When I was growing up in the 1970s, Europe seemed to me
a rather comforting combination of the Eurovision Song Contest...
# When you pick a flower... #
..package holidays,
and of course, the international version of It's A Knockout.
But I was also mad about horror...
Dracula's Secret, now deadlier than ever with blood-red jelly.
And alongside Hammer and Universal,
Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man,
I started to become aware of other names.
Film titles like Nosferatu and Les Diaboliques.
Actors like Conrad Veidt.
The work of directors like Dario Argento...
..and Mario Bava.
Now I'm going in search of the stories behind the classics
of European horror cinema
and meeting the people from across the Continent
who created the films I most admire.
The way each country reinterprets horror
brings a new flavour to the banquet of horror.
What is commercial? Commercial is violence, blood, sex and horror.
I was hidden behind the mask like a prisoner.
Fantasy is like a dream, a nightmare.
Europe's turbulent 20th century
forged a distinctive and diverse horror tradition.
My travels will take me from German expressionism
in the aftermath of the Great War
to Belgian surrealism in the wake of the sexual revolution.
From guilt-ridden post-war France
to the dark excesses of swinging sixties Italy.
And to Spain, in the dying years of a dictator.
What's so fascinating, and chilling, about the continent's horror cinema
is how much it reflects the story of Europe itself.
I'm beginning my continental journey at the location
of one of my favourite horror movies.
Daughters Of Darkness is a stylish and coolly elegant vampire movie,
but its story doesn't take place in Paris or Rome
or any other glamorous European capital.
It was set here...
..in Ostend.
And perhaps that makes it the perfect entry point
to European horror cinema.
After all, this IS the gateway to Europe.
Let's hope we find something better here.
I'm so tired.
I'll go in first. You look after the luggage, Ilona.
What makes Daughters Of Darkness
such a quintessentially continental production
is its strange cocktail of ingredients.
A respected French actress plays opposite a German blue movie star
and a Canadian beauty queen in a Belgian horror film.
1970s chic rubs up against quotations from the silent classics.
Daughters Of Darkness tells of a mysterious countess,
who, together with her companion,
latches onto a newly-married couple holed up in an out-of-season hotel.
Stefan.
Unfortunately, they're leaving tomorrow.
The Countess and her friend are, of course, lesbian vampires,
and the hotel soon becomes a playground
for increasingly dangerous mind games with the young newlyweds.
The Countess Erzsebet Bathory, my ancestor.
Erzsebet is Elizabeth in Hungarian, but she was best known
as the Scarlet Countess.
Imagine, she bled 200 virgins to death.
Some say 800. A woman will do anything to stay young.
But drinking human blood!
She believed human blood was the elixir of youth.
Exactly. Do you know about her?
Yes, I've read of her.
She kidnapped young girls and kept them chained.
To give blood.
Blood for her to bathe in and drink. No.
Oh, yes. Yes.
And she hung them up by the wrists
and ripped them until their tortured flesh was torn to shreds.
Yes, that's it, and she clipped off their fingers with shears.
No!
She pricked their bodies with needles.
Yes. Yes, she tore out their nipples with silver pincers.
She bit them everywhere. No.
Then she pushed white-hot pokers into their faces.
And when they parted their lips to scream,
she shoved the flaming rod up into their mouths. Stop it.
Yes, go on, go on.
Harry, obviously Belgium doesn't have much
of a tradition of horror films.
What was your attitude towards Daughters Of Darkness
when you first approached the project?
Belgium HAS a tradition of horror films,
when you look at Belgian films.
MARK LAUGHS But I was approached by producers and they asked me,
after my first film, to do something in that style
that would be commercial.
What is commercial? Commercial is violence, sex, blood and horror.
So, I mixed those and found a subject
that would make it possible to do that.
Any vampire film is only as good as its vampire
and Daughters Of Darkness boasts
one of the finest on-screen vampires of them all,
Countess Elizabeth Bathory, played by Delphine Seyrig,
the doyenne of French art house cinema,
an actress of spellbinding poise and presence.
With her platinum blonde Marcel wave and Marlene Dietrich couture,
she exudes a timeless ennui.
Did you have a sense of what sort of a vampire you wanted her to be,
or did she bring...?
She was very fluffy in a certain sense,
like many actresses are,
but on the other hand, extremely serious.
But she had one idea, "I'll play it smiling."
Closer.
The visual thing that I knew is to make the countess and maid
iconic film figures.
Show me your eyes.
So Delphine has connotations of Marlene Dietrich...
You're jealous.
..and her maid, Ilona, of Louise Brooks.
Well, well, well...
So that in their exteriorisation, they would be immortal.
She's a demagogue and a dictator,
so I put her in Nazi colours.
Red, black and white, that is the colour scheme that she wears.
The rich historical resonances of Harry Kumel's characters
are echoed in the locations.
He filmed Daughters Of Darkness at two of Belgium's great hotels,
the Thermae Palace in Ostend...
..and here at the Astoria in Brussels.
Both date back to the reign of King Leopold II,
notorious for his brutal profiteering in Africa.
It all lends Daughters Of Darkness
a depth unmatched by any contemporary British
or American attempt at erotic horror.
Help me! Help me!
The film is also suffused with a mordant sense of humour -
death by dish cover, anyone?
The blood. The blood!
The blood!
And it boasts a painterly eye for light and composition.
Would you say there's a particularly Belgian sensibility to the film?
Absolutely. In Belgium, we have a tradition of surrealism, of course.
That is obvious, and expressionism.
So, the combination of the two gives this visual effect.
How do you feel about the film now, 40 years on?
I don't feel anything about films.
