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| From http://www.ivid.it/fotogallery/imagesearch/images/ demonio_daliah_lavi_brunello_rondi_001_jpg_snfi.jpg |
Director: Brunello Rondi
Screenplay: Ugo Guerra, Luciano
Martino and Brunello Rondi
Cast: Daliah Lavi (as Purif); Frank
Wolff (as Antonio); Anna María Aveta (as Sister Angela); Dario Dolci (as Don
Tommaso); Franca Mazzoni (as The Mother Superior)
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #31
Sometimes one is lucky enough to
encounter a film completely anonymous to you - no previous knowledge of its
existence let alone anything about the movie, no idea what the plot's going to
be about, almost nothing barring checking IMDB
to be able to write down what year it was released in and who directed it for
this review - and find something that goes beyond your expectations completely.
Discovering afterwards that director Brunello
Rondi was more well known for screenwriting, including a large portion of Federico Fellini's films, gave a clue of
why The Demon was as good as it was.
Very much an unknown entry to me
in dealing with women who are in the position of witchcraft or demonic possession
- evoking films like Mother Joan of
Angels (1961) to Belladonna of
Sadness (1973) - this follows a young woman called Purif (Daliah Lavi) who is in a cusp between
mental illness and actual possession from a devil. The film is split between a
rational grounded reality and the supernatural to the point neither side can be
separated, Purif clearly troubled between being cast aside by local lothario Antonio
(Frank
Wolff), who's decided to marry another, and community that views her as
a witch. You feel utter sympathy, especially from Lavi's incredible performance, in spite of her trying to hex Antonio
or much later trying to throttle a nun in a fit of possible demonic control. She's
an outcast, raven haired with deep eyes, a figure who feels more comfortable in
nature than with society, the local community deeply superstitious and only
held back from burning her because, set closer in the modern day, there's a
thin uncomfortable border between modern Christian and pagan belief at hand
keeping some sanity to the environment.
The most pronounced touch is The Demon's numerous depictions of
ritual and folk custom so idiosyncratic that they have to be real or are so
detailed they could be passed off as real history custom, the former likelier
as the opening credits explicitly state expert assistance on Italian folk
customs. The marriage bed of a newly betrothed couple has to be painstakingly
made, a scythe placed under the bed frame and dry grapes on the sheets above to
ward away evil that that would ruin the first consummated sex act. A large
portion of the rituals seen, Christian and folklore so melded together it feels
closer to medieval and further back to pagan culture than Christianity of the
present day, is the attempts for Purtif to be cleansed of the devils in her,
from carrying a heavy rock a great distance to a village square so she can
confess her sins and channel them into the stone, to the conventional exorcism
seen in cinema which includes a spider walk that predates The Exorcism (1973).
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| From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/post_images /21249/vlcsnap-2016-04-26-22h44m54s136.jpg?1461707302 |
What possesses Purif is
exceptionally vague, a person deeply troubled in mind but there's clear moments
of the supernatural, such as the presence of a young boy by a lake, which force
you to continually question what is taking place in her mind. Naturally the
film comes off as very progressive for its time even if there's implication she
may have cursed Antonio finally in the last part of the film; not only is
subconscious hallucination an answer for what takes place but, barring malice
to him, even Purif's blasphemies are clearly afflictions of a person in the
worse community possible to be in within her position, people who believe they
can move a black cloud off a field through joining in a mass chant, who
immediately chase her after as a witch believing she's responsible for it being
there. Even religion itself cannot be trusted as there's even an implication of
possible rape having taken place and nuns in a convent Purif finds herself looking
at her as inherently evil without any sympathy. And as a horror film still,
there's plenty that raises the hairs on the back of your neck. An attack on
Purif as she sleeps, whether it's real or in her mind, is worse from her spasms
and screams. The aforementioned spider walk, which is a prolonged piece of athleticism
by Lavi, just enforces how a simple
change in the symmetry of the human body by gymnastics is absolutely
unsettling.
The Demon is a beautiful film to look at, less a horror film than a
drama with sociological content that delves into the supernatural and occult in
theme. The rural community evoked in its monochrome depiction reminded me of an
Italian director whose work is also exceptionally difficult to find Vittorio De Seta, an acclaimed
documentary maker who also did fictional dramas, the rocky hills around the
community town emphasising its isolation from everywhere else, where the act of
banishing Purif would have real effect and that such a community would be
stewed in its own paranoid. It also evokes the community of Michelangelo Frammartino's wonderful La Quattro Volte (2010), especially as The Demon briefly has a herd of goats
in it, but whilst that later film celebrated small town folklore customs as
part of a cycle of life, in The Demon
it's a toxic mix of Christianity and pagan fears that leads to mostly elderly
or middle aged people to fear someone as clearly off in her own world as Purif.
Even when she throws a dead cat at someone to hex Antonio's future first child,
the emotional felt by the viewer is sadness for her stuck in herself rather
than the usually conservative attitude of these sort of films to vanquish the
evil witch.
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| From https://enlalistanegra.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/daliah.jpg |
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