Year: 1963
Director: Brunello Rondi
Stars: Dalia Lavi, Frank Wolff, Anna Maria Aveta
Ideas of witchcraft in cinema – particularly modern cinema – are most often tied to Celtic or Gaelic roots, or the frontiers of New England (with heavy influence from the two former origins). We think most naturally of the folk horror tales of the United Kingdom or Ireland, of myth and fairy tale or, when considering movies, perhaps Robert Eggers’ genre-defining debut The Witch from 2015.
Take a wider, more encompassing view of film history, of course, and you’ll find such superstitions brewing across the globe and back through the decades; everywhere from Russia to Japan. Anywhere, in all honesty, where the patriarchy has feared women. So, of course, it has been perennially present in the home of Catholicism; Italy.
The neon hysterias of Dario Argento’s Suspiria might be your first thought, but there are others. Go back a decade and a half further and you’ll find one of the subgenre’s most stark and empathetic entries; Brunello Rondi’s beautiful and fascinating monochrome treaty The Demon.
We are introduced to the ironically named Purificata (Israeli actor Dalia Levi), a woman in torment. She writhes and cuts her own hair, pricks her breast for her own blood, fashions a mixture of these bodily offerings in a fire for an ill-conceived notion of love. She appears distressed, at the end of her wits. We come to discover that the object of her obsession is local man Antonio (Frank Wolff). Antonio is betrothed to be married. Though she throws herself at him and appears an endured nuisance, Antonio drinks of her concoction, through which she believes him to be bewitched. She has power over him now!
Things play out tragically. While the locals attempt to bless and protect Antonio’s forthcoming marriage through all manner of rituals that intersect Catholicism with more spurious, traditional superstitions (a scythe laid beneath the marital bed seems alarmingly dangerous and more inclined to engender bad vibes rather than blessings), Puri’s commotions at the wedding ceremony – she tries to damn it with the body of a dead cat – mark her out in the community as a focal source of rebuke and suspicion. When a local boy with whom she is friendly takes ill and dies, the townsfolk denounce Puri as a witch and encircle her in the town square.
When Puri is ‘treated’ in close quarters by local charlatan Giuseppe (Nicola Tagliacozzo), he manhandles her during what is supposed to be a kind of faith-based exorcism. Director Brunello Rondi is shockingly provocative here, presenting a sham clergyman as an outright hypocrite and sexual predator. As he clutches at Puri’s breast and orders her to breathe deeply, the sanctity of the church is derided and undermined. It’s a bold move for an Italian film in 1963. If our sympathies weren’t already coded to reside with Puri, they certainly do at this juncture. His manhandling only grows more aggressive, directly relatable to an earlier scene in which Puri was raped by a local goatherd (an event that went without reprisal).
It is this sense of love and pity for Puri encouraged by Rondi – and evident in the film from its very first scene – that makes The Demon feel so powerfully communicative. An expression of pain and empathy for a young woman driven to madness and mysticism by the conservative constraints of the society around her. Levi’s performance is phenomenal. Gripping, physical, sexually charged but also deeply human. When she claws at herself in bed, screaming as though in a fevered dream, she appears to us as a patient in an asylum. A brutal cut shows that the solution to her malady is simply to bind her at the wrists. Rondi makes the cruelty feel very real.
Things go from bad to worse. A more concerted attempt at a church-based exorcism leads to one of the most distinctive and oft-aped sequences in horror film history. Either coerced by the priest into religious exaltation or genuinely revealing of an inner possession (the film is brilliantly slippery on what ‘the truth’ of the matter is), Puri is moved to walk inverted on all fours with her back arched – the very spectre of so many ineffectual latter day possession movies. Here, though, through Levi’s controlled underplaying of her acrobatic prowess, the act chills and commands. It is the greatest performance of possession outside of Lucyna Winnicka in the Polish masterpiece Mother Joan of the Angels from 1961.
A harsh cut to another scene reveals that this act of intervention has been as fruitless as all others. Suddenly we’re treated to a sequence in which the villages attempt to scare away dark clouds from their newly sewn crops by banging tankards together and chanting to the skies; acts as delirious as any Puri herself has performed, but accepted as status quo as they are performed en masse. Drawn either by their incantations or by the ever-alluring presence of Antonio among them, Puri is quickly chased home, where her family see no choice but to shutter her away in a hole in the ground. Here, tellingly, her perceived status as a witch is conflated with promiscuity. She is dubbed a “whore”, yet the film provides no evidence to support such assertions. She is vilified, nothing more.
Rondi’s unscrupulous handling of his subject matter is a large part of The Demon‘s power. He understands what Friedkin and Blatty would a decade later with the world-conquering The Exorcist (and, ironically, what seemed not to occur once to David Gordon Green in the recent travesty The Exorcist: Believer); that is that activating the audience’s mind is the greatest way of sustaining such films that question and query faith and the possibility of the supernatural. The Demon doesn’t tell you anything about the true nature of Puri’s malady. It infers – heavily at times – but it does not instruct. It is ultimately up to us to choose whether she is a witch, possessed, insane or merely reacting against relentless persecution.
The final act of the film sees her committed to a convent to be dealt with by nuns. Here a further battle of wills plays out, as physical as any other in the film. Puri comes close to strangling one of the nuns as she attempts to invoke the Trinitarian formula (that of Father, Son and Holy Ghost), but by this point in the narrative – after a litany of wrongs against her – discarding her response as that of a possessed soul feels thornily problematic. Not to condone violence, but hasn’t she earned her crazed and violent response by now? Aren’t her desperate attempts to remain ‘unspoiled’ by the Catholic church at the very least understandable? Puri represents thinking outside of the conformist. In the world of The Demon this is simply not permissible. It is radical. Dangerous. Must be excused by possession, witchery or other ills that have a legacy of ‘treatments’ through which her individuality can be suppressed.
What is most sad about this portion of the film is Puri’s continued devotion of Antonio, a man almost certainly not worthy of her passion. He awakes in the night plagued by a rash – ‘witched’ no doubt – and his uncertain belief that it must be Puri’s doing is taken on faith by Giuseppe, showing the lack of rigor to proceedings throughout the community; a reactionary lot whose puritanical behaviour is inseparable from barbaric paganism. Of course, the end for Puri is inevitable. The threat of a mob. The threat of the pyre. And, ultimately, Antonio; a man entirely able to prey upon her vulnerability and weakness… and unleash his own.
Rondi’s future would see him examine female exploitation and violence over and over, from Italian variants on the emerging Women In Prison films, to providing the artistic apex of the ‘Black Emanuelle’ cycle of the late ’70s starring genre queen Laura Gemser; Black Emanuelle, White Emanuelle. You might scoff, but that picture has a lyricism reminiscent of Pasolini. Rondi was no joke, though his work seldom caught the limelight. I can’t call myself seasoned in his filmography – deep cuts of cult cinema from 40+ years ago are hard to come by – but what I have seen has only impressed.
As derisive as The Demon is of human frailty, hypocrisy and mob mentality, it is an uncommonly beautiful film to look upon. Rendered in some of the most majestic black and white photography this viewer has ever had the fortune to witness thanks to cinematographer Carlo Bellero, it must rank among the most beguilingly handsome – and damning – horror pictures ever made.
The Lost Highway Hotel 