I know only one thing, that it still makes money!
I can't tell you how completely happy I am to have you here tonight.
Salut. Welcome back to the Astoria.
Oh, yes.
Don't drink it, it's shampoo.
Goodness. It looks so good.
It looks very inviting, doesn't it? Yes, yes, it's so green.
Daughters Of Darkness may be set just a brief ferry ride from Britain
but its story reaches all the way across the continent.
Countess Bathory is a figure drawn from the rich myths and legends
of eastern Europe, which provided the very foundations of horror.
I'm heading East,
into the region that was home to the real Elizabeth Bathory,
and to Vlad the Impaler,
the historical counterparts of fictional vampires.
Centuries of war and shifting boundaries have made this
an amorphous, indefinable place,
its castles and forests the inspiration
for literary and film renderings of Dracula and Frankenstein.
But to travel here is also to journey back in time
to the earliest days of European horror cinema.
This is Orava Castle in Slovakia, residence of Count Orlok
in the pioneering German vampire movie, Nosferatu.
Orava Castle dates back to the 13th century,
and the decision to shoot Nosferatu here lends it an authenticity
rarely matched in any horror picture since,
a disorientating sense that the terror,
however outlandish it may appear, comes from a real place.
Directed by FW Murnau, one of the masters of German silent cinema,
Nosferatu is a reworking of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
The characters' names were changed
in what would be a doomed attempt to avoid copyright problems.
In place of Count Dracula, we have the vampire Count Orlok,
a startling figure played by Max Schreck.
Little is known about the actor
but the word "schreck" is German for fright,
and this gave rise to a rumour
he'd changed his name specially for the film.
It was, though, simply a coincidence.
Familiar as we now are with the more urbane Draculas
of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee,
it's easy to find Max Schreck's goggle-eyed, hunch-shouldered Orlok
crude, even absurd.
But in his utter alienness lies his menace.
Nothing about him seems susceptible to human reason or emotion.
He's like a figure that's stepped out of a medieval painting of hell,
an embodiment of apocalypse intruding into reality.
Nowhere is this captured more than in Nosferatu's most chilling scene.
As a ship transports him to Germany,
Orlok picks off the sailors one by one.
Slowly, as if he has all the time in the world.
The scene culminates in one of silent cinema's great intertitles,
which appears with perfect timing.
"The Ship of Death has a new captain."
It's difficult to separate Murnau's vision
from that of his set designer, Albin Grau.
In effect the producer of Nosferatu, Grau was also responsible
for the remarkable images that were used to promote the picture.
The publicity campaign is believed to have cost more
than the film itself.
Albin Grau was a devout occultist, and he envisaged Nosferatu
as the first in a series of occult-themed films,
possibly as a way of spreading his belief system
through post-war Germany and Europe.
Unfortunately, Bram Stoker's widow had other ideas.
She sued Nosferatu's producers for copyright violation,
and a court ordered all the prints to be destroyed.
Luckily, some slipped through the net.
It's sobering to think how close this classic film came
to joining the long roll-call of lost works from the silent era.
The irony is that in many respects,
Nosferatu is very different to Dracula.
Indeed, if you watch it expecting
a straightforward interpretation of Stoker's novel,
you'll be baffled and frustrated.
It has rats instead of bats,
no-one gets staked or turned into a vampire.
To do it justice,
you need to see Nosferatu as a work in its own right.
The film's unique climax
is at least the equal of any other version of the story.
Rather than leave the vampire-killing action
to the male characters, Nosferatu becomes a confrontation
between feminine virtue and masculine evil,
played as a symphony of light and dark.
At this point, Orlok's exaggerated shape and appearance
seem entirely justified, as Murnau makes striking use
of the vampire's shadow.
Light, of course, is Orlok's undoing,
as he lingers just that little bit too long over his victim,
long enough for the dawn to rise.
Nosferatu may have run into trouble
but the German film industry wasn't easily daunted.
It had a determination and ambition unmatched in Europe.
One that belied the country's recent,
disastrous defeat in World War I.
After the Great War, German cinema had something to prove.
It wasn't just entertainment.
The young medium could help restore the nation's lost pride,
showcasing German artistic talent,
to audiences at home and the world.
One film in particular, made just a year after the war ended,
came to embody this bold aspiration...
..earning it pride of place in Berlin's Film Museum.
The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari was ambitious and startlingly original,
and it's cast a shadow over cinema ever since.
The film is the story of a sleepwalking killer,
who is manipulated to fulfil the murderous urges
of his own psychiatrist.
Caligari boasts some daring narrative twists.
But above all, it was a ground-breaking attempt
by film-makers to put German expressionism on screen.
No-one ever agreed an exact definition of German expressionism,
least of all the German expressionists themselves,
but subtlety was never an aspiration.
Expressionist art offered a heightened, stylised experience
that made inner, psychological states outwardly visible.
That's what the makers of Caligari hoped to achieve
with their set design.
The result is one of cinema's most distinctive visions.
The Berlin Film Museum holds some detailed reconstructions
of the original sets, which give an insight into how they conveyed
their claustrophobic, disorientating effect.
These are my murdering gloves. THEY LAUGH
Werner, tell me about these models. Who made these?
That was one of the set decorators,
Hermann Warm. He did these models in the '50s.
So the first model here is Wohnzimmer Allen,
which means this is the living room of Allen.
It's not a cosy living room because it has
a window which looks like a window from a prison.
You wouldn't like to live in a room like that.
It's very dark, it has shadows painted on the wall.
When you look at the film, all the sets look like theatre sets.
People are moving in circles
and they built things where you could go down and up again,
so they are all moving on a very limited space.
