hexafu

PART THREE:

ALL SAFE AND DEAD

But she came of age at a confusing time; social mores changed around her on a daily basis. Unlike the recent ‘Naptime is the New Happy Hour’ hipster-mom fad, in the immediate post-war period, female alcoholism started to come under attack in the media, with the boozing, pill-popping housewife emerging as a stock character in news stories, literature and films.

Female alcoholics proliferated as social drinking – in moderation – became acceptable for women.

But many of these women, knowing that female alcohol abuse was especially taboo, and not wanting to be associated with the stereotype being propagated in the media, continued to drink in isolation, hiding their increasing dependency from their families and friends.

In the 1950s, doctors estimated that 25% of American alcoholics were female, but because female alcoholism was relatively invisible, we have no way of knowing how accurate the statistics are.

Add to this the free-flowing psychotropic prescriptions that flourished in the 1950s and ’60s – billed as ‘happiness pills’ – as a means of treating depression among largely female patients, and you have the makings of domestic cataclysm.

Studies undertaken during the 1960s also showed that nurses, like my mom, represented a large proportion of female pill addicts.

Early on in the movies, female drinking was tied to some kind of sexual pathology, and female alcoholics were portrayed as loose, public women – nightclub singers, hostesses, barflies – with marriage and domesticity seen as the answer to their evasive fulfilment.

But by the 1960s, this had reversed – alcoholism came into the home, and the domesticity itself was seen as its cause.

Mainstream films showing the ugly side of female alcoholism proliferated as the ’60s wore on – Days of Wine and Roses (1962), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Graduate (1967) – often linking these problems to the boredom of upper-class housewives, or the blotting out of feelings that one’s identity was being compromised by the act of marriage in and of itself.

Likewise, the issues I associated with excessive drinking from my experiences with my mother – withdrawal, loneliness, boredom, fear, escape – were ever-present in domestic horror.

Just as alcoholism and drug abuse were now problems within the home, so the concept of ‘home’ itself became a problem as women became conflicted over the role of marriage in their lives.

Husbands were now suspicious characters trying to keep their wives’ ambitions under wraps while they themselves cavorted freely through the sexual revolution’s exploratory offerings.

Eloy de la Iglesia, the director of Cannibal Man, also wrote and directed the effective Spanish giallo The Glass Ceiling (1971), which starred Carmen Sevilla as Martha, a loyal housewife whose husband goes away on business far too often, leaving her isolated and alone with her imagination.

Her attempts to ease her boredom by being sociable are commonly misinterpreted – a delivery boy invited up for some milk makes a move on her, and when spurned, retorts, “don’t think you’re the only woman in this predicament. There are millions of women who are bored… almost as bored as you.”

Indeed, her boredom is what leads her to eavesdrop on her neighbours and speculate on what their lives are like – and on what it means when she hears a loud thump in the middle of the night followed by scurrying footsteps.

When she notices the extended absence of Victor, the man upstairs, she comes to the conclusion that his wife Julie (stunning Euro-starlet and Barbara Steele-lookalike Patty Shepard) and an alleged lover murdered him.

She becomes obsessed with the idea, and her days are filled with trying to solve the ‘mystery’ of Victor’s disappearance.

Her only friend is the landlord/sculptor Richard (the fact that nubile teenager Emma Cohen keeps exposing herself to him is supposed to indicate that he’s hunky), who proposes that she’s a voyeur: “Have you ever heard of voyeurism?” he asks, “Voyeurs are people who get a kick out of spying on the most intimate, the most personal secrets of other people… and like you said – snooping, for instance, is this instinct we all have.”

Prompted by the suggestive tone of his analysis, they share an illicit kiss, which leaves Martha feeling guilty and suffering from nightmares involving grotesque images of infidelity and murder.

Even when she’s absolutely convinced a murder has taken place and her life is in grave danger, she takes no steps to make herself safe; instead she sits in her apartment in silence, ruminating on every accentuated sound, and she starts coming apart.

