Daughters of Darkness Podcast, with Kat Ellinger and Samm Deighan

In episode 17, Kat and Samm kick off an ongoing retrospective of Italian director Elio Petri, which will cover all the feature length films of his career. Known for his leftist politics, uniquely stylized films, and bold interpretations of genre, there’s no one quite like Petri and it’s a mystery why he’s so neglected compared to contemporaries like Antonioni, Pasolini, and Bertolucci. This first episode is an in depth discussion of some of his least seen films, three black and white titles he made in the early ‘60s at the beginning of his career: L’assassino (The Assassin, 1961), I giorni contati (His Days are Numbered, 1962), and Il maestro di Vigevano (The Teacher from Vigevano, 1963).

In this third and final segment of Kat and Samm’s series on obscure but stunning giallo films, they look at five of their favorite titles—nearly all of which involve a protagonist’s descent into madness—beginning with Francesco Barilli’s The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974). Mimsy Farmer stars as a troubled scientist who begins to have flashbacks about her mother’s suicide and is alarmed to find her life quickly unraveling. In Umberto Lenzi’s Spasmo (1974), a man begins a relationship with a woman, saving her from attempted murder, only to realize that he may be in the middle of a deadly conspiracy meant to drive him mad.

Mimsy Farmer returns for Armando Crispino’s Autopsy (1975), where she stars as a pathology student writing a thesis on suicides. This just happens to coincide with a wave of them across Rome, though she believes that some of these are actually murders. The same year’s wonderfully eerie Footprints on the Moon follows another female protagonist (the great Florinda Balkan), who misses several days of work, but can’t remember what she did during that time, and the clues lead her to an isolated resort town. But there the residents confuse with another woman. The series concludes with what is surely one of the most terrifying giallo films ever made, Pupi Avati’s House with the Laughing Windows (1976), which follows an art historian to a small town, where he is charged with restoring a grisly fresco in a church. He comes to be haunted by memories of the mad painter responsible for it and suspects that the man might still be alive.

In episode fifteen, Kat and Samm continue their three-part exploration of the art giallo film, with an emphasis on some unconventional and unfairly neglected titles, beginning with Slaughter Hotel (1971). The only giallo film from Fernando di Leo, this follows a mysterious, medieval weapon-wielding killer at a country asylum for troubled women, where the doctors (including Klaus Kinski) are hoping to discover the identity of the murderer before any more of their patients are dispatched. Renato Polselli’s absolutely insane Delirium (1972) is focused on a psychiatric consultant to the local police, who moonlights as a particularly vicious serial killer.

In episode fourteen, Kat and Samm begin a three-part look at the art giallo film, the more unconventional cousin to everyone’s favorite Italian horror genre, popularized by directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento. This episode begins with a look at Tinto Brass’s Deadly Sweet (1967), with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin as two young lovers trying to outrun a killer in swinging London. Trintignant and Aulin return for what is probably the only chicken-themed giallo, the totally bonkers Death Laid an Egg (1968), about murder and backstabbing in a poultry factory. Also explored is Elio Petri’s gloomy, beautiful A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), starring the great Franco Nero as a painter who rents an abandoned villa that might be haunted by the ghost of a nymphomaniac countess who died during WWII. War themes also trickle into the completely insane In the Folds of the Flesh (1970), about a family living in a mansion on top of an Etruscan burial ground. They have a nasty habit of gruesomely dispatching anyone who tries to visit them. Finally, Kat and Samm also explore one of the only Soviet-set giallo films, Aldo Lado’s grim Short Night of the Glass Dolls (1971), about a man who wakes up paralyzed, on a slab at the morgue and must try to remember how he got there before it’s too late.