In terms of the expressionist look of the film,
what would an audience have made of that?
Because...it wasn't absolutely brand new.
No, expressionism was already in literature,
in painting and sculpture. But not in film?
But not in film. For film it was new, so this was the strategy
of the film industry to install film as an art form.
This is expressionist for the poor.
So everybody can now see expressionism.
Caligari's production design
has ensured its status as a cinematic landmark.
But it's also a film with remarkable performances.
Werner Krauss as the sinister doctor
and, most hauntingly, the tragic somnambulist Cesare,
played by Conrad Veidt.
The moment Cesare first opens his eyes
must be one of the most unforgettable close-ups ever filmed.
Future horror and fantasy creations,
ranging from Boris Karloff's monster in Frankenstein
to Johnny Depp's Edward Scissorhands,
would all follow in Conrad Veidt's halting footsteps.
Conrad Veidt established himself
as European cinema's first great horror actor
with a series of standout performances in macabre roles.
What made him so special was his talent not just to convey menace,
but to articulate, simply through his looks, gestures and expressions,
a particular kind of terror.
Terror like that of the sleepwalker Cesare, a man forced to commit acts
that he would never sanely do.
A man whose psyche has been fragmented,
like the hundreds of thousands of German veterans
who returned from the war
to hospitals like this former sanatorium outside Berlin.
Explicit soul-searching about the war experience
was frowned upon in Germany,
but Conrad Veidt's films provided an extraordinary metaphor.
Veidt's characters are constantly losing control,
fighting to hold themselves together in the face of doppelgangers,
alter egos, forces they can't comprehend.
Germany may have been reluctant
to confront the trauma of the war in public,
but Veidt played out the nation's fears on the big screen.
In Der Januskopf, or The Head Of Janus,
Veidt was both the Jekyll and the Hyde characters
in this unauthorised adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel.
The Student Of Prague saw Veidt confronted
with his doppelganger in a Faustian fable.
And in The Hands Of Orlac, an Austrian production from 1924,
Veidt reunited with Caligari's director, Robert Wiene.
While less stylised than Caligari,
the film's depiction of a train wreck offers a powerful image
of mechanical carnage that clearly echoes a battlefield.
The Hands Of Orlac is an early example
of what we might now call body horror.
Veidt plays Paul Orlac,
a concert pianist who loses his hands in the train crash.
A surgeon replaces them with those of an executed killer,
and Orlac comes to believe they have retained their homicidal intent.
The moment when that realisation dawns
is captured in one of Veidt's most compelling scenes.
This is expressionism not as set design or lighting
but as a purely physical performance that holds the screen.
It's one thing to act with your hands and eyes,
but to act with your veins as well...
In the silent era, nobody cared about your accent,
and Veidt was soon lured across the Atlantic to Hollywood.
There, he took the lead in one of Universal Studios' greatest epics,
The Man Who Laughs.
Veidt's hero,
his face cruelly mutilated into a permanent rictus grin,
is said to have inspired Batman's nemesis, the Joker.
But Veidt had other reasons to pack his suitcase.
Back in Germany, the Weimar government was collapsing.
The Nazis were on the rise.
And Veidt's new wife was Jewish.
The couple decided to settle in London.
The departure of such a leading talent
was bitterly felt by the Nazi authorities.
One evening, Veidt took a phone call in his Hampstead home.
It was Joseph Goebbels.
The Reich's propaganda minister
offered Veidt a number of inducements,
but failed to convince him to return to Germany.
You can imagine Veidt saying as he replaced the receiver,
"Darling, next time Goebbels rings, tell him I'm out."
Veidt was just one participant in a growing exodus
from Germany and Austria.
An exodus of talent, of craft and of style.
Universal's Dracula and Frankenstein,
released in 1931, drew heavily on their German forebears.
But Germany was no longer horror cinema's centre of gravity.
Despite their fondness for mystical Aryan mumbo-jumbo,
the Nazis weren't too keen on horror.
Their idea of a good night out was a queasy mixture
of sentimentality, patriotism and propaganda.
Horror cinema had found a new home in Hollywood and decided to stay.
Europe was about to face more than enough real horror of its own.
SIRENS WAIL
And when horror cinema returned to Europe,
it was France that picked up the baton.
French horror, like that of Weimar Germany,
was shaped by the country's wartime experience.
But the trauma suffered by France in the Second World War
had a particularly insidious quality.
The Vichy government's collaboration with the occupying Nazis
shattered French self-confidence
and divided the country against itself.
La Main Du Diable, The Hand Of The Devil,
was a rare French horror film from the period.
Its tale of a Faustian pact was painfully ironic.
As a film-maker under the occupation,
you either sought approval from the Germans, or you didn't work at all.
The war and its aftermath were full of betrayal
and the settling of scores.
Even after the liberation, the bitter mood lingered for years.
And nothing captured it better than a 1955 release
in which two seemingly ordinary women commit a violent murder.
The crime doesn't take place
in an exaggerated expressionist setting,
but in a banal domestic bathroom,
and it's depicted with unflinching detail and realism.
The film was called Les Diaboliques, and it established the template
for a new hybrid of horror and thriller
that's been with us ever since.
At its outset, the tone of the film is humdrum and provincial.
Much of it takes place in a shabby boarding school,
filmed here in L'Etang La Ville,
a small town on the outskirts of Paris.
Vera Clouzot and Simone Signoret play, respectively,
the wife and mistress of the school's headmaster.
The husband treats his wife with contempt,
making no effort to conceal his affair.
But he's not above raising his hand to his mistress,
hence the dark glasses.