But she’s not crazy – a murder has taken place, and the murderers – including her absent husband Michael – make every assurance that she be completely unhinged by the time it is her inevitable turn to die.

So while she’s neurotic, her neurosis is fuelled exclusively by external factors; before a murder was carried out within earshot of her, she was bored and uninspired, but hardly crazy.

1970s horror films abound with marriage-phobia (and the corresponding paedophobia), but nowhere is the medicated wife or girlfriend more visible than in the Italian giallo film.

Although the hallmark of the giallo is its misogynistic violence, these movies tend to incapacitate women by medicating them just as often as by killing them.

The characters’ skewed subjectivity (heightened by the abuse of alcohol and medication) creates tension for the spectator and also allows for the tangential lapses of logic characteristic of most gialli.

In the cinematic world, alcohol abuse is fuelled by aesthetic considerations, especially in giallo films, where J&B whisky bottles are as much a deliberate part of the production design as giant pop art paintings.

The lifestyle depicted in most gialli is one of leisure; women are seen lying down – wearing muumuus, lingerie or other items of lounging attire that imply that they don’t leave the house much – more than they are seen standing up.

They are either independently wealthy or married to rich men.

independently wealthy or married to rich men.

Their apartments vary between tacky baroque and black and white ’70s minimalism, complete with shag carpets, oversized cushions and furniture made in bizarre geometric shapes.

There is an element of fantasy in these rooms; they mirror the decadence of the sexually liberated, and no attempt is made to model them after the bedrooms of reality.

Throughout these films there is a certain ‘cult of laziness’ being propagated. The giallo wives and girlfriends, with their booze, pills and ethereal blankness become almost a perverted counterpart to the 19th century ‘Angel in the House’, an ideal of womanhood popularized by poet Coventry Patmore (and later to be famously criticized by writers such as Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman).

In this scenario, the perfect wife was devoted and submissive, passive and powerless, and – contrary to the sexually pathological giallo women – morally incorruptible.

Sergio Martino is a prolific Italian exploitation film director celebrated for his work in both the giallo (Torso, 1973) and crime genres (The Violent Professionals, 1973). Taking its cues from Rosemary’s Baby in the supernatural department, All the Colors of the Dark (1972) is a unique entry in Martino’s oeuvre and easily the most hallucinatory of all his films.

After perfecting the giallo with The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971), Martino took his regular stable of actors (Edwige Fenech, Ivan Rassimov and George Hilton) and threw them into his most perverse narrative yet.

Rassimov has never looked more stunning, or more threatening. Fenech has never looked more crazy.

Fenech plays Jane, a woman teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown and constantly medicated accordingly by her long-time boyfriend Richard (Hilton).

Left alone much of the time, her dangerously active imagination is free to wander, and when asleep she is haunted by violent nightmares that somehow connect to an incident in her past that she has repressed.

When she wakes up from a nightmare, sweaty and exasperated, she reaches for her boyfriend on the bed beside her, but he – as usual – is not there.

He comes home to find her in the shower, fully clothed.

He shakes his head in disappointment: “You didn’t take your pills again, huh?”

Instead of rushing into his arms for comfort, she stands alone in the shower, looking ridiculous and shrinking in shame.

He makes her take her pills and tells her to go to sleep, but once she passes out, he undresses and starts fondling her.

She reacts accordingly, gripping him passionately in a drug-induced half-sleep – but their lovemaking is interrupted by the haunting images that invade her sleep each night, and she thrusts him away, screaming.

We are given the impression that their sex life has followed this routine for some time.

When Jane’s sister inquires about the pills Richard constantly plies her with, insisting that he is not a doctor and that Jane should refuse anything not prescribed by a shrink or a physician, Jane immediately comes to Richard’s defence: “They’re just concentrated vitamins, but when I take them I always throw up… but Richard would never do anything to harm me.”

