The Cinema of Repulsions from Suspiria to Satan's Playground

The following essay I originally wrote a few years ago as a sort of defense of Dante Tomaselli's films. When I wrote it, Tomaselli, an independent horror filmmaker, had made only three films, all competent, strange, and unique. Eventually, I had written so much preface and so little about Tomaselli, I realized the essay was in trouble. I also realized that while Tomaselli's films are inventive, I didn't want to exaggerate their value. Since I see no real future for this essay elsewhere, nor do I have any desire to re-read, let alone re-write it, I'm posting it now with some slipshod repairs to hide the seams. The writing is turgid, the references pretentious, my case pompously overstated, but I hope the ideas and facts prove interesting.

A new and peculiar approach to making horror films arose in 1970s Italy, an approach that placed its faith in the pure effect of horrific, terrifying, and otherworldly imagery. With this faith in imagery came increasingly illogical narratives, so thin they were but clotheslines for a series of horrifying images, movements, and sounds. Why one event happens when it happens, or why it happens at all, the source of a light and its colour, the source of sound: none of this is adequately explained within the narrative; one just accepts the incoherent order of things on the strength of the spectacle. It is a "cinema of attractions," as Tom Gunning calls it; a "cinema pur" in its abstraction from narrative, a purity devoted to the creation of horror, terror, revulsion. It's a cinema of repulsions.

One might suppose this category is unnecessary. Horror films, after all, generally are light on narrative. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) isn't so much plotted as it is experienced: it's a single event. Some youths arrive at a house and what follows is one instance of cruelty after another until Marilyn Burns finally escapes. What distinguishes Texas Chainsaw Massacre from a film like The Beyond (1981) is just the explainability of what you see. The remarkable set designs in TCM are certainly effective at creating horror and a horrible awe. But they're explained: the lunatics inhabiting the house keep lots of bones and fashion things out of them, and they do this just because they're lunatics. However, when spiders attack an archivist in The House by the Cemetery (1981), there is no explanation other than some abstract, malign influence that is itself in need of explanation. That explanation, of course, never comes, because the malign influence is in essence hand-waving. By its very nature it is an excuse to have whatever horrifying event one imagines on the screen. The events, then, happen for extra-narrative reasons: for the creation of the horrifying image, ultimately the creation of pure effect. There's no reason, in The Beyond, for the decaying body of the plumber to be in a bathtub, but the 'malign influence' allows us to excuse our normal requests for explanations, coherence, continuity, and accept he is indeed there; he's there so he can smash Veronica Lazar's eyeball out of her skull and make us recoil in so doing.

Perhaps someone will claim I'm cheating. The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery are both films involving the supernatural, whereas The Texas Chainsaw Massacre does not involve the supernatural. However, I could have just as readily chosen The Exorcist or The Omen in place of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Every horrific event in The Omen, also the product of a vague, malign influence, is explicable: we know why it's happening. The glass severs David Warner's head because he was poking his nose in Satan's business and because the glass's presence made a convenient tool of execution. Why the bookstore owner in Inferno must be assaulted by rats and finally sliced by a random hotdog vendor is considerably more mysterious--in fact, it defies explanation other than the vague, malign influence.

The need for the term 'Cinema of Repulsions' on the other hand is a little less defensible. Tom Gunning coined the term 'Cinema of Attractions' to define the pre-narrative film shorts that presented only a shocking image to the audience, then ended: a train enters a station as the camera points at it; Melies's head grows enormous then returns to normal; a train robber shoots directly at the audience (the camera). Gunning acknowledges that the Cinema of Attractions continues to appear amidst narrative, however, in avant-garde films and musicals. When these moments occur, "The spectator," he claims, "does not get lost in a fictional world and its drama, but remains aware of the act of looking, the excitement of curiosity and its fulfilment." It also appears in horror movies as murder set pieces. These set pieces, like musical numbers, exist for pure effect. They usually have some relevance or explanation within the narrative, however, and are at the service of the characters and the world they inhabit. But for the films in what I'm terming the Cinema of Repulsions, as I've noted, these set pieces don't have much to do with immersion in a fictional world or character psychology, but rather with "the film image engaging the viewer's curiosity" and the fictional world and characters are subordinated to that engagement. The emphasis is on thrill, as Gunning notes, "the immediate reaction of the viewer." So this term doesn't so much refer to a style of cinema in opposition to the cinema of attractions, but rather a subset that concerns a very specific sort of effect or viewer reaction, one might even say a particular type of curiosity: the fascination with death, abnormality, and other objects of revulsion safely viewed. If Gunning considers the traditional Cinema of Attractions akin to a rollercoaster ride, the Cinema of Repulsions is the Haunted House ride.