It soon becomes clear that the mistress and the wife
are brewing up something between them -
a plan to get rid of the unpleasant husband, once and for all.
Let's face it, which of us has never fantasised
about doing away with a bully?
After drugging and then drowning the headmaster in the bath,
the women dump his body in the school's murky swimming pool,
hoping it will look like an accidental drowning.
It's at this point that the film becomes more
than just a very frank thriller,
and takes a turn into horror.
The pool is drained, but there's no sign of a body.
One of the pupils insists that he's seen the headmaster
hanging around the school, and most chillingly of all,
a familiar face is half-visible
in the back of the annual school photograph.
It all begins to take a toll on the fragile wife.
And then, one night...
SHE SCREAMS
It's enough to scare you to death,
but there are still more twists to come.
The next thing... Ah, well, that really would be telling.
The director of Les Diaboliques was Henri-Georges Clouzot,
who understood the grey world of moral compromise all too well.
He himself had been criticised for taking German funding
to make a film during the occupation.
But Les Diaboliques wasn't an original story.
Clouzot adapted it from the debut novel by a crime-writing duo,
Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.
Their work would have a lasting influence
on horror and thriller films.
But at the time, Clouzot was taking a gamble
by adapting Boileau and Narcejac's book, Celle Qui N'Etait Plus.
It didn't have a conventional detective hero
but was told from the perspective of victim and perpetrators.
I've come to the small French coastal town of Pornic,
home to Thomas Narcejac, to find out from his daughter Annette
how the novel was initially received.
Could you tell us how the publishers reacted
when they first saw Celle Qui N'Etait Plus?
TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH:
Clouzot's faith in the story paid off.
Les Diaboliques was a hit,
despite, or because of, reports that people became ill with fright
during the climactic scenes.
The impact of Les Diaboliques was quickly felt across the Atlantic.
But when Hollywood came calling,
it wasn't Clouzot who was wined and dined.
It was Boileau and Narcejac.
No less than the master of suspense himself
wanted to film their latest novel.
The book was D'Entre Les Morts, Between the Deaths.
With the story of a man obsessed with a woman,
it continued Boileau and Narcejac's theme of the dead returning.
Do you think that Hitchcock felt that they had found something new,
that was the next big thing?
The film became Vertigo, one of the master's most morbid works.
But although they weren't involved, Boileau and Narcejac's influence
can also be strongly felt in a later Hitchcock film.
Psycho blends horror and thriller,
blurs the line between heroes and victims,
and features more unpleasant goings-on in a bathroom.
Vertigo premiered in May 1958, just the day after another release
which proved to be an out-and-out international hit.
That was Dracula, made by Britain's Hammer Films,
its follow-up to another full-colour horror sensation,
The Curse Of Frankenstein.
Hammer's success proved that audiences worldwide were hungry
for a new level of graphic horror.
French producers couldn't ignore
these gory imports from across the Channel,
but they weren't going to respond with a mere piece of hack work.
Boileau and Narcejac were signed up
to write what became France's next great horror film.
In a genre that's never shied away from the lurid,
few horror films boast a premise quite like Eyes Without A Face.
Someone is travelling around Paris,
abducting beautiful women and... cutting off their faces.
The culprit is an outwardly respectable plastic surgeon,
secretly attempting to restore the beauty of his disfigured daughter.
It is a lurid premise,
but this is perhaps the most poetic of horror films.
It fuses the grim realism of Les Diaboliques
with an almost fairy-tale quality.
The moment we first see Professor Genessier's tragic daughter
is both startling and moving,
filmed by director Georges Franju with restraint
and accompanied by Maurice Jarre's delicate score.
In Christiane, shut away from the world,
her ruined face hidden behind an expressionless mask,
actress Edith Scob created a particularly haunting figure.
When did you realise that your face would hardly be visible,
that you'd be doing it through a mask?
How did you feel about that?
I think it was something I liked profoundly, yes.
If I may say, it's an astonishing performance.
Did you have a method of approach for that, once you realised
you'd be expressing yourself through your eyes only?
I really had no method because I was hardly 20 years old,
and it was the first time I had such an important thing to do.
It was quite instinctive.
I remember behind my mask,
I was sometimes smiling to a person. People see nothing!
And I was really...
..alone.
And somehow, with a mere tilt of the head or movement of her eyes,
Edith Scob conveys a world of isolation, a life forever lost.
For all its poetry, this is an unflinching film.
Just as Les Diaboliques doesn't hold back on its central murder scene,
the key moment in Eyes Without A Face -
its heart of darkness if you like -
takes place in Professor Genessier's secret operating theatre.
The scene shows a facial transplant.
It's almost silent,
the main sound being actor Pierre Brasseur's concentrated breathing.
It lasts more than five minutes,
director Franju daringly letting it unfold in real time.
He was telling that the most impressive thing was...
it was not the blood,
it was just Pierre Brasseur with the pencil, like this.
The china pencil is more invasive and scary than a knife. Yes!
You can imagine people looking away and thinking they see... Yes, yes!
He wanted people to imagine they're seeing,
more than showing that.
Crayon.
For several minutes, the scene is pure technical procedure...
and utterly, morbidly fascinating.
How do you go about removing someone's face?
As the scalpel starts to cut into flesh, we start to wonder,
when will Franju fade to black, or move to the next scene?
Surely he won't show us an actual, literal facelift?
Allons-y.
It's said that when Eyes Without A Face received its first UK showing
at the Edinburgh Film Festival, seven people fainted,
leading Franju to comment, "Now I know why Scotsmen wear skirts."
I'd like to read you something, Edith.
