Daughters of Darkness Podcast, with Kat Ellinger and Samm Deighan

Kat and Samm return from a lengthy hiatus with this personal, boisterous episode that explores desire, consent, and sexuality by comparing two very different films: Nelson Lyon’s forgotten erotic classic, The Telephone Book (1971), and Paul Verhoeven’s challenging rape-revenge drama, Elle (2016).

In a very special episode, Kat and Samm explore some of their favourite things, unedited, unscripted, and unrestrained. The list was long, but they only made it to two subjects. Listen to the show to find out what they are…

Kat and Samm begin an exploration of the films of Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar. This episode focuses on his collaborations with actor Antonio Banderas, beginning with 1986’s explicit serial killer film Matador, where a young would-be bullfighter (Banderas) confesses to several murders, though it’s immediately apparent that the real killer (or killers) is still on the loose.

In this final part of their series inspired by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs’ Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies, 1956-1984, Kat and Samm discuss unclassifiable French director (and writer) Alain Robbe-Grillet. Known for his surreal and often controversial arthouse and erotic films, this episode focuses on three of his titles in particular, and centers on his collaborations with actor Jean-Louis Trintignant and his wife, Catherine Robbe-Grillet. The first of these, Trans-Europ-Express (1966), follows a director (played by Robbe-Grillet himself) who discusses the plot for an upcoming film he’d like to make while onboard the titular train. It concerns a man (Trintignant) smuggling drugs, or perhaps diamonds, across Europe, who is interrupted by a sadomasochistic affair with a strange woman (Marie-France Pisier).

In the third part of their series inspired by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs’ book Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies, 1956-1984, Kat and Samm explore the work of French poète maudit Jean Rollin. First, they discuss Rollin’s colorful, Franju-inspired second feature, La vampire nue (1970) aka The Nude Vampire, about a suicide cult’s obsession with a young female vampire. Their leader, a nefarious businessman, tries to use medical science to unlock the secret in her blood, while his son has fallen in love with her and hopes to set her free.

Kat and Samm continue their series inspired by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs’ cult cinema bible, Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984. This time they explore the work of prolific but divisive Spanish director Jess Franco, who made the first Spanish horror film (1962’s Gritos en la noche aka The Awful Dr. Orloff) and went on to make reams of sex, horror, and all-around cult films. This episode looks at some titles from his early career, like Miss Muerte (The Diabolical Dr. Z, 1966), but primarily focuses on three of his films: first, the enigmatic and beautiful Paroxismus aka Venus in Furs (1969), where a jazz musician witnesses a woman’s murder but comes to find that she might not be dead after all. Also discussed is the delightful De Sade 70 aka Eugenie (1970), an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom. Maria Rohm and Jack Taylor star as a couple who coerce an innocent teen back to their remote island to educate her about sex… and sadism. Finally, they turn to another loose adaptation—of Cornell Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black—with She Killed in Ecstasy (1971), one of the last films Franco made with his early muse Soledad Miranda. She stars as a young widow, whose doctor husband was driven to madness and suicide by his colleagues’ destruction of his unconventional research.

With this episode, Kat and Samm begin a new four-part series inspired by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs’ seminal film book, Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984. Here they explore a few key films from Jose Larraz, one of the directors explored in depth in Tohill and Tombs’ book. This Spanish-born artist, writer, and director made some of his most famous films in England, such as Vampyres (1974), which was explored in Daughters of Darkness episode two. Here the focus is on Symptoms (1974), The Coming of Sin (1978), and Black Candles (1982). Symptoms, which was recently uncovered after it was believed to be lost for decades, existing only in bootleg form, is Larraz’s masterpiece. The film follows a disturbed young woman (Angela Pleasance) spending a few days in her family’s country house with her friend Anne (Lorna Heilbron), but Anne soon begins to hear strange things happening at night.

Kat and Samm conclude their four-part series on the films of Elio Petri with a discussion of his final three features. The great Daria Nicolodi — at her most erotic — costarred in La proprietà non è più un furto (Property is No Longer a Theft, 1973), Petri’s absurdist, highly political crime film about a young man (Flavio Bucci) who is sick of being destitute and robs a well-off butcher (Ugo Tognazzi). Even more bizarre is Petri’s utterly unique follow up, Todo modo (1976), which reunited Petri with his two most important male leads, Marcello Mastroianni and Gian Maria Volontè. In this chilling drama, a political leader (a white-haired Volontè) gathers with his party and his spiritual adviser, a Catholic priest (Mastroianni), at a monastic retreat, but someone begins murdering them one by one. Petri’s last feature film is another surreal, absurd drama Buone notizie (Good News, 1979). A downtrodden media executive (Giancarlo Giannini) struggles with a barrage of violent content in his job, strife in his married life, and political tension in the city, including assassinations and bombings — he’s also confronted by an old friend who is mentally ill. Bizarre and often bleak, but loaded with moments of comedy, Good News includes many of the themes that obsessed Petri throughout his career: a battle of sexes, changing gender roles within Italy, sexual repression, leftist political ideology, the effectiveness of terrorism, and — most of all — man in the midst of an existential crisis.