When Jane visits a psychiatrist against Richard’s wishes, she discloses to him that the various images from her dream – a pregnant woman, a witchy, toothless Baby Jane lookalike, a menacing pair of crystal blue eyes, a hand stabbing, the motion of a car crashing into a tree – relate directly to the loss of her own unborn child in a car accident, and to the murder of her mother as a child.

She has never told Richard about the latter, claiming that he would “never believe her”.

But in asserting that the story is hard to believe, she is in a sense saying that she herself doesn’t believe it; that she questions the reliability of her own memory.

The psychiatrist mistrusts Richard, and urges Jane to stop taking the pills he gives her – insisting that her real problem is loneliness, but this doesn’t account for the creepy man with shocking blue eyes (Ivan Rassimov) who has been following her all around town – a man identical to the attacker in her dream.

Lonely and frightened, Jane is pleased when a new woman named Mary (Marina Malfatti) moves into her creepy building, and proves as friendly as she is beautiful.

When Fenech admits to her new friend that she suffers from bouts of depression and frequent nightmares (“I’m almost certain that someone is after me, someone from my past, from something that happened in my childhood”), Mary urges her to stop seeing the psychiatrist and to come see ‘her friends’ instead.

When Jane asks who these friends are and what they do, Mary responds enigmatically, “They don’t like to be questioned.”

Mary leads her to a giant secluded mansion, into a dark basement full of people in bizarre make-up and either naked or clothed in robes bearing occult symbols.

“Drink this and you will be free”, orders the high priest, handing her a goblet of fresh dog’s blood (Only in a giallo film would a woman be convinced to join a Satanic cult to cure her psychological ailments).

After she is forced to imbibe, the cultists descend upon her in an orgiastic frenzy, paralleling the earlier scene of Richard drugging and mounting her.

Thus Jane is bounced around from one controller to the next, all these people – her boyfriend, her sister, Mary, the psychiatrist, and the Satanists – who want her to just obey them without hesitation.

Just shut up, take your pills, go to sleep, don’t question.

As Jane is increasingly terrorized on all fronts, she comes to realize that the Satanists – like the man who has been following her – are connected to her mother’s murder years before.

In a later sequence, the man following her reveals his purpose: he is a murderer sent by the Satanists to visit retribution upon those who have forsaken them.

“You have renounced us just like your mother!” he hisses.

While no back-story is given on Jane’s mother (other than an apparent Satanic affiliation), there are clearly efforts to deprive women of their individuality.

Jane is made out to be a crazy woman as a means of keeping her dependent, of convincing her that she is incapable of making decisions on her own.

The one concrete decision she has made without the influence of others is to not officially marry her long-time boyfriend Richard.

While she lives out all the trappings of an unhappy marriage, tolerating his constant absence and even succumbing to his amateur prescriptions, she has denied him legal control over her.

But men are not her only problem.

Even the other women in the story want to stop her from being independent: the two women who urge her to defy Richard’s wishes also betray her.

By the end of the film, with several people dead and a mountain of secrets exposed, she is no better off than she was at the start.

Her last words are words of despair: “Oh darling, help me.”

When my mother was in her first marriage to Oates, she discovered early on that he was cheating on her. Not with one woman, but several, and he openly flaunted his affairs to her and her family members, even – according to one of my aunts – bringing a girlfriend to the hospital the night my brother was born.

He was condescending and emotionally manipulative, and when one of my uncles confronted my father, asking why he didn’t just divorce my mother if he found marriage so restrictive, my father said, “Oh that would be too easy”, continuing on to admit that he looked forward to driving my mother crazy.

Supposedly he even went so far as to enlist someone to lurk outside the windows of the house when my mother was home alone, in an attempt to scare her out of her wits.

He would have been a perfect giallo husband.

The Italian title for Sergio Martino’s Gently Before She Dies (aka Excite Me, 1972) translates directly as ‘Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ – a line from the previous Ernesto Gastaldi/Sergio Martino collaboration The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh.

