On the one hand, he turned in two of the pre-eminent classics of ‘60s Italian gothic horror (The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock (1962), ‘The Ghost’ (1963)), and his extensive background in swashbucklers and historical epics ensured that his films always carry a dramatic, painterly visual flair and a rich sense of atmosphere. (Born in 1909, he had already been directing for nearly twenty years when he instigated his nation’s gothic horror cycle with ‘I Vampiri’ in 1957.)
At the same time though, he was also a slap-dash, inconsistent and self-sabotaging filmmaker with a highly divisive personality, as is evidenced by both long periods of inactivity his later years and the multitude of productions he walked away from or left unfinished (famously passing some of them on to his friend/protégé Mario Bava).From the mid-‘60s onward in fact, even the work he did complete and sign off on is characterised by a woozy, rather incoherent/unfinished quality which makes it difficult to fully engage with.
All of these contrasting traits can be seen in spades in Freda’s swan-song, ‘Murder Obsession’ [‘Follia Omicida’], an intriguing but chronically uneven melange of classical gothic, giallo, supernatural horror and even slasher DNA first unleashed to bamboozle Italian audiences in February 1981.
Allegedly set in the UK, our tale here concerns movie actor Michael (Stefano Patrizi) who, along with his girlfriend Debora (Silvia Dionisio), travels to Surrey’s finest shadow-haunted Italianate palazzo to reunite with his mother Glenda (giallo veteran Anita Strindberg, who scarcely looks much older than Patrizi to be honest, but never mind) after many years of separation.
As per gothic tradition, Michael’s family pile turns out to be a decrepit, dust-enshrouded stone edifice with an intermittent electricity supply, presided over by deeply sinister man-servant (Oliver, played John Richardson from ‘Black Sunday’) who is expected to saw logs, tinker with fuse boxes, cook and serve all the food and prepare guest bedrooms at a moment’s notice whilst still finding time to lurk around every corner looking menacing.
Far more worryingly though, it also soon becomes clear that this is Michael’s first visit home since he inexplicably murdered his father (a celebrated musician and conductor, referred to by all and sundry as ‘il maestro’) whilst still a child, leaving his mother heartbroken and intermittently bed-ridden. Awkward.
And as if that weren’t uncomfortable enough, Debora is also forced to pretend to be Michael’s ‘secretary’ and is instructed to sleep alone in a pokey attic room, whilst the moody and reclusive lady of the house meanwhile fawns over her returned son as if he were a lost lover, repeatedly noting how much he resembles his long dead father.
In view of all this, it’s safe to say that a fun weekend in the countryside is not really on the cards for anyone, although a note of relative normality is at least sounded when a carload of victi -- I mean, uh, Michael and Debora’s glamorous film-making friends -- arrives on the scene, amongst their number such welcome Euro-cult faces as Martine Brochard and Laura Gemser.
Sad to say though that, despite all this, ‘Murder Obsession’s opening act feels like a bit of a bust (and not the kind that Gemser and Dionisio are frequently called upon to thrust in the general direction of the camera in an attempt to keep the presumed hetero-male audience engaged, either).
On the plus side, the film certainly inherits some of the grand, aristocratic sweep of Freda’s earlier horror classics, successfully adapted here for a lower budget production shot primarily on location. Some of the photography (by Cristiano Pogany) is painstakingly gorgeous, whilst the atmospheric potential of the echoing footsteps, vast, empty spaces and flickering candlelight of the palazzo are all expertly utilised.
That aside though… sigh. The pacing is leaden, the gossamer-thin plotting is both vague and boring, and the acting (particularly from Patrizi) is stilted and disengaged.
Most dreary of all though is the musical score, credited to the usually reliable Franco Mannino, who had frequently worked with Freda during the ‘50s and ‘60s. Largely consisting of indifferently recorded renditions of Bach and Liszt solo piano pieces, it really got on my wick.
Of course, Freda had gone to solo piano route before, with 1969’s ‘Double Face’ [‘A Doppia Faccia’]. On that film though, he’d had a haunting theme and sympathetic playing from the great Nora Orlandi to help him out. Here by contrast, we have to put up with hearing some of the film’s wildest and most intense sequences accompanied by (as Jonathan Rigby notes in Euro Gothic) a school assembly-level recitation of ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. Not to rag on J.S. Bach or anything, but it’s a drag, man.
A more propulsive, contemporary horror score could really have given this film a welcome shot in the arm, especially through the rather lugubrious first half, during which Freda seems entirely uninterested in furnishing his public with any of the exploitation goodies a horror crowd in the early 1980s might reasonably have expected.
But, fear not. ‘Murder Obsession’ does at least get a lot better - by which I mean crazier, basically - as it goes along.
Mirroring the unusual ‘massive halfway point freak-out’ structure utilised in Freda’s penultimate horror film ‘Tragic Ceremony’ (originally released as - deep breath - ‘Estratto Dagli Archivi Segreti della Polizia di Una Capitale Europea’ (phew) in 1972), we’re suddenly roused from our languor when - ironically - we’re plunged into Debora’s head as she recounts the mother of all nightmares to Michael in the cold light of morning.