This is a British critic. He said,
"Eyes Without A Face is a piece of revolting, pandering, evil rubbish.
"I wonder what the censor was up to the day he gave this film
"an X certificate. He should have ordered it to be publicly burned
"in the Charing Cross Road, and on top of the fire,
"he should have thrown all the makers of the film
"and the people who saw fit to release it in Britain."
Wow! THEY LAUGH
It's strange, isn't it? It's someone criticising the film for its horror,
then suggesting the film-makers should be burned at the stake. Yes.
I think Franju would be delighted by this critic!
But Franju's singular film
also received a mixed reception in France,
and, inevitably, overseas distributors struggled to work out
what to do with Eyes Without A Face.
For the American market, it was dubbed into English
and re-titled The Horror Chamber Of Dr Faustus,
ignominiously paired in a double bill with The Manster,
the story of a man with two heads.
While Britain revelled in its Hammer boom,
by the early 1960s, the brief flowering of Gallic horror was over.
France, it seemed, had neither the instinct nor the inclination
to pull off that peculiar mixture of art and exploitation
which is essential to a thriving horror movie industry.
But, in the wake of Hammer's success,
other European countries were far less...reticent.
In an atmosphere of horror, the story of a man...
Italian producers had no qualms
about jumping on the horror bandwagon.
They even flew in Hammer's biggest star
in a shameless grab for the international market.
..starring the unforgettable creator of Dracula...
You wonder what Bram Stoker would have made
of the trailer's extravagant claim.
Breathtaking as never before.
Sadistic and pitiless.
Subtle and monstrous.
While Lee embalmed his victims in The Castle Of The Living Dead,
Barbara Steele was the target of a necrophilic scientist
in another Italian production, The Horrible Dr Hichcock.
The set-piece scene in which Steele wakes up in a coffin
echoes the claustrophobic terror of her previous American hit,
Pit And The Pendulum.
The 1960s saw nothing less than an Italian horror boom.
But it would go well beyond
merely cashing in on British and American films
to take on a distinctive national flavour.
After all, this was the decade
in which Italy became the byword for style.
And its best films brought a visual flair to the genre
that would win Italian horror lasting renown.
SCREAMING
Italian horror directors weren't exorcising national ghosts,
they were flaunting their talent, and in the early '60s,
one man rapidly established himself at the forefront of the genre.
He was Mario Bava, an experienced cinematographer
and prolific director, who made everything from westerns
to science fiction.
Mario made many movies.
The movies that we remember the most, probably, are the movies
where he was really having fun, that he liked the stories.
He was thinking, "I would enjoy seeing this kind of film."
TRANSLATED FROM ITALIAN:
Black Sabbath is a portmanteau of three tales of terror.
It was the follow-up to Bava's debut horror hit, Black Sunday,
in which he'd established his mastery of the Gothic tradition
of crypts and castles that dominated horror cinema.
Black Sabbath gave Bava the chance to work in colour
and with Boris Karloff, the elder statesman of Hollywood horror,
who links the three stories.
Karloff was a useful marquee name to attract an international audience,
but there's a humorous -
and even psychedelic - quality to his linking segments
that shows that Bava was playing by his own rules.
The film's opening shot is a declaration of intent.
With its bold colours, knowing tone and otherworldly setting,
the scene flies in the face of the Gothic tradition.
But Bava's most daring move comes
at the original Italian conclusion of Black Sabbath,
where he co-opts the grand old man of Hollywood horror
into a decidedly European, whimsical joke.
HE LAUGHS
The scene was cut from the English-language release.
The ending of Black Sabbath is very unexpected.
What do you think Mario was trying to say with that?
If you see all of his films,
in the end you always feel like he wants to show the trick, or...
..the last statement is, "OK, but it's just a movie.
"OK, we were scaring you, but, see? It's just a game."
LAUGHTER AND SHOUTING
Having worked with Karloff,
Bava secured another horror icon to star in his next film.
Christopher Lee wielded the lash in The Whip And The Body,
a lush, overheated ghost story
in the mould of Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe films.
I'm fond of telling people the plot of the story
is essentially, the prodigal son returns to the family home
and recommences his incestuous affair with his brother's wife.
She kills him, but the affair doesn't end.
It's very much ahead of its time.
Even today, if you make that movie and you make it explicit,
that can be shocking.
The movie was released, then the censorship stopped the release,
because of the fact that
in one scene you see the bare back of the actress.
I mean, it's too much!
Not because she's... I mean, she's enjoying
the fact that she's a masochist and she's having sex with the ghost,
and he's whipping her...
Just the shoulders, too much. It's just the shoulders.
Bava shot this heady mix of shoulder baring
and supernatural sadomasochism
with his trademark virtuoso camerawork and lighting.
It was clear that the Gothic tradition
could barely contain his ambitions.
Where to next?
Fittingly, for such a style-obsessed director,
Bava now embarked on a film that fused fashion with horror.
An ultra-violent thriller set in a Rome house of haute couture -
Blood And Black Lace.
Many of the exteriors of Blood And Black Lace
were shot here at the Villa Sciara in Rome,
but Bava transforms the location with his lighting.
Throughout the film, he uses colour like a costume.
Other horror thrillers set in the present day,
like Les Diaboliques or Psycho,
had been sought in austere black and white,
but Bava promises the colour of flesh,
the colour of blood.
Bava was also pioneering something even more significant.
Nothing less than a new, distinctly Italian horror sub-genre -
the Giallo film.
"Giallo" means yellow, the colour of the pulp paperback thrillers
that inspired many of the plots.
Blood And Black Lace has a typical Giallo storyline,
with the models and staff of the fashion house being stalked
and killed by a mysterious masked figure.