In a script freely adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat, Gently Before She Dies stars Anita Strindberg as Irina, the anorexic, humiliated and abused wife of philandering failed writer Oliviero (Luigi Pistilli) who gets caught up in a murder rap.

Irina lives in a state of unrelenting nervousness as the target of her husband’s sadism; she takes sleeping pills frequently and seems to just live in wait for the next display of hostility.

The opening sequence depicts a wild party at their large country house (it should be pointed out that party house (it should be pointed out that party scenes in giallo films are always a hotbed for sleazy and hilarious academic musings) in which Oliviero physically forces Irina to drink a boozy mixture from a giant bowl in a room full of jeering hipsters.

The more she sputters and coughs, the more pleasure he derives from the situation, and the more inexplicable her own submissive behaviour becomes, given the context of the liberated early ’70s; but marriage provides its own context that seems to stay locked in time.

“Nowhere are the effects of the historical and cultural forces that predispose women toward masochism more keenly realized than in marriage”, says Natalie Shainess in her book Sweet Suffering: Woman As Victim.

“The husband has the fantasy of destroying the wife, and that fantasy will give him potency.”?

In Gently Before She Dies Oliviero’s potency manifests itself literally as well as figuratively: it is in those moments when his loathing of Irina is at its apex that he finds himself aroused enough to rape her.

Oliviero becomes the prime suspect when his young mistress is brutally murdered, and when his maid turns up dead as well, he convinces the unstable Irina to wall up her corpse in the cellar to avoid further suspicion.

While he denies having anything to do with the murders, he frequently extols the virtues of murder to the anxious Irina, caressing her throat as he purrs, “Maybe this will be my first one.”

His homicidal designs on her are no secret, but Oliviero’s campaign to destroy his wife is not limited to physical violence; it is much more calculated.

He doles out various punishments – verbal abuse, neglect and dismissal, frequent beatings, the flaunting of extramarital affairs – and is increasingly disgusted with her for putting up with them.

When Oliviero’s promiscuous niece Floriana (Edwige Fenech, sporting a sharp bob haircut) shows up to stay with them, Irina is thrown even more off guard by the girl’s sexual advances and suggestions that she bump off her loutish husband.

“He’s a brute, an alcoholic and a drug addict”, Floriana insists, pointing out that he’s also rumoured to have slept with his own mother.

When Floriana suggests that Irina should leave him, Irina says he would never allow it: “To lose his plaything, his victim? Never.”

Their relationship, however abusive, is co-dependent.

Like the couples in Ingmar Bergman’s From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) or Pasquale Festa Campanile’s Hitch-Hike (1977), each is reliant on the responses of the other for a reinforcement of their own identity.

The self-confidence of Oliviero, the sadistic husband, is fuelled by the denigration of his wife.

The further she sinks, the more powerful he feels, but he forgets that it takes two to play this game, and he makes the mistake of denying Irina the affection that motivates her compliance, which will prove his own undoing.

The Italian horror film, the giallo in particular, often features female neurosis as an adjunct to the husband’s moral deficiency and/or mental illness, which is often a catalyst for the wife’s own mental disturbance.

Due to the patriarchal nature of marriage however, the husband’s mental instability is not seen as the problem, even though it may have been the primary instigator – he is allowed to drive his wife crazy, and she suffers domestically and socially as a result.

Throughout my childhood, there was constant interplay between my mother’s physical and mental well-being.

Because my father was a psychologist, he had professional validation for dismissing my mother’s health problems (and problems with their marriage) as unfounded anxiety.

Certain members of my mother’s family were onto him, but he just filed away their grievances as stemming from the same neurotic source.

To return to Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, in which an anxious female writer is driven mad by her husband’s insistence that she give up writing and stay in bed:

“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage. John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures. John is a physician, and perhaps — (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) – perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do? If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency – what is one to do?”

Whereas the husband in The Yellow Wallpaper is just the ignorant product of an earlier time in medical history, Oates, like the giallo husbands, should have known better.