Kat and Samm continue their in-depth investigation of Italian filmmaker Elio Petri, this time focusing on two of his collaborations with actor Gian Maria Volonté: his most famous film, Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, 1970), and his most overtly political, La classe operaia va in paradiso (The Working Class Goes to Heaven aka Lulu the Tool, 1971). Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion stars Petri as a high-ranking detective who murders his mistress just to prove to himself that he can get away with the crime — even if the evidence stacking up against him is right under the nose of the police department. A masterpiece of political and personal paranoia, it focuses on one of Petri’s most beloved themes: man in an existential crisis.

In episode 18, Kat and Samm continue their retrospective of Italian director Elio Petri with a look at his first three color films: La decima vittima (The 10th Victim, 1965), A ciascuno il suo (We Still Kill the Old Way, 1967), and a film discussed during one of their earlier art giallo episodes, Un tranquillo posto di campagna (A Quiet Place in the Country, 1969). One of Petri’s most beloved and uniquely stylized films, The 10th Victim is a futuristic, sci-fi tale about an advanced society that redirects violence into a spectacle known as the Big Hunt, where contestants turn state sponsored murder into popular entertainment.

In episode 17, Kat and Samm kick off an ongoing retrospective of Italian director Elio Petri, which will cover all the feature length films of his career. Known for his leftist politics, uniquely stylized films, and bold interpretations of genre, there’s no one quite like Petri and it’s a mystery why he’s so neglected compared to contemporaries like Antonioni, Pasolini, and Bertolucci. This first episode is an in depth discussion of some of his least seen films, three black and white titles he made in the early ‘60s at the beginning of his career: L’assassino (The Assassin, 1961), I giorni contati (His Days are Numbered, 1962), and Il maestro di Vigevano (The Teacher from Vigevano, 1963).

In this third and final segment of Kat and Samm’s series on obscure but stunning giallo films, they look at five of their favorite titles—nearly all of which involve a protagonist’s descent into madness—beginning with Francesco Barilli’s The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974). Mimsy Farmer stars as a troubled scientist who begins to have flashbacks about her mother’s suicide and is alarmed to find her life quickly unraveling. In Umberto Lenzi’s Spasmo (1974), a man begins a relationship with a woman, saving her from attempted murder, only to realize that he may be in the middle of a deadly conspiracy meant to drive him mad. Mimsy Farmer returns for Armando Crispino’s Autopsy (1975), where she stars as a pathology student writing a thesis on suicides. This just happens to coincide with a wave of them across Rome, though she believes that some of these are actually murders. The same year’s wonderfully eerie Footprints on the Moon follows another female protagonist (the great Florinda Balkan), who misses several days of work, but can’t remember what she did during that time, and the clues lead her to an isolated resort town. But there the residents confuse with another woman. The series concludes with what is surely one of the most terrifying giallo films ever made, Pupi Avati’s House with the Laughing Windows (1976), which follows an art historian to a small town, where he is charged with restoring a grisly fresco in a church. He comes to be haunted by memories of the mad painter responsible for it and suspects that the man might still be alive.

In episode fifteen, Kat and Samm continue their three-part exploration of the art giallo film, with an emphasis on some unconventional and unfairly neglected titles, beginning with Slaughter Hotel (1971). The only giallo film from Fernando di Leo, this follows a mysterious, medieval weapon-wielding killer at a country asylum for troubled women, where the doctors (including Klaus Kinski) are hoping to discover the identity of the murderer before any more of their patients are dispatched. Renato Polselli’s absolutely insane Delirium (1972) is focused on a psychiatric consultant to the local police, who moonlights as a particularly vicious serial killer.

In episode fourteen, Kat and Samm begin a three-part look at the art giallo film, the more unconventional cousin to everyone’s favorite Italian horror genre, popularized by directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento. This episode begins with a look at Tinto Brass’s Deadly Sweet (1967), with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin as two young lovers trying to outrun a killer in swinging London. Trintignant and Aulin return for what is probably the only chicken-themed giallo, the totally bonkers Death Laid an Egg (1968), about murder and backstabbing in a poultry factory. Also explored is Elio Petri’s gloomy, beautiful A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), starring the great Franco Nero as a painter who rents an abandoned villa that might be haunted by the ghost of a nymphomaniac countess who died during WWII. War themes also trickle into the completely insane In the Folds of the Flesh (1970), about a family living in a mansion on top of an Etruscan burial ground. They have a nasty habit of gruesomely dispatching anyone who tries to visit them. Finally, Kat and Samm also explore one of the only Soviet-set giallo films, Aldo Lado’s grim Short Night of the Glass Dolls (1971), about a man who wakes up paralyzed, on a slab at the morgue and must try to remember how he got there before it’s too late.