In episode thirteen, Kat and Samm return to discuss Miklós Jancsó’s neglected 1976 film, Vizi privati, pubbliche virtù aka Private Vices, Public Virtues, which has recently been restored and will soon be released on Blu-ray by Mondo Macabro. Based on the Mayerling Affair from 1889, when the Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, committed suicide with his mistress, Jancsó’s film ponders what could have transpired if Rudolf did not kill himself, but was murdered. Here, Rudolf (the beautiful Lajos Balazsovits) is a rebel and is determined to fill his days with sex, partying, scandal, and blackmail in an attempt to embarrass his father and eventually overthrow the government. The episode explores how this explicit, visually sumptuous film — which includes everything from orgies and incest to anal sex and bestiality, among other surprises — has been unfairly neglected for too long.

Kat and Samm return for episode 12 of Daughters of Darkness, where they discuss mad science in general and transplant-themed horror in particular. They begin with an analysis of the origins of mad science fiction in Gothic literature — partly a reaction to the European Enlightenment — through the fiction and nonfiction work of writers like Coleridge and Goethe, culminating in Mary Shelley’s seminal Frankenstein. The episode moves on to explore adaptations of Maurice Renard’s novel, Les Mains d’Orlac (1920), in which a pianist’s hands are damaged in an accident and replaced in an experimental procedure; but he’s convinced that his new hands belonged to a murderer and are possessing him to commit horrible acts.

On the eleventh episode of Daughters of Darkness, Kat and Samm dive into another American Gothic-themed double feature, this time examining neglected ‘80s films Superstition (1982) and Eyes of Fire (1983). They begin with an in depth discussion of Calvinist Gothic literature from eighteenth century England to pre-Revolutionary America, including works like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, particularly The Scarlet Letter. This is also connected to a discussion of witchcraft, social hysteria, and the persecution of women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The tenth episode of Daughters of Darkness is the first in a series of special double feature discussions to tie in with Diabolique’s American Gothic-themed summer season. In this one, Kat and Samm explore Roger Corman’s delightful Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, most of which starred horror icon Vincent Price — and sometimes his fellow genre luminaries Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff. They give an overview of this eight film series, as well as a few titles American International Pictures attempted to include, but they specifically examine the horror-comedy The Raven (1963) and the morbidly colorful The Masque of the Red Death (1964).

In The Raven, Price plays a good-hearted magician who agrees to help Peter Lorre’s character get revenge on the sinister Scarabus (Karloff), who has a number of surprises at his eerie castle by the seaside. Laser beams, wizardly hijinks, too-big hats, and a number of other shenanigans ensue, aided and abetted by a young Jack Nicholson. The Masque of the Red Death, on the other hand, is a serious horror tale set in the medieval fortress of avowed Satanist Prince Prospero, who holes up with scores of guests to throw an elaborate masked ball while a deadly plague rages outside his doors.

The episode also includes a discussion of Poe’s work, his impact on European readers, and his legacy as a major figure of American Gothic — as well as nineteenth century fears, like being buried alive, and how they factor into the Corman-Price-Poe series.

In the ninth episode of Daughters of Darkness, Kat and Samm return for the second of a two-part series inspired by Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA. They kick things off with a discussion of Bob Clark’s devastating classic, Deathdream (1974), a Canadian production that reimagined the zombie film while simultaneously offering up a fresh adaptation of W.W. Jacobs’ story “The Monkey’s Paw” and confronting the effects of the Vietnam War. Frederick R. Friedel’s Kidnapped Coed (1976), on the other hand, is an odd mashup of genres that follows the strange romance that develops between a kidnapped young woman and her captor as they travel through the American countryside.

Kat and Samm are back for the eighth episode of Daughters of Darkness, which is the first of a two-part series inspired by Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA. This 500+ plus masterpiece is an in-depth examination of low budget American horror from the ‘70s and ‘80s, the type overlooked or even unheard of compared to mainstream fare like The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In the words of publisher FAB Press: “Nightmare USA explores the development of America’s subterranean horror film industry, spotlighting some of the wildest films imaginable from an era unchecked by censorship or ‘good taste.’ Ranging from cult favourites like I Drink Your Blood to stylish mind-benders like Messiah of Evil and ultra-violent shockers like Don’t Go in the House, Nightmare USA goes where no other in-depth study has gone before, revealing the fascinating true stories behind classics and obscurities alike.”