Thanks to the giallo horror film obsession of my friend Bruce, I was able to watch a particularly good example of the genre last night, The House with Laughing Windows (1976, dir. Pupi Avati). You can read fuller summaries of Italian horror and the giallo films elsewhere, but in short they were a pulp/exploitation genre from the 1970s that combined atmosphere- and suspense-oriented murder thrillers with the cinematic style and visual look of the art film. For some (like one of the Amazon reviewers), this hybrid brings the worst of both worlds, but for others the combination of sheer generic pleasure with gorgeous cinematography and sure editing is the appeal. At least based on this example, I’m definitely in the latter category, as this film really worked for me. I’m reminded by a perennial favorite film of mine - Spiral Staircase - and the way that film recycles and has such fun with every convention of the women’s gothic film without losing its suspense. Here, too, we get so many gothic and horror film cliches, coming at us so rapidly that they’re made effective again, even as we laugh at them. The tone is quite different from (and far more atmospheric than) the reflexive horror films like Scream or I Know What You Did…, but there’s a similar simultaneous appeal on multiple emotional levels, serious and camp at once. And, for sheer style, I’ll put this film up against the prestige products Italy was putting out in the 1970s; this exploitation film is far more restrained with zoom shots than, say, Death in Venice.
The plot itself is rococo: a painter hired to reconstruct a destroyed church painting of the killing of St. Sebastian slowly discovers that something sinister behind the façade of a normal village and the history of the triptych’s original painter, long dead, who seems to haunt the present tense. As he investigates this artist (whose specialty was painting the agony of death!), the dead bodies start piling up and the house where he and his girlfriend are staying fills up with shadowy lurkers and recorded words from the dead painter. As narrative, it’s hardly linear, as day and night shift without logic or warning, and character motivation and reaction seem curiously cut off from any consistent knowledge on their part of what’s going on. These limitations are further compounded by frankly subpar acting and by the post-synch dubbing endemic to Italian films.
But these are hardly fatal flaws in a film as well-made and beguiling as this. The differences between this and an American horror film are instructive. First, while Laughing Windows activates off-screen space to create a sense of dread, the conventions of framing in the slasher film (in which half the time the killer is concealed by the frame, and half the time the danger is a false alarm) are absent here. Second, while this film uses some subjective camera work - unsurprisingly in times of voyeuristic gaze at the female lead - that camera work is not psychologized to comment on the killer’s sexual perversion. Third, here place becomes all important in the buildup of tension and suspense; in this sense the film owes as much to the gothic as to the horror film proper, which just as easily inhabits the soundstage or suburban mall or subdivision as Coleridgean ruins. None of which is to say that Laughing Windows is “psychological horror”… plenty of gore here, even if by today’s standards it’s relatively tame.
I’m not sure if this is the best or most representative of the giallo films, but I can say it’s not a bad introduction and a worthy watch in its own right.
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