In episode thirteen, Kat and Samm return to discuss Miklós Jancsó’s neglected 1976 film, Vizi privati, pubbliche virtù aka Private Vices, Public Virtues, which has recently been restored and will soon be released on Blu-ray by Mondo Macabro. Based on the Mayerling Affair from 1889, when the Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, committed suicide with his mistress, Jancsó’s film ponders what could have transpired if Rudolf did not kill himself, but was murdered. Here, Rudolf (the beautiful Lajos Balazsovits) is a rebel and is determined to fill his days with sex, partying, scandal, and blackmail in an attempt to embarrass his father and eventually overthrow the government. The episode explores how this explicit, visually sumptuous film — which includes everything from orgies and incest to anal sex and bestiality, among other surprises — has been unfairly neglected for too long.

Kat and Samm return for episode 12 of Daughters of Darkness, where they discuss mad science in general and transplant-themed horror in particular. They begin with an analysis of the origins of mad science fiction in Gothic literature — partly a reaction to the European Enlightenment — through the fiction and nonfiction work of writers like Coleridge and Goethe, culminating in Mary Shelley’s seminal Frankenstein. The episode moves on to explore adaptations of Maurice Renard’s novel, Les Mains d’Orlac (1920), in which a pianist’s hands are damaged in an accident and replaced in an experimental procedure; but he’s convinced that his new hands belonged to a murderer and are possessing him to commit horrible acts.

On the eleventh episode of Daughters of Darkness, Kat and Samm dive into another American Gothic-themed double feature, this time examining neglected ‘80s films Superstition (1982) and Eyes of Fire (1983). They begin with an in depth discussion of Calvinist Gothic literature from eighteenth century England to pre-Revolutionary America, including works like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, particularly The Scarlet Letter. This is also connected to a discussion of witchcraft, social hysteria, and the persecution of women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The tenth episode of Daughters of Darkness is the first in a series of special double feature discussions to tie in with Diabolique’s American Gothic-themed summer season. In this one, Kat and Samm explore Roger Corman’s delightful Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, most of which starred horror icon Vincent Price — and sometimes his fellow genre luminaries Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff. They give an overview of this eight film series, as well as a few titles American International Pictures attempted to include, but they specifically examine the horror-comedy The Raven (1963) and the morbidly colorful The Masque of the Red Death (1964). In The Raven, Price plays a good-hearted magician who agrees to help Peter Lorre’s character get revenge on the sinister Scarabus (Karloff), who has a number of surprises at his eerie castle by the seaside. Laser beams, wizardly hijinks, too-big hats, and a number of other shenanigans ensue, aided and abetted by a young Jack Nicholson. The Masque of the Red Death, on the other hand, is a serious horror tale set in the medieval fortress of avowed Satanist Prince Prospero, who holes up with scores of guests to throw an elaborate masked ball while a deadly plague rages outside his doors. The episode also includes a discussion of Poe’s work, his impact on European readers, and his legacy as a major figure of American Gothic — as well as nineteenth century fears, like being buried alive, and how they factor into the Corman-Price-Poe series.

In the ninth episode of Daughters of Darkness, Kat and Samm return for the second of a two-part series inspired by Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA. They kick things off with a discussion of Bob Clark’s devastating classic, Deathdream (1974), a Canadian production that reimagined the zombie film while simultaneously offering up a fresh adaptation of W.W. Jacobs’ story “The Monkey’s Paw” and confronting the effects of the Vietnam War. Frederick R. Friedel’s Kidnapped Coed (1976), on the other hand, is an odd mashup of genres that follows the strange romance that develops between a kidnapped young woman and her captor as they travel through the American countryside.

Kat and Samm are back for the eighth episode of Daughters of Darkness, which is the first of a two-part series inspired by Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA. This 500+ plus masterpiece is an in-depth examination of low budget American horror from the ‘70s and ‘80s, the type overlooked or even unheard of compared to mainstream fare like The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In the words of publisher FAB Press: “Nightmare USA explores the development of America’s subterranean horror film industry, spotlighting some of the wildest films imaginable from an era unchecked by censorship or ‘good taste.’ Ranging from cult favourites like I Drink Your Blood to stylish mind-benders like Messiah of Evil and ultra-violent shockers like Don’t Go in the House, Nightmare USA goes where no other in-depth study has gone before, revealing the fascinating true stories behind classics and obscurities alike.”