hexafu

the whip and the body

1963, Italy/France

Original titles: La frusta e il corpo; Le corps et le fouet

Alternative titles: Night Is the Phantom; What!; The Whip and the Flesh

Foregoing the modern giallo in favour of a return to the Gothic terrain of his breakthrough film Black Sunday (1960), The Whip and the Body is very likely Bava’s best and most complex film.

The film opens with prodigal son Kurt (Christopher Lee) returning to the family estate after several years of (allegedly debauched) wandering.

Hardly welcomed with open arms, he is faced with resentment from every angle: over the suicide of a maid with whom he’d had an affair; over abandoning his invalid father; and most of all from his younger brother Christian, who has in the meantime been married off to a woman (Daliah Lavi) he knows to be in love with Kurt.

When Kurt besets upon Nevenka with her own riding crop, eliciting moans of delight, it is revealed that their previous relationship had been one of sadomasochistic pleasures that have proven a source of great shame to Nevenka.

When Kurt is mysteriously murdered, Nevenka starts to have visions of Kurt’s ghost, whipping her more violently than ever before.

When the patriarch is suddenly murdered as well, Christian believes the ghost of his recently-departed brother to be responsible, but finds that it is in fact Nevenka, dressed in Kurt’s clothing.

With the death of her beloved, she had to assume his identity in order to keep him alive, and thus satisfy unconventional sexual desires without guilt.

January 19, 2026

bdsm, christopher lee, horror movies, italian horror, mario bava, night is the phantom, s&m, sadomasochism, the whip and the body
whoever slew auntie roo?

1972, UK

Alternative title: Who Slew Auntie Roo?

Adding to the catalogue of Grand Dame Guignol films (and carrying on their titular tradition) Curtis Harrington’s Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? is a 1920s re-imagining of Hansel and Gretel set in England.

Harrington, whose canon careened fascinatingly through avant-garde short films, melodramatic horror and episodic television, was no stranger to bat-shit crazy women, most of them older – Piper Laurie in Ruby, Simone Signoret in Games, Ann Sothern in The Killing Kind, Gloria Swanson in Killer Bees, Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters in What’s the Matter with Helen? – and Winters carved out a second career in these kinds of roles, returning to Harrington’s campy world of decaying glamour with Roo in ’72.

Winters plays Rosie Forrest, a wealthy former cabaret star whose magician husband disappeared mysteriously after their daughter Katherine plummeted to her death from a staircase.

Unwilling to accept her daughter’s death, she reported the child missing and hid her corpse in a nursery in the attic, where she sings to it in bed each night with blind motherly devotion.

Lonely and depressed, she frequently employs the medium Mr. Benton (Sir Ralph Richardson) to conduct séances to try to contact Katherine’s spirit, but Benton is in cahoots with her maid (Judy Cornwell) and butler (Michael Gothard of The Devils) in a ruse to cheat the grieving woman out of her riches.

This, combined with Rosie’s annual tradition of inviting 10 lucky orphans to her large estate to be spoiled over Christmas weekend, makes her out to be a sympathetic, if somewhat pathetic character who tries any way she can to find an outlet for her nurturing instincts.

The weird cabaret pantomime she performs in black lace for the children only reinforces this picture of desperation.

This Christmas is not like the others, because siblings Christopher and Katy Coombs (pouty child star Mark Lester of Melody and Oliver!, and Chloe Franks of the 1972 version of Tales from the Crypt) sneak their way into the festivities, only to have Rosie convince herself that Katy is Katherine reincarnated.

She immediately offers to adopt Katy, but is so obsessed with this new little girl that she ignores the bond that the two children have with each other and doesn’t consider that it may be painful for them to be separated.

She conspires to keep Katy locked away in Katherine’s room in the attic, and while Katy is enamoured with the array of toys and luxuries, Christopher is certain that Rosie – who the children have taken to calling ‘Aunt Roo’ – is a witch, fattening them up to eat them (and in case you missed the reference, Mark Lester narrates the famous folktale in snippets of voiceover throughout the film).

When the children try to escape, she falls over herself trying to block their way, shouting: “I will not be abandoned! Everybody tries to abandon me!”; while originally characterized as a sad, mournful widow, through the children’s eyes she becomes a tyrannical witch with emphatic vocal mannerisms to match.

Slowly losing her mind in the midst of this perceived betrayal, she embraces her daughter’s corpse, whose skull crumbles in her hands as she whimpers, “I have nothing, I have nothing…”

January 19, 2026

curtis harrington, feminism, grief, horror movies, kier-la janisse, loss, mark lester, shelley winters, the house of psychotic women, whoever slew auntie roo?

the whip and the body

whoever slew auntie roo?