A rare directorial effort for Gastaldi, who is best known as the screenwriter of many fine Italian genre pieces of the 60's and 70's. He manages to create a somewhat chilling atmosphere with minimal resources, mainly with creeping and circling camera movements. Overall, the film is routine at best, no different from dozens of others in the genre. The French-language Canadian video is known as "La force du mal".
2 Reviews
Screams In the Night
BandSAboutMovies17 December 2023
Warning: Spoilers
The only copy I can find of Screams In the Night is, as nicely as I can put it, beat to s***. Whole sections of it turn into static and digital noise, the quality is at least fifth generation and the sound is barely listenable. There are no subtitles, either. And yet, in a world of 4K everything, I appreciate these analog moments when a movie looks bad and you need to fit to make it matter.
A medium named Brigitte (Mara Maryl, the wife of co-director and writer Ernesto Gastaldi), her husband Paul (Luciano Pigozzi, the Peter Lorre of Italy) and their friends Gerard (Gerardo Amato, The Red Monks), his fiancée Eileen (Martine Brochard, Top Model) and Sheena (Gioia Scola, Obsession: A Taste for Fear) have invoked the spirit of the long dead Christian (Franco Molè), who was killed ten years ago in this very room. He was once the husband of Eileen and in a few days, he will finally be declared dead, so she can use his money to build residential spaces on his property with Gerard.
Everyone has a secret. As for Gerard, he's sleeping with Sheena and plans to kill Eileen. Paul used to be a priest. And Brigitte? Well, as everyone dies around them, she just may be a witch.
Gastaldi, who was the writer of so many Italian films, joined director Vittorio Salerno (he directed Libido as Julian Berry Storff), who hadn't made a movie in five years. One day, while hunting in the woods - according to Roberto Curti's Italian Gothic Horror Films 1980-1989 - he found a gigantic petrified formation known as a trembling stone. He couldn't stop thinking about it until one night, he finally had an idea. Five people - lost in the woods and who all hate each other - find the stone. It becomes "the amplifier of their bad desires, their projects of mutual duplicity ... and mysteriously, no one will get out of the woods alive."
To fund the movie, they got a 60 million lire grant from the Ministry of Spectacle by submitting the movie as La coscienza and pretending it was an art film. After they got the money, they formed a co-op with the cast, basing their salaries on the money the movie made from distribution.
Shot in three weeks with just four technicians, which included director of photography and cameraman Benito Frattari, his nephew Marco, a sound man and a local handyman to carry things who was provided for free by the mayor of the town where they shot, Soriano nel Cimino. Unlike many Italian exploitation movies, it was shot with direct sound. It also has nearly all natural light, which may be why it was set and shot outside. It is a frugal film, as you can tell.
If you have seen Libido, this is something of a spiritual sequel. It takes scenes from that movie and treats them in sepia, using them as flashbacks. In 1965, Mara Maryl was tied to a bed, an image that appears on that film's poster. In 1981, it's a rock in the woods. Pigozzi fell off a cliff to his death in the earlier film; here he claims it just broke his legs.
Perhaps most strange here is how much this movie prefigures the ideas within The Blair Witch Project. I'm not insinuating theft, just that the collective unconsciousness is a strange place. The woods are constantly changing, reality is shifting and there is no way out. However, this was shot on 16mm, not video, and even with a small crew looks professional and not the work of twentysomethings in the woods with a handheld.
As for the score, it has material lifted from The Suspicious Death of a Minor and improvised flute music by Severino Gazzelloni, whose ode to Pan was composed and recorded in six hours, giving the movie an hour of music to use.
I would treat this as a curiosity unless you have an obsession - you know me - with Italian film.
A medium named Brigitte (Mara Maryl, the wife of co-director and writer Ernesto Gastaldi), her husband Paul (Luciano Pigozzi, the Peter Lorre of Italy) and their friends Gerard (Gerardo Amato, The Red Monks), his fiancée Eileen (Martine Brochard, Top Model) and Sheena (Gioia Scola, Obsession: A Taste for Fear) have invoked the spirit of the long dead Christian (Franco Molè), who was killed ten years ago in this very room. He was once the husband of Eileen and in a few days, he will finally be declared dead, so she can use his money to build residential spaces on his property with Gerard.
Everyone has a secret. As for Gerard, he's sleeping with Sheena and plans to kill Eileen. Paul used to be a priest. And Brigitte? Well, as everyone dies around them, she just may be a witch.
Gastaldi, who was the writer of so many Italian films, joined director Vittorio Salerno (he directed Libido as Julian Berry Storff), who hadn't made a movie in five years. One day, while hunting in the woods - according to Roberto Curti's Italian Gothic Horror Films 1980-1989 - he found a gigantic petrified formation known as a trembling stone. He couldn't stop thinking about it until one night, he finally had an idea. Five people - lost in the woods and who all hate each other - find the stone. It becomes "the amplifier of their bad desires, their projects of mutual duplicity ... and mysteriously, no one will get out of the woods alive."
To fund the movie, they got a 60 million lire grant from the Ministry of Spectacle by submitting the movie as La coscienza and pretending it was an art film. After they got the money, they formed a co-op with the cast, basing their salaries on the money the movie made from distribution.
Shot in three weeks with just four technicians, which included director of photography and cameraman Benito Frattari, his nephew Marco, a sound man and a local handyman to carry things who was provided for free by the mayor of the town where they shot, Soriano nel Cimino. Unlike many Italian exploitation movies, it was shot with direct sound. It also has nearly all natural light, which may be why it was set and shot outside. It is a frugal film, as you can tell.
If you have seen Libido, this is something of a spiritual sequel. It takes scenes from that movie and treats them in sepia, using them as flashbacks. In 1965, Mara Maryl was tied to a bed, an image that appears on that film's poster. In 1981, it's a rock in the woods. Pigozzi fell off a cliff to his death in the earlier film; here he claims it just broke his legs.
Perhaps most strange here is how much this movie prefigures the ideas within The Blair Witch Project. I'm not insinuating theft, just that the collective unconsciousness is a strange place. The woods are constantly changing, reality is shifting and there is no way out. However, this was shot on 16mm, not video, and even with a small crew looks professional and not the work of twentysomethings in the woods with a handheld.
As for the score, it has material lifted from The Suspicious Death of a Minor and improvised flute music by Severino Gazzelloni, whose ode to Pan was composed and recorded in six hours, giving the movie an hour of music to use.
I would treat this as a curiosity unless you have an obsession - you know me - with Italian film.
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