The opening murder is a classic Giallo sequence,
a carefully built up set-piece in which a shadowy killer
plays cat and mouse with a beautiful woman.
It shows what pushed the Gialli
beyond the thriller genre into horror - their flamboyant violence.
And strangulation is one of the more merciful means of dispatch
in Blood And Black Lace.
Others include striking with a metal claw,
and even pressing a victim's face against a burning stove.
The film's Italian title says it all.
Sei Donne Per L'Assassino - six women for the killer.
This is horror as a numbers game,
and it has left a lasting legacy in the scores of faceless women
slaughtered in horror films ever since.
We quickly forget them as characters.
We just remember how they die.
The murders do reach a new level of violence.
It's a very striking...
Yeah, but I mean, if in real life you read and you see
how the people die, then why should you modify this too much?
Even if it was violent,
there's a moment that you can even find some poetry.
I read that he had nightmares for three days after filming
the girl having her face burnt on...
That's, let's say, the Catholic part that's coming out.
That you do something bad, and then, you know, you have...
You start to think about it, and we call it crocodile tears.
HE LAUGHS
DISTANT ECHOING SCREAMS
Thanks to Bava, Italian horror freed itself from American
and British influences, and boldly asserted its own, unique style.
The dark-hatted, black-gloved killer of the Giallo
became an Italian icon.
SCREAMING
The longevity of the Giallo film might seem surprising.
With the best will in the world there are only so many
dark-hatted, black-gloved killers that anyone can take.
But the formula seems to have encouraged,
rather than stifled innovation,
and in 1970, Bava's crown as king of Italian horror
was seized by a young pretender.
Dario Argento was shaped by the cutting edge
of the Italian New Wave,
and he injected new life into the Giallo.
Argento also had a penchant
for doing his own glove modelling in his films.
His directorial debut was L'Uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo,
The Bird With The Crystal Plumage.
In the 60s, you were a rising star as a screenwriter.
Why did you decide you wanted to make a Giallo?
TRANSLATED FROM ITALIAN:
While Argento's film employed many of the familiar Giallo motifs,
of black-gloved killers and violent murders,
it also showed a highly unconventional imagination at work.
The standout scene in The Bird With The Crystal Plumage
is a remarkable set-piece in which the hero witnesses
a violent attack in an art gallery, but is trapped behind glass,
unable to help or intervene.
The scene echoes Hitchcock's Rear Window
in its use of the powerless spectator,
but Argento brings an energy and dynamism that's all his own.
WOMAN MOANING
Just hang on! Just hang on!
KNOCKING
(MUFFLED) Open the door!
Open the door!
Call the police!
The art gallery scenes show that,
even working within the Giallo formula,
Argento had a gift for the unexpected,
for the unforgettable image.
Sometimes this came at the expense of conventional narrative logic.
One of my favourite scenes in Argento's work
is from his 1975 thriller Deep Red.
It begins as a fairly traditional stalking moment,
although it's nice to see a male character
as the potential victim for a change.
DUMMY SQUEAKS AND GIGGLES
A-ah! Urgh!
I remember everybody asked me,
"Please not this, no," because people don't understand.
"It is stupid, this is absurd!"
But I want to do that.
I speak in English now?
THEY LAUGH
It's a very...it's genuinely unsettling, cos the very last thing
you expect to come through that door is a tiny, childlike, dwarf robot.
Yes, it was like an hallucination.
Argento's clearly very fond of Deep Red.
He named his memorabilia shop in Rome after it.
'Welcome to Dario Argento's Museum of Horrors.
'Here you will find some original props
'from his famous terrifying movies...'
The basement of Profondo Rosso houses a curious exhibition,
or shrine, to Argento's prolific output.
It feels a bit like walking inside Dario's head.
I've been here before.
This rings a bell now.
HE CHUCKLES
Hannibal Lecter's in the last cage, as long as I remember.
'The corpse you see lying among the remains of a city
'is a perhaps-dead demon.'
Extraordinary mixture of things.
There's a stray leg over there.
'In front of demons,
'here is the little ghoul
'of the horrible child from Phenomena, or Creepers.'
It's genuinely horrible.
'During the action moments, the funny child was played...'
In the 1960s, the pendulum of Italian horror
had swung from the supernatural to the thriller.
No comment.
But by the mid-'70s, Argento was swinging it back.
With his next film, he fully embraced the supernatural.
I think they've missed a trick not having someone jumping out.
That seems to be the next logical step.
Probably Dario with a pair of black gloves.
FURIOUS SNARLING THEN SUDDEN SILENCE
MANIACAL CACKLING
In Suspiria, the gloves are off.
This tale of a German ballet school run by a coven of witches
climaxes in a riot of visual effects and monster make-up.
It's not a Giallo, but a hyper-violent fairytale.
CACKLING AND MOANING
And watching Suspiria
is like experiencing a cinematic fever dream.
Did you feel that making a fantasy film
was a liberating experience as a director?
TRANSLATED FROM ITALIAN:
It's best not to worry about whether the plot's coherent.
Just let yourself be overwhelmed by the dazzling colours,
startling images and pounding soundtrack.
THEY GASP AND MOAN
Suspiria represented the ultimate outcome of the trend
that had begun with Mario Bava's experiments in the early 1960s.
Story was now totally subordinate to style.
Argento's best work of the '70s could hold its own
against the horror produced anywhere else in the world.
But by the end of the decade,
America had seized back the low-budget horror crown
with films like Halloween and Dawn Of The Dead,
which ironically, Argento himself produced.
