final product, the film still serves as a delightfully cynical introduction to the genre. The second film in the box set, Lucio Fulci’s THE BLACK CAT (1981, 91m 51s), is a more straightforward horror film, and— unlike Poe’s original story—un- ambiguously ensconced within the world of the supernatural. When a series of bizarre deaths linked by the presence of a mys- terious black cat strikes a small English village, Scotland Yard In- spector Gorley (David Warbeck) must call upon visiting photogra- pher Jill Trevors (Mimsy Farmer) to help document the crime scenes. The claw marks on one victim lead her to suspect the in- volvement of local pariah Robert Miles (Patrick Magee), a self-pro- fessed psychic and medium who has discovered a way to record the spiritual voices of the recently dead. Isolated within his sprawl- ing mansion, Miles’ sole compan- ion is a vicious feline to whom he is inextricably bound despite his certainty that it will one day kill him. As the death toll mounts, Jill
determines that only she can un- cover the truth, and soon em- barks on an investigation that reveals a truth more bizarre and deadly than she imagined. One of Fulci’s least-loved genre films, THE BLACK CAT eschews the director’s infamous grand guignol histrionics for a far more subdued—if no less sur- real—tone. Although a number of elements from Poe’s original story appear, the film’s serial-murder structure, gal-Friday romance, and daffy mix of pseudo-science with the supernatural align it more closely with the “Poverty Row” horror films of Monogram and PRC, especially THE DEVIL BAT (1940), which also features an animal employed by a bitter mis- anthrope as an instrument of re- venge. This déclassé lineage is also clear in the film’s kitchen-sink approach to horror, which bom- bards the audience—notably without even a pretense of narra- tive justification—with graveyard necromancy, an underground crypt festooned with manacled skeletons, a heroine beset by a swarm of bats, and scenes of Magee brooding over his record- ings. While this “voices of the dead” subplot turns out to be nothing more than a rather
circuitous dead end, it does per- mit Fulci to offer a visual hom- age to Magee’s performance in “Krapp’s Last Tape,” the one-act monologue that Samuel Beckett wrote specifically for the actor after hearing him read excerpts from the author’s MOLLOY on BBC radio. Genre aficionados will also recognize the resemblance between Miles and Mr. Wilde from Robert W. Chambers’ “The Re- pairer of Reputations,” another recluse vested with supernatural powers who lives with a cat that habitually attacks and mutilates him.
Although the screenplay by Fulci and Biagio Proietti offers ample opportunity to indulge in the type of gruesome gore set- pieces that would become the director’s hallmark, Fulci proves positively demure here, showing just enough to generate mild shocks before quickly cutting away. The frequent close-ups of eyes also prove quite effective in ratcheting up the tension, lead- ing viewers to anxiously await the seemingly inevitable ocular trauma one would expect given both Poe’s original story and Fulci’s infamous “splinter” scene in ZOMBIE. As in the typi- cal Lugosi or Zucco outing, logic
Mimsy Farmer investigates a series of bizarre deaths in THE BLACK CAT.
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