By Keri O’Shea
That director and purveyor of horror and sleaze, Joe D’Amato was born on this day in 1936, and had he not died so suddenly back in 1999, would have been near to eighty years of age at this point in time. And yet, somehow, something tells me he’d still have been making movies, with the same diehard work ethic that could be said of other exploitation cinema stalwarts like Jess Franco and Jean Rollin. It seems unlikely that anything could have stopped him. I mean, what else would he have done? When he died at the age of 62, he had nearly two hundred directorial credits to his name, and had also completed plenty of other work in film as a cinematographer, writer and producer. That’s a pretty impressive career, even if a lot of his work was straight-up (heh) porn and probably even slightly beyond the remit of a site like Brutal as Hell, even if we did get a visitor today who arrived via the search term ‘cannibals eating human genitals’. I’m not a D’Amato completist, so I’m afraid I haven’t yet sat down nicely with my mug of tea to watch House of Anal Perversions – but where he began to dabble with the horror genre, well, there I’ve taken more of an interest…
The thing about D’Amato, though, is that he could never really divorce himself from that bawdy, rather unseemly spin on sex which he did so well. Almost accidentally, via making films the way he knew and liked, he often wound up infusing a lot of his horror with an undercurrent of mordant eroticism. Sometimes eroticism was left in the dust for utter filth, mind you. This often made for jaw-dropping, ‘oh no he didn’t!’ movies; take a film like the gloriously-titled Porno Holocaust (1981), for instance, and marvel at just how deeply wrong it all is. A radioactive rapist killing women with his semen? Oh, Joe – you went there. The results are always bewildering (with porn spliced into the horror, and vice versa), rather (read very) skeezy and for all of that, oddly entertaining. These days there’s a clear-cut sub-genre of porn films which plumps for horror parodies, but it wasn’t always this way, and once upon a time it was a lot more noteworthy to deliberately mix the two; grisly horror and graphic sex certainly didn’t always go together, but they did when D’Amato was around.
The first experience I had of this genre-mashing was in Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980), a title which I confess I got hold of simply because the title amused me so much; it does of course, as Eurosleaze and horror so often does, have several titles, and each of them you can conjure plenty with. I’m not sure what I expected from the movie, to be honest – but certainly, I think I expected more of a seamless join between the horror and the erotica promised in the title. What I got instead was a film which seemed to hop quite madly from hardcore porn scenes (and it may have been made in the early 80s – just – but the body hair quotient therein simply screams 70s) to a rather disjointed zombie horror – all set, as was often customary, in a tropical paradise which has a bit of voodoo going on. The horror and the sex happen very separately here; the basic plot is that some lusty Americans hope to acquire the tropical island for a holiday resort of some kind, but they are warned off this course of action by two strange, possible supernatural characters who warn them that the island is cursed (natch). The zombie element is given minimal treatment here, which is a bit of a shame as they’re nicely lumbering, old-school walking dead, but the film does boast a few noteworthy scenes: you get the gorgeous Laura Gemser (who by some accident of fate ended up as a costume designer on the so-bad-it’s-good epic Troll 2 in later years) biting off someone’s winky and furthermore, after witnessing a prolonged dance scene interlude which gets a bit full on, you will never look at a bottle of champagne the same way again. The film also features George Eastman – yes, him – who, interestingly, participates in sex scenes with his trousers firmly still on. Now there’s horror!
There was more horror to be had in Anthropophagus, made in the same year as Erotic Nights and also featuring Eastman – though looking a tad worse for wear in this film, as a rather grotesque, foetus-munching murderer who picks off a group of holidaymakers when they wind up on his remote island. Islands get a very bad rap in horror, don’t they? Anyway, Anthropophagus is probably D’Amato’s best-known foray into horror, at least for British viewers, for the simple reason that the film got swept up in the Video Nasties debacle and banned outright. This has probably added a frisson of danger to the film and sustained it for far longer than it ever could have on its own merits – as it’s not a great film, all told. The pacing is actually rather weak, and although Eastman can conjure up some menace in his role, he doesn’t really get enough screen time to develop on this. The foetus scene is certainly notorious, though its execution isn’t fantastic either – but still, it was definitely a turning point in shock and gore, which has influenced many horror fans since and no doubt spawned a gazillion enthusiastic homages. You can certainly still see the shadow of Anthropophagus in certain styles of gore/death metal – it seems that chowing down on the unborn is still a potent enough idea to have gone down in horror history, whatever the limitations of the film where it first appeared. If you want gore, then Anthropophagus is the place to start…
However, to my mind the very finest horror film that D’Amato ever made – Beyond the Darkness (1979) – is light years apart from the likes of Anthropophagus. An atmospheric and rather discomfiting piece of film, it manages to weave necrophilia into what would otherwise be a rather straightforward yarn about sexual jealousy and, yep, class and status too. Frank (the rather angelic-looking Kieran Canter) is a young man who could be said to have it all, in terms of wealth, a luxurious home and a beautiful girlfriend, Anna (Cinzia Monreale, who also appeared in The Beyond, playing Emily). Sadly for Frank, though, he is an orphan – and his housekeeper, the malevolent Iris (Franca Stoppi) doesn’t have his best interests at heart, for all her pretences. Sensing that the presence of Anna could jeopardise her position in the household – a position she hopes to bolster, as she has romantic designs on her young charge – she sets to work, hexing the young woman – which results in her death.
Already devastated by bereavement, Frank finds it very difficult to let go of Anna – so he doesn’t let go of her at all, digging her up, returning her to his home and embalming her, before returning her to their bed. As one does. The film follows his slow descent into insanity as he struggles to find a replacement for Anna, always ending up with another corpse on his hands (which Iris is happy to help him dispose of, reminding him all the time of just how much she is willing to do for him) – whilst all the time, Anna maintains her silent vigil in Frank’s bed, slowly but surely disintegrating as we go. All to a soundtrack by Goblin, might I add…
Shocking and repellent as Beyond the Darkness is in places, this is actually D’Amato showing what he can do, on a ridiculously limited budget and time-frame (the film was completed in just four weeks). It boasts an impressive, even Gothic atmosphere throughout, and here the links forged between sex and death are sensitive and seamless. Perhaps most impressively – and again in keeping with its Gothic leanings – you begin to feel a real empathy for Frank, even for all of his horrific actions. He’s a damaged man struggling to cope with loss, not to mention the machinations of the deranged and very driven Iris, who will do anything to claw her bloody way up the social ladder. Clear evidence of D’Amato’s versatility, this film, and – yeah, I’m going to say it – his talents as a director. He made some superb films, and this is not only one of his best, but one of my personal favourites. With a filmography of nearly two hundred, I suppose it’s completely inevitable that there’ll be a lot of differences in outcome and quality – especially when you’re knocking out (excuse the pun) a hell of a lot of DTV pornography. But Beyond the Darkness clearly deserves to reach a greater audience than perhaps it has done to date.
That ‘mordant eroticism’ of Mr D’Amato’s: well, when it’s good, it’s very, very good, and just one of the many reasons for remembering his birthday today. Happy birthday!
Thanks to @ronandusty on Twitter for his help!