Even my own perception of my mother’s various illnesses is filtered through the conflicting stories of various family members… “She’s sick, she’s not sick, she’s faking it, she’s on drugs, she’s an alcoholic, she’s a victim, poor thing…”

In Dino Risi’s Anima persa (Lost Soul, 1977) – written by the frequent Fellini collaborator and writer of Argento’s Profondo rosso, Bernardino Zapponi – Vittorio Gassman and Catherine Deneuve are stately couple Fabio and Sofia, who live in Sofia’s crumbling ancestral home in Venice.

The arrival of their teenage nephew, who is staying with them while he attends art school, brings their dysfunctional relationship to light: Sofia is a nervous wreck for undisclosed reasons, and her domineering husband clearly detests her.

The revelation that Fabio’s insane brother lives shut in an attic room is unnerving enough – but that’s only the beginning of the horrors that await the young art student.

Evidence of a child’s one-time existence in the house prompts him to ask questions that bring forth uncomfortable and contradictory answers.

Sofia maintains that she once had a young daughter, Beba, whose beauty entranced Fabio’s entomologist brother to the point of driving him insane and prompting the young girl to leap to her death in the canals.

Fabio tells a different story: when he married Sofia, she was a widow with a ten-year-old daughter whom he loved as though she was his own.

Jealous of their innocent affection for each other, Sofia allowed the child to die when she was struck by bronchitis — an easily treated illness in childhood.

With the couple’s mistrust and hatred of each other clearly laid out, there is still one more twist to their already convoluted (but believably played-out) tale: there is no stately husband and wife; there is only an insane entomologist and his child bride, who he came to detest when she grew out of innocence and into womanhood.

Concocting a phony death for his lover and a bland identity for himself as an engineer with a rich wife, he had hoped to keep his passion and grief locked away in a room upstairs, where he could periodically act out the role of the crazy brother with his wagging tongue and broken dolls, and then re-emerge with tie straightened, hair combed, and id in check. Sofia, the broken doll in question, plays along, as she’s never known any other way; she’s been with this man since pre-pubescence (although how that initially came to be – once we know there’s no wife – remains unexplained).

She also has a double life: alternating between being the ageing woman who’s mostly bedridden and has a drink problem, and the little girl in ribbons and baby-doll dress that she regresses to when required by her sick lover.

“Do you know why they’re locked up?” Fabio asks his nephew as they drive past an asylum,

“Because, like children, the insane know the truth. And people fear the truth.”

The truth, and the threat it poses, can be too overwhelming to bear, and for many women in the aftermath of the sexual revolution, the truth was that their experiences were being dismissed by the men in their lives.

Although many of the women in the films of this period are clearly meant to be schizophrenic, sociopathic or downright psychotic, the underlying implication (and there always is one in horror films) is that these ‘illnesses’ come in at the break between the woman’s experience and the man’s experience of the same situation — and what is ‘true’ or ‘right’ is often whatever the man says it is.

Many horror films dealing with mental illness are deliberately ambiguous: we are left to form our own conclusions as to whether the protagonist is insane, or whether we believe that supernatural forces are indeed at work.

One of the most subtle masterpieces of ’70s genre cinema is John Hancock’s moody, ethereal Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), starring Zohra Lampert as a young woman recently released from a mental institution.

As in Mario Bava’s Shock (1977), the husband’s bright idea is to move to a new home so that his wife can “get better” — in this case an imposing, labyrinthine house on an isolated apple farm, far removed from New York City.

Before the film even gets going we know that this is probably a bad decision on his part: he has spent everything they had buying this house, leaving them financially as well as socially cut adrift.

He has brought along his pal Woody, and Jessica likes Woody just fine – as she does everyone – but there is no escaping the fact that her husband has brought her into a very limited environment in which she has to be dependent solely upon him.

Even her doctor is miles away in New York, and they have no financial contingency should Jessica feel the need to contact him.