We've gone as far as we can with abstractions. Let's move on to the films themselves.

The inaugural film of this movement is, of course, Suspiria (1977). While obviously influenced by the films of the maestro Mario Bava, particularly Kill, Baby, Kill (1966) and his masterpiece Lisa and the Devil (1974), it was Suspiria's singleminded devotion to a sound-and-light show of horror at the expense of all reason that made this cinema of repulsions a movement. All the pieces were already in place with Kill, Baby, Kill, however. Kill, Baby, Kill concerns a town trapped in perpetual nightmare by the malign influence of a haunted villa and its resident ghost, the androgynous Melissa. Though the film ultimately explains most of its mysteries, the astounding Villa Grapps sequence, with its Maya Deren-esque twisting of reality through film language, contains all the seeds for Suspiria and its followers. Suspiria, like Kill, Baby, Kill functions on the premise of a vague, malign influence that perverts the world around it. In this case, the malign influence is an ancient witch inhabiting a prestigious, Isadora Duncan-style dance school. Her influence extends from violent, black-gloved murders to maggot rain and random dog attacks. The famously expressionistic lighting and atmosphere depicts not reality but that malign influence oozing everywhere in and around the school. (Ultimately these tropes can be traced back to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932). As usual, Dreyer is decades ahead of his time. Already in Vampyr we have the same tropes: in a small village, an evil vampiress exerts a vague, malign influence over the locals causing a whole host of inexplicable, supernatural events.)

With the success of Suspiria, Argento and his muse/co-writer Daria Nicolodi took the idea even further with Inferno (1980). The 'malign influence' of the two remaining witches creates a movie-length string of set-pieces, as Kim Newman argued(1). Rats and cats launch fatal attacks without reason, a hot dog vendor suddenly becomes murderous, a book binder chases a woman from a library--it all looks strange and horrifying, though it doesn't make a lick of sense other than, "Well, there's that malign influence..." On the strength of these two films alone, Daria Nicolodi can justly be regarded as one of the architects of this movement. Her screenplay for the third film in the series, while never actually adapted by Argento, became the source for two other films in the cinema of repulsions tradition: the interesting if very flawed Paganini Horror (1989) and Luigi Cozzi's The Black Cat (1989).

Picking up this trend and taking it in new directions is the other major architect of the movement, Dardano Sacchetti. Sacchetti, working with Lucio Fulci, created narratives that don't really go anywhere--in fact, they tend to loop in on themselves--but allow for maximum carnage. In this, Sacchetti follows Lisa and the Devil more than Kill, Baby, Kill. Lisa and the Devil provides a circular narrative about a woman unwittingly trapped in the land of the dead. She arrives in Rome, sees a painting of Satan carrying away a body, and through a series of bizarre events ends up carried away by Satan--piloting a Boeing 747! The point is not the narrative, but the disturbing and bizarre events, and their corresponding imagery, that occur along the way. Fulci's infamous gore trilogy, The City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981), and The House by the Cemetery (1981), all penned by Sacchetti, follows much the same trajectory. In fact, The Beyond, like Lisa and the Devil, begins with a painting, in this case of hell, and ends with the protagonists trapped within it. The major difference from Bava is the notorious gore. Patricia MacCormack has argued these films are best understood as being "about intrinsic quality, texture, consistency...they affect sense rather than intellect – confusion, disgust, suffering, delight at the pangs of horror are the qualities these films evoke." Because "[t]he narratives are there but they don't matter, what matters is the very matter of the images, their materiality." I think she's exactly right. The carnage in Fulci's gore films is cognate to the expressionistic lighting in Suspiria: it exists to shock, revolt, horrify. And the narratives, which replace the 'malign influence' of a supernatural being with the sudden opening of a 'gate to hell' and which does very little work as narrative, does great work at making room for increasingly revolting, disturbing, and disorienting images.