The ensuing dream sequence constitutes a ten minute(!) explosion of absolutely all the bat-shit / brilliant horror imagery a Euro-horror fan could possibly wish for, and which ‘Murder Obsession’ has so conspicuously failed to provide to this point.
This includes (but is not limited to) a black-gloved killer, pus-drooling zombie cultists, a ridiculous ‘Bloody Pit of Horror’ style giant spider, a rubber bat attack, a wall of skulls with bleeding eye sockets, a lengthy sequence in which Dionisio runs through fog-drenched, swampy undergrowth with her breasts hanging out of her flimsy nightie, getting sliced up by loose branches, and, finally, a scene in which she is tied to one of those classic X-shaped wooden frames and forced to drink the blood of a black cockerel as part of a black mass.
Good grief! It’s as if Freda had made a list of every kind of clichéd horror situation he’d quite like to include in his film… and then just threw them all together randomly to get it all out of the way in one go. (In a nice nod to Italio-horror heritage, this sequence also features prominent usage of a variation on the Bava family’s patented ‘wobbly glass’.)
After this, the second half of ‘Murder Obsession’ is more liberally dosed with good ol’ fashioned Italio-horror delirium (and indeed, murder, and obsession), as we get to enjoy flashbacks to a number of ‘Rashomon’-like variations on the ‘Deep Red’-esque primal scene which may or may not have precipitated the death of Michael’s father, prompting Michael to start to lose his grip on reality, as the film’s assigned cannon fo -- I mean, uh, glamorous friends -- simultaneously begin to be meet their inevitable, gory demise.
Most memorably, Michael finds Laura Gemser slaughtered next to him when he awakens following an adulterous, lake-side tryst, whilst meanwhile, Oliver the handyman has taken to conspicuously lugging a chainsaw up and down the palazzo’s crumbling staircases, and we also need to deal with the belated revelation that Michael’s mother is in fact a freakin’ SATANIST.
In the context of all this irrational, oneiric goodness, ‘Murder Obsession’ totally abandons the glum, self-serious air which dragged down some of its early scenes, even allowing the film’s astonishing parade of continuity blunders and production design SNAFUs to become rather endearing, instead of merely infuriating.
Chief amongst these is probably Gemser’s role as the most egregious ‘breathing corpse’ in cinema history. Which is not just nit-picking on my part, I’d like to make clear; I mean, she is not just breathing a bit when she is supposed to be playing dead - it’s as if she’d just finishing running a couple of laps around the castle’s grounds when Freda commanded her to lie down and act still and lifeless!
Elsewhere, the traditional gothic horror reveal of a hidden portrait of Michael’s father is rather spoiled by the fact that it seems to consist of a xeroxed photo of Patrizi pasted onto a background of random colours, and you’d need to be a pretty tolerant viewer not to remark on the tendency of John Richardson’s costume to change from a formal white uniform to a flamboyant red shirt between shots as he serves dinner to the palazzo’s guests.
Clearly, these are the kind of clangers which no remotely committed director would ever send to the lab for printing - much less a filmmaker like Freda, who had spent nearly four decades behind the camera at this point. Which leads us to speculate on what the hell he was up to here. Was he sending a message to his producers, letting them know that he was done with this stupid film? Or, was he just signalling to his audience that nothing here was meant to be taken remotely seriously?
Either way, such moments of amateurishness clash markedly with other parts of the film, which were clearly crafted with great care and attention, not least Debora’s discovery of Martine Brochard’s character’s body, and her subsequent flight through a thunder storm, which recalls the vibrancy of Bava’s ‘Blood & Black Lace’, and the breathtaking tableau towards the end of the film wherein a shot of the prone Michael reclining across his mother’s knees is staged to recreate the majesty of Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Pietà (1498-99), an image enhanced here by almost Caravaggio-like use of subdued colours and shadow.
As with the film’s anachronistic musical score, could such classical allusions represent attempts on the part of an elderly filmmaker to smuggle elements of the culture he really loved and valued into an example of the popular genre cinema in which he’d make his name decades earlier, but which he had subsequently come to despise..?
If so, it was likely a doomed effort, given how thoroughly such gestures are overwhelmed by the film’s deranged smorgasbord of gratuitous nudity, bloody violence and jarring tonal and narrative inconsistencies.
Though hugely enjoyable for fans of the more eccentric and outlandish end of Italian horror, ‘Murder Obsession’ is ultimately a dishevelled and confused refugee, not just from the austere gothic horrors of the 1960s, but also from the ‘Erotic Castle Movie’ cycle of the ‘70s, finding itself staring down the barrel of a notably unsympathetic new decade with no plan in mind except panic, flight and desperate self-immolation.
In all likelihood, we’ll never know just what was going through Riccardo Freda’s mind as he called ‘action’ and ‘cut’ on his set for the final time in his long career. But then, he always was a bit of an odd duck… which I think is where we came in.
