The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave
(La notte che Evelyn uscì dalla tomba) (1971);
The Black Cat (Gatto nero) (1981)
The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, another richly saturated, spicy and mainly nutty giallo by Emilio Miraglia, begins with a man trying to escape from a psychiatric institution. He has all the genre movie signifiers of “madness”: he twitches and shakes, his vision is blurred. The orderlies restrain him and drag him back. The credits roll.
On the other side of the credits, we see him again, out of hospital. He is, we discover, Lord Alan Cunningham (Peter Wyngarde lookalike Anthony Steffen), inhabitant of a decaying ancestral pile a short drive from central London (yeah, let that sink in).
He is still not quite right, since it is established very early on that he has a compulsion to bring home red-headed sex workers, get them to wear some very kinky boots, whip them, and murder them. They have to be natural redheads, because Alan's dead wife Evelyn (Paola Natale) was a redhead. Alan didn't apparently murder Evelyn, although he did catch her banging another guy in the castle grounds, and whatever his feelings, it is safe to assume that his reaction to her death has not been processed all that well, and it should not be especially controversial to state that luring exotic dancers who resemble your late wife to your pad, strapping them to a bondage bench and dispatching them is not a valid form of emotional catharsis. Safe, sane and consensual this is not.
The disconcertingly glamorous Agatha (Joan C. Davies), who despite being Alan and George's auntie, is clearly younger than either of them and who although wheelchair bound, is perfectly able to get up and walk when it suits her, suggests that what Alan needs is a séance. A bonkers scene ensues that ends with Alan collapsing at the sight of a see-through apparition of Evelyn standing on the table. Everyone is convinced that Alan will be fixed by the ministrations of a Good Woman. Who is Explicitly Not a Redhead.
Apart from Evelyn's body going missing and Alan's vile family getting bumped off one by one, and the uncanny manifestations of Evelyn that begin to shake Alan's fragile sanity to its foundations, everything is fine.
Why is Agatha in the wheelchair anyway? Could Gladys be as innocent and pure as she appears? Is Evelyn coming back? Or could it be that someone is murdering the relatives and trying to drive Alan back to the asylum for some other reason? Will Alan meet justice?
(Spoilers, in order: fuck knows; no; no; duh, yes; oh hell no.)
This is another sleazy, pervy movie. No one – no one at all – in this film is good and if they all deserve it, there's no weight to what happens to them. But unlike What Have You Done to Solange? it takes a sort of joy in its trashiness, and the setting is part of that. Here, Britain is the sort of Gothic playground that Dylan Dog would have no problem fitting into – and in fact the classic Dylan Dog adventure “The Return of the Monster” (which was translated as one of the Dark Horse issues) exists in exactly the same space of weird aristocrats, decaying ancestral estates and Country House asylums that Evelyn rises from.
I can't help thinking that Count Dracula is a useful comparison here: Dracula's Transylvania is a place of castles and bats and wolves, an exoticised, orientalised East where someone else's home is our tale of shuddery terror, where vampiric nobility exists in a rarefied world of stately homes and castles and dungeons full of cobwebs and monsters. But Lord Alan and his depraved clan are as exotic as Dracula is; we see our own parasitic aristocracy made into a far-away horror story, and the land we take for granted as home made into an outsider's Gothic bloodbath.
Early on, American photographer Jill Trevers (the wonderful Mimsy Farmer) trespasses in an open tomb. A village policeman finds her. Instead of perhaps, you know, arresting her or issuing a warning, the bobby tells her that his grandad told him that you should never disturb the dead, that they're “grumpy” (as the subtitle translation has it) and then hops on his bike and rides off.
Jill: I thought policemen weren't superstitious.This is more or less a transposition of a classic horror trope to our vicinity, and the oddness of it makes apparent a thing that is no less present in a lot of British folk horror, but which we don't notice so much, namely folklore that's mangled or even entirely made up for the sake of cinema. Somehow in a British film we're prepared to accept it (consider Blood on Satan's Claw, as the number one example of a film that largely gets away with this). The subject of the film itself is an example of this: it's notionally based on the Edgar Allan Poe short story of the same name, although it's only in the last ten minutes or so where the plot even vaguely resembles Poe's original in even the most superficial terms. And of course, Poe was American. He was trading on the superstition that black cats were ill-starred animals. But in English folklore, black cats are lucky.
Police Sergeant: Maybe in America. Here, we all believe in certain things.
The thing with the mic and the tape recorder ties into the idea of hauntological tech, that we see in British classics like The Stone Tape or The Shout. Fulci has clearly seen some of these very Radiophonic stories, the films where recording levels and cables communicate with ghosts, the films where the technological and supernatural highlight the juxtaposition of the prosaic and the uncanny that truly comes from a haunted piece of media.
Miles is lonely, bitter and vengeful, and not averse to trying to use his powers of hypnotic influence on Jill when she shows up at his door, and it would work too, except that his black cat ruins it by flying at him just as he gets her under his power.
(Spoilers, in order: maybe; could be; almost certainly; probably the latter, but it's a close call; not a chance.)
While we go back and forth on the question of who's in charge here, we've the cat's entertainingly evil murders to keep us occupied. Jill is smart and resourceful, and unlike a lot of characters in horror films with specialised jobs, is actually good at her profession, with an eye for detail that means she picks up on vital points that others miss – I reckon that she works so well because it's simply easier for a film director to know how a person who's good with a camera thinks, which is pretty obvious if you think about it. Anyway, Jill knows something is up, and, co-opted by the competent and handsome Inspector Gorley of Scotland Yard (David Warbeck) to be a crime scene photographer (there being no one else on hand to do the job), she is there for all the clues.
As a procedural detective story, this makes the whole thing interesting to watch – while Jill only suspects and the police have no clue, we know it's that meowing bastard, and the only question we have is who is supplying the intent. It's the Columbo Structure (the viewer knows and the hero suspects, and the tension lies in how it plays out), only furry and with a penchant for tuna.
Even without the pretty look of the thing, nothing could be wholly bad when you have the presence of the two principals. Patrick Magee chews the scenery like a man really possessed (as opposed to a man just playing one).
And then there's Mimsy Farmer.
Here, once again, we have a film where England – specifically Hambledon, Buckinghamshire – is a foreign place, a place where the dead talk from their graves and black cats are vindictive murderous dicks who come back from the dead and literally teleport with hilarious twinkly sound effects. The presentation of a folk horror that shows England as the foreign country provides a glass that both displays the limitations of folk horror and shows us something of how England (and by extension, Britain) appears to Europe, which, let's face it, is something that England needs more than ever right now.