The one you might have saved

Joe D'Amato's BUIO OMEGA (BEYOND DARKNESS, 1979) isn't a significant movie in most ways but I often find myself thinking about it... the death of one minor character in particular. Lucia D'Elia plays a hippy hitchhiker who has the misfortune of getting into the caravan of taxidermist Kieran Canter while he is working through his grief over the death of his beautiful girlfriend... whose body he has stolen from the cemetery.

Getting stoned, the hitchhiker nods off only to wake up a little later. Finding herself alone in the minivan, she stumbles around Canter's garage and catches him in the act of embalming said dead girlfriend. Not surprisingly, she screams blue murder and bolts for the exit, her escape thwarted when she slips on a spilt bucket of entrails. After pulling out her fingernails, Canter throttles the life out of her. You might think that was the worst of it, but...

A few scenes later our "hero" and his housekeeper go about the ugly but necessary process of disposing of the dead body. As Canter fills the tub with acid, scary Franca Stoppi undresses the dead girl, roughly pulling at her clothes as if she were plucking a chicken. It's here that the scene goes from rather standard gore movie procedure to something, well... more.

At the time of shooting, Lucia D'Elia was a young, pretty and exceedingly fleshy actress and its this fleshiness that particularizes the scene. As her clothes are pulled from her body, she cannot help (however excellent D'Elia was at playing dead) as her breasts, belly and sides jiggle from the harsh treatment. I can't say I found the scene erotic, per se, but I found D'Elia tremendously attractive, a full-figured woman straight out of Peter Paul Rubens or Fernando Botero, and this violation of her lively and (to me) alluring corporeality gave the setpiece the perfect balance between eroticism and something I nearly couldn't watch. It's not the threat of the gruesome details that bothers me half as much as the heartbreak of seeing the clothes she dressed herself in that morning torn off and cast aside like rubbish along with her belongings, her identity, her essence and her hopes and dreams for a happy life.

The scene in BEYOND DARKNESS reminds me of a similar bit of business in Bud Townsend's THE FOLKS AT RED WOLF INN (aka TERROR HOUSE, 1972), in which Margaret Avery is drugged at dinner, stolen from her bed and brought to a concealed abattoir, where she is (nongraphically) dismembered and her organs canned for eating while the elderly butchers talk quietly between themselves about mundane things. That scene worked a nasty charm because you didn't see what was happening but were left with the unhappy mental picture of a charming, vibrant young woman being canceled out and reduced to meat by malefactors who unable to comprehend the evil they were doing.

The comparable scene in BEYOND THE DARKNESS also works in its own way because it shows you what the earlier scene didn't, although the specific acts of butchery are still somewhat discreet. It was Joe D'Amato's stock-in-trade to go there, to show you what you thought he wouldn't dare, and most of the time (for me anyway) his use of excessive force diluted and diminished the tension. Not this time, though. This scene bothers me and yet I don't think it would have quite the same effect on me if the actress were trim, as are most horror movie victims. There's something real about Lucia D'Elia and seeing that pulse stifled is, for me, a true definition of horror. As a horror lifer, I've seen countless women stripped bare by their butchers even (little Marcel Duchamp joke there) but this is a rare instance where the engagement of my libido has tapped directly into my sense of empathy, making me want to breach the fourth wall of the movie screen and save this poor young woman.

I'm not about to go calling for a proper blog-a-thon, primarily because I'm signing off of this account tonight and going on the lam for seven days off the grid, unplugged and incommunicado. But I wouldn't be disappointed if you bloggers out there carried the "The one you might have saved" torch to your own sites and wrote about those horror movie victims whose plights especially touched you and whom you wish you could have carried to safety.