Sacchetti's work didn't stop with Fulci's gore trilogy. Together they made Manhattan Baby (1982), an interesting failure for being less logical but also less substantiated by horrifying imagery. Still, the film oozes the mystique of Egypt, not so much the real Egypt but the movie Egypt that has yielded us such horrors as Karl Freund's The Mummy. The film readily fits within the cinema of repulsions. Sacchetti then moved on to write The Church for Michele Soavi, of which I'll say more later, and for Lamberto Bava the minor masterpiece that is Demons and The Ogre. The Ogre very much resembles Fulci's gore films minus the gore; the gore is replaced, instead, by otherworldly fluids, the visceral horror by psychosexual terror, making the film more about semen than blood. Yet the film is no less a string of repulsions held together by the thinnest and most ethereal of narratives.

Fulci himself continued his cinema of repulsions without Sacchetti in Ghosts of Sodom, a haunted house film that only makes sense on a visual level where vaginas and pool balls can equal real bombings. And in Demonia, an awkward nunsploitation film that fuses the 'malign influence' tradition with Fulci's gore aesthetic. Neither of these films are anywhere near as good as Fulci's work with Sacchetti, although Ghosts of Sodom offers some fascinating images. The same energy and invention just isn't invested in creating repulsion, revulsion, terror.

Argento's disciple, Michele Soavi, took over the cinema of repulsions throne once Argento had returned to the familiar territory of his gialli. If this movement has always been a self-indulgent one, Soavi's films are entirely decadent. The Church, written by Dardano Sacchetti, concerns itself with nothing but stylishly strange events and images on the grounds that a massacre once occurred upon the grounds where the church was built. The Sect, Soavi's next film, is one of the most incoherent horror films ever made and yet its seemingly-endless flow of disturbing, terrifying, and confusing images--such as a thief finding a human heart in his mark's pocket, a rabbit watching television, and a face-removal sequence--more than makes up for its chaotic narrative.

Outside of Italy this movement had few proponents. At the time the only filmmaker out of Italy to seriously and consciously attempt to work in the cinema of repulsions was the British director, Norman J. Warren. He had already made a film in the style of Hammer and Amicus, albeit considerably gorier, called Satan's Slave when he saw Suspiria and had a revelation: for pure shock and terror, narrative could be foregone. He then made Terror (1978), a deliberate attempt to emulate what Argento did in Suspiria. The film concerns a burnt witch whose curse haunts her archnemesis's bloodline to the present with no apparent limits. The best and most abstract moment of this film is when a producer is attacked and killed by celuloid amidst green-gelled lights. The film is something of a failure if only due to Warren's inability to really commit to leaving logic aside. He wants his witch to adequately explain everything, even if she thankfully doesn't.

Warren tried to develop this approach with his, as of now, final film, Bloody New Year (1987), and, despite producer interference, did quite well. A group of youths are trapped on an island where, due to an experimental time-distorting device having accidentally been dropped, the dead, the buildings, the very order of reality assaults them. Why? How? Who cares? There is no narrative. There's only the desire to escape the island and the island's incessant and morbid toying with its victims. We're treated to such images as a burnt man crumbling into ash, a woman being consumed by an elevator wall, and an attack by a staircase post, amongst other things. A strange film that, by 1987, had become difficult to appreciate as the cinema of repulsions style had already lost its public appeal.


The cinema of repulsion's loss of public appeal has been most unfortunate for a young, dedicated American filmmaker named Dante Tomaselli, the latest and perhaps only active practitioner of the cinema of repulsions. He has made three films to date and every one of them is firmly and deliberately in the cinema of repulsions style. All of them have had a poor reception, despite being some of the most fascinating independent horror films of the past fifteen years. Desecration (1999), his first feature, about the malign influence of a dead mother/nun reaching from the grave to capture her son, is at present his highest rating film on Internet Movie Database with a whopping 3.1. His second film is Horror (2002), a title that recalls Warren's Terror. It concerns a group of juvenile detention escapees who take refuge in a house perverted by Satanic rituals. Horror is rated 2.8. His latest film, Satan's Playground (2006), mixes the ideas of Desecration and Horror with the legend of the Jersey Devil, creating a phantasmagoria of inexplicable horror set-pieces around a shack in the woods. Satan's Playground is rated 2.6. If those who rate Tomaselli's films are to be believed, his films have only been getting worse. In fact, they've been getting better; but each film reaches a wider audience that, unfortunately, does not appreciate what Tomaselli's films have to offer.

(1) - "Previously, the murders in Argento's films (particularly the first death in Suspiria) have been set pieces; Inferno is all set pieces, and thus all of a piece." - Nightmare Movies