The nearby townspeople – all hostile and intimidating old men wearing weird bandages – will prove no help to Jessica either.

The house itself is a gorgeous piece of Victorian architecture, with a large turret and winding staircases – including one set of stairs in the front yard that leads nowhere.

As Jessica perches on this staircase, negotiating with the voices in her head, we are given a striking, tangible image of her mental state.

When they first enter the house, she sees a woman at the top of the stairs, and thankfully her husband sees her too, making Jessica sigh and laugh with relief.

The pale redheaded stranger introduces herself as Emily, a drifter who has been crashing out in what she thought was an abandoned house.

Jessica invites her to stay with them, happy to have a female companion, but Emily – like most strangers who intrude upon a family unit in genre films – will prove the catalyst for Jessica’s complete mental breakdown.

Jessica is fascinated by rumours in the town about the house’s previous inhabitants, the Bishop family, whose 20-year-old daughter Abigail drowned, wearing her wedding dress, in the cove behind the house.

Abigail’s body was never recovered, and the townsfolk believe that she is still alive, roaming the country as a vampire.

These vampiric myths intertwine with Jessica’s increasing view of Emily – a spitting image of the ‘missing’ Abigail Bishop – as a predator who wants to steal away her husband and keep Jessica a prisoner on the farm.

“Duncan’s mine now”, she hears the voices whispering, “You want to die… Stay with me… forever.”

As Jessica’s visions intensify, and Emily/Abigail gets more aggressive with both Jessica and the men in the house, she finds it harder and harder to maintain any front of normality.

Zohra Lampert, a stage actress who once went out with director John Hancock, is incredible in her portrayal of Jessica’s struggle to hold herself together.

Her credibility is repeatedly called into question, not only by the other members of her mock-family, but by Jessica herself.

She sees things, and talks herself out of revealing them to the others for fear of chastisement.

She feels that her mental state has caused her husband to be sexually disinterested in her, and consequently encouraged his budding fascination with the hippie girl who’s come into their fold.

Even for the viewer, there is confusion between which off-screen voices are Jessica’s own, and which are those of the supernatural forces with which she is apparently attuned.

Jessica compensates by being over-friendly, overgenerous and goofy.

But this goofiness soon transforms into hysteria.

When everyone around her is dead, Jessica dissociates completely.

As she says in the film’s opening, and again in its closing moments, drifting peacefully in a boat out in the cove:

Suppose you knew who you had been in your previous life.

Where you had lived….whom you had loved

[ J. Lee Thompson’s The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975).

“I sit here and I can’t believe that it happened. And yet I have to believe it. Dreams or nightmares, madness or sanity. I don’t know which is which.” ]

Jessica’s attempts to rebuild her life failed.

The illness was too strong, the ghosts too overbearing.

Her guilt over not being able to ‘act normal’ only exacerbated her awkwardness and invited the kind of self-hatred that woul unravel her.

The same was true in my own home; my mother wanted a perfect life, to erase painful recollections of her past – and when it didn’t materialize by the mere act of remarrying, she felt that, again, she had somehow failed.

But failure begat failure, and my mother shrunk away from uncomfortable situations by trying to convince herself that they didn’t exist.

Repression and guilt are the most weighty contributors to the alcoholism endemic to many of these films; women self-medicate to repress traumatic memories, the lingering reminders of horrible deeds committed either by them or unto them.

In J. Lee Thompson’s bizarre and morally disturbing The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975), Michael Sarrazin plays the title character, who is haunted by recurring dreams that convince him he is reliving scenes from past life.

The images lead him to a small lakeside town in Massachusetts, where 30 years earlier he was murdered by his wife Marcia (Margot Kidder) in a staged drowning incident.

However, the more he delves into his past life the more he realizes what a reprehensible character his 1940s counterpart was – aside from myriad adulterous indiscretions, he sexually humiliates his wife.