Italy rapidly responded to the new American horror
with a salvo of films which pushed shocking and violent imagery
beyond even Argento's work.
Pictures like Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters
and Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust
kept censors busy across the world
before being consigned to the dead end
of banned and "video nasty" lists.
But European horror had life in it yet.
A new wave would emerge from a country
with one of the least celebrated traditions of all.
Creaking trapdoors,
shadowy attics, period costume.
While Italy looked forwards, Spain seemed to be looking backwards.
The most successful Spanish horror film
made in the 1960s embraced the Gothic tradition
the Italians had so quickly discarded
to tell a tale of disappearance and dismemberment.
Irene?
What happened? Irene?
Child!
What happened to you?
Oh, my God.
SHE GASPS
La Residencia is set in a strict 19th-century finishing school,
where the young women are going missing.
The isolated, repressive atmosphere
was something of a metaphor for Spain itself,
languishing for decades under an authoritarian government.
One of the most striking things about La Residencia
and much other Spanish horror, is the pervasive air of melancholy,
the sense that no matter what fresh terrors
the characters are about to face,
they're already living in a world of defeat and loss.
The story burns slowly to its grim conclusion.
The principal of the school discovers that her own teenage son
has been murdering her pupils.
The boy has been driven by a mix of Oedipal
and Frankenstein-like urges, to create the perfect girlfriend.
..had almost the same eyes as yours.
You always said I'd have a...have a girl like you when you were young.
And now I've got her.
Do you see?
Luis...!
Now you must teach her to take care of me the way you do.
And love me as you've always loved me.
The shock here isn't just visceral, it's emotional as well.
Luis!
Luis...
La Residencia was the feature debut of Narciso Ibanez Serrador,
an actor and producer whose chilling television dramas
had made him Spain's Godfather of Horror.
He also created the game show 3-2-1.
Now that's scary.
How did audiences in Spain respond to La Residencia?
TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH:
Do you have any thoughts about why the film was so popular in Spain?
Serrador's restrained approach was indeed a stark contrast
to the more monstrous manifestations
of Spain's own horror boom.
As in Italy, it was largely motivated by producers
with an eye for the overseas market.
Frankenstein's Bloody Terror didn't actually feature Frankenstein,
but rather a werewolf, played by Paul Naschy,
who became Spanish horror's biggest star.
Whatever happened to Super 70 Chill-o-Rama?
Christopher Lee, meanwhile, continued his continental career
with a rare, non-Hammer Dracula role in El Conde Dracula,
directed by Jesus Franco,
the master of Spanish exploitation cinema.
And in the Blind Dead series of films, director Amando de Ossorio
introduced some unique indigenous Spanish monsters...
They're coming!
..Undead Medieval Knights Templar who wreak havoc in the present day.
The Gothic darkness of these films sat rather oddly
with the image of itself that Spain was keen to sell to foreigners.
One of sun, sea and fun.
And it was this image that Serrador set out to subvert in his next film,
provocatively titled Who Can Kill A Child?
Shot mainly here in Ciruelos, a small town near Madrid,
the film is the story of a young English couple
who take a vacation to a Spanish island,
which seems strangely empty of adults.
Who Can Kill A Child is horror for the package holiday era.
British tourists often returned home
with stories about dodgy food in half-built hotels,
but the nightmare faced by the holidaymakers in Serrador's film
is of an entirely different order.
The island's children have turned murderously
against their parents and elders.
It makes a disturbing change
from the Gothic monsters of much Spanish horror.
Do you think that, despite their superficial innocence,
children do have a great capacity for violence?
BELLS CHIME
This was a decade when hits like The Exorcist and The Omen
made monstrous children the height of horror fashion.
Here, however, they're more a force of nature.
Like Hitchcock's Birds, they're mostly content to watch,
malevolent in their silence, and wait.
Wait to take their revenge on the adult world.
Serrador leaves us in no doubt that this is simply payback
for all the suffering children have endured as a result of wars
and other man-made catastrophes.
The film builds to an uncompromising climax,
as the English hero tries to escape the island,
only to be blocked by sweet-faced psychopaths.
Like director Georges Franju in Eyes Without A Face,
you wonder how far Serrador is prepared to go in his key scene.
He doesn't hold back.
GUN COCKS
RAPID GUNFIRE
For many British cinemagoers in the mid '70s,
the setting of Who Can Kill A Child
would have felt uncomfortably familiar.
But another Spanish film brought its nightmare all the way home.
Boasting one of the great horror movie titles,
The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue
opens with an almost documentary-like depiction
of the 1970s North.
It even throws in a sequence
showing a popular pastime of the era.
There aren't many zombie films that make me misty-eyed with nostalgia.
I'm from the north of England,
and that's very much how I remember the 1970s.
Apart from the living dead!
THEY LAUGH
Director Jorge Grau was fascinated by the idea
of zombies being created by environmental pollution,
hence those opening shots of congested Mancunian traffic.
TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH:
All this probably flew over the heads of Grau's producers,
who just wanted to replicate the American hit
Night Of The Living Dead, but in colour.
And the first appearance of a zombie in Manchester Morgue
definitely recalls a similar scene in George A Romero's classic.
Albeit relocated to a Peak District picnic spot.
MOANING
But Grau's approach to his zombies is innovative.
He gives each of them a specific look and identity,
almost a personality.
Grau's zombies were inspired by real cadavers
he read about in a book on forensic medicine.
The book explained how each corpse had met its particular violent end,
and Grau imagined similar backstories for his living dead.
This idea of the zombies as sympathetic victims
carries through to the film's climax,
which has the emotional resonance
so characteristic of Spanish horror.
SHE SHRIEKS
SHE CRIES OUT
Both Manchester Morgue and Who Can Kill A Child
give their horror a political edge.
But they're about British characters and global issues.
Making a political film about Spain in the early '70s
was never going to be easy.
IMPERIAL MUSIC
It was only after the demise of their dictator,
Francisco Franco, in 1975, that the Spanish could start
facing up to their own defining 20th-century trauma, the Civil War.
CROWD CHANTS "FRANCO"
But the subject remained so sensitive
that it was another quarter of a century
before a horror director was prepared to take it on.
Set in 1939, The Devil's Backbone
sees the conflicts of the Civil War play out in a boys' orphanage,
after the ghost of a dead child points to buried secrets.
TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH:
The director of The Devil's Backbone isn't Spanish, but Mexican.
And meeting him hasn't taken me to Europe,
but to Toronto, Canada, where he's finishing his latest film.
Guillermo del Toro is arguably
the most powerful force in horror cinema today.
A truly international figure
who straddles both the European and English language traditions.
Del Toro's career combines Hollywood hits
like Blade II and the Hellboy films
with highly personal projects made in Mexico and Spain.
What led to your decision to set The Devil's Backbone
during the Spanish Civil War?
It's still something that is haunting the country to this day.
It's something that a lot of people want to think is buried,
but is very present.
And the idea of the movie was,
a ghost is not just what you term a ghost in the work of fiction,
but it's something that has not been concluded.
That's something that cannot be resolved.
Unfinished business. Unfinished business.
And for all those reasons, it had to be Spain.
The ghost in The Devil's Backbone is surely one of the most
convincing spectres ever to manifest on screen.
He looks both ethereal yet tangible enough to be a real physical threat.
And like Jorge Grau's zombies,
he's a carefully characterised, tragic presence.
The idea was to actually start the movie
with the ghost as the scary figure.
And then when his true nature is revealed to be benign,
you then feel pity for him, and the opposite is true
for the human counterparts. The real, terrible things come from the humans.
Del Toro developed the themes of The Devil's Backbone
in a companion piece, Pan's Labyrinth,
set in 1944 after the Nationalist victory in Spain.
The central character is once again a child,
this time a girl who encounters a series of fantastical,
beguiling and downright monstrous creatures.
Echo. HER VOICE ECHOES
Hola?
The dangers of the magical realm are more than matched
by the menace of the real world,
in the shape of the girl's cold-blooded fascist stepfather.
He's a character that I really constructed carefully.
There's a particular brand of unsubtle fascism
that I think is bred is Spain,
where fascists are gentlemen.
But the word gentleman is used almost as a stabbing weapon.
You know, like, "I'm a gentleman, a Spanish gentleman." And that's...
I tried to construct him as a character
whose function would be unclouded by moral judgement.
THEY SPEAK SPANISH
The first few murders in the movie are shocking to me
because of how in control he is.
The bottle, he never even misses a beat,
he doesn't get agitated.
The way fascism packages itself is,
I think, one of its most powerful, pervasive, perverse powers.
In our times, I think, the most despicable people
are mostly the most well-tailored people that appear on the news.
In both The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth,
the brutality of adults
is set against the courage and purity of children.
I started reading fairytales and horror at the same time.
So I was reading Little Red Riding Hood or Cinderella
or Sleeping Beauty at the same time
that I was discovering Edgar Allen Poe, HP Lovecraft,
and for whatever reason,
that clash in my head always fixated horror in a moment of childhood.
SCREECHING
SCREAMING
Del Toro's highly personal approach and beautifully realised vision
helped Pan's Labyrinth win three Oscars and break box-office records
for a Spanish-language picture in the United States.
It's probably the most commercially successful
European Horror film ever made.
The 21st century has seen Europe step out from the shadow
of American and British Horror
to reach wider audiences than ever before.
Leading the pack is a new generation of Spanish films,
from ghost stories to zombie action.
France is back on the scene with its own extremely graphic thrillers.
Other countries are pushing the genre in new directions.
There's been Dutch body horror with the Human Centipede films
and Swedish vampires in Let The Right One In.
But it may be tempting fate to speak of a European horror boom
just as the continent slides towards
its biggest financial crisis in decades.
These are straitened times, and film-making is a risky business.
But as we've seen, horror cinema can thrive
in the face of difficult political and economic conditions.
Perhaps the continent's present crisis could actually be
the impetus for a new generation of European horror movies.
I think that genre film in general thrives in adversity.
I think that the worst thing that can happen to a horror movie
is for it to be birthed out of sheer support.
You know, you can have adversity from the money, financiers,
or it can come from the adversity of the political, social environment.
In any case, in order to talk about horror
you have to remain an outsider.
If you are fully welcome,
I essentially think you lose your mojo.
And the best European horror cinema has always come from outsiders.
Italian and Spanish film-makers,
seeking to exploit the new horror trend triggered by Hammer,
but spawning strange and distinctive works of their own.
Maverick directors who took lurid subjects
and lent them surreal elegance and poetry.
And earliest of all, the expressionist directors
and stars of Weimar German cinema,
hoping to revive the dignity of their defeated nation.
What fascinates me about the story of European horror
is its sheer diversity, the sense that there's a parallel,
but entirely separate story to the one we're familiar with.
Europe is so much the home of horror,
with its myths of vampires, werewolves,
witchcraft and the undead,
yet it's like those myths were exported to Hollywood,
leaving Europe the room to develop a new tradition
as a way of processing its own traumas,
particularly the two world wars.
It's led to a fascinating conversation between
the English-language tradition and the European
that continues to this day.
I can't wait to see what happens next.