When she confronts him about his extracurricular love life he rapes her, muttering clichéd comments such as, “you know you want it…” (even his name seems to reflect his macho self-righteousness), but Marcia’s struggling eventually gives way to rapture and she clutches at him hungrily, only to have him immediately spring from the bed afterwards saying that he’s going for a late night swim, “to wash her stink off” – thus prompting the ‘accident’

Years later, Marcia’s traumatic memories come flooding back, prompted by the sudden appearance of the suspicious stranger in her (their) daughter’s life, who is the spitting image of her dead husband.

Marcia is visibly disturbed, and her routine drinking – which has been a problem since the time of her husband’s death, and was explained away by a psychiatrist as “typical middle-aged female alcoholism” – intensifies, and she frequently hides away in her room.

On one such occasion, curled up defensively in the bathtub, the memory of her rape starts to excite her – at first her hands go toward her crotch defensively, but slowly they start to move back and forth… Complicating things further is the fact that Peter appears to be courting her (their) daughter, which she perceives as a deliberate transgression on his part, to further torment her.

Early on in the film Peter bemoans not being able to have “normal Freudian dreams”, elaborating with, “why can’t I just dream of killing my father and raping my mother?”

His flippant wish to be governed by easily recognizable Freudian tropes comes true, which is effectively squirm-inducing for the audience.

As his “dreams” dissipate with the integration of his old life into his new reality, he is still haunted by the last image of being murdered in the lake – an image that will only leave him once he has re-enacted the scene.

While he is acting out of a need to satisfy his own curiosity, his former wife (Marcia) is coming apart – being forced, with no choice in the matter, to relive the most unpleasant episode of her life.

And like Carla Moran in The Entity, she struggles with the concept of blame, believing that she deserves the torment because of her inability to reconcile her need for individuality and respect with her apparent sexual appetite toward an abuser.

She has a reason to feel guilty – she has, after all, murdered her husband – but one gets the sense that the murder is not what she feels guilty about.

Guilt ran through 1970s genre films like a parasite, eating away at the psyches of female characters, who oscillated between domestic responsibility and the desire for autonomy.

A perfect, devastating example of this cinematic guilty conscience can be found in Richard Loncraine’s The Haunting of Julia (also known as Full Circle, 1977), which sees Mia Farrow as the titular distraught mother of a child she has accidentally killed while performing an emergency tracheotomy.

When Julia emerges from the hospitalisation that ensues, she immediately leaves her husband Magnus (Keir Dullea) and goes looking for a house of her own, to be alone with her grief.

Julia explains to her sister-in-law Lily (Jill Bennett) that her marriage had been on the rocks for some time, and says, “Now that Katie’s gone… there’s no reason to try.”

However, Lily and Magnus are both dependent on Julia’s trust fund, and make increasingly aggressive attempts bordering on personal terrorism to convince her to return to her marriage.

Augmenting this pressure is the fact that Julia’s new home is the kind of immense, sinister house that undoubtedly fuels nightmares and paranoia.

She tries to go through the motions of a new life, but is isolated by a debilitating guilt over her daughter’s death.

She laughs one minute and cries the next.

“It’s like stepping out on a window ledge and feeling so alive because any second you could jump”, she says.

“Sometimes I feel I’ve already jumped.”

Though she occasionally socializes with her bohemian friend Mark, Julia is unwavering in her decision to work through her grief alone.

Therapy is not an option – after all, if you go to therapy, people might think you’re crazy.

But there are a million things that can drive you crazy, and ruminating in solitude is one of them.

When my mother was a teenager, she was involved in a drowning accident in which one of her best friends died.

A group of her school friends were out swimming in a lake.

A wicked storm blew in, and they were forced to form a circle and clasp hands to stay afloat.

One of the girls went down, and my mother let go of the chain in order to save her.

And save her she did – but in letting go of another girl’s hand, the second girl drowned.

My mother was put into therapy, but was not allowed to talk about it.

Somehow, even though she had saved another girl’s life, she became the shame of the family because of her incapacitating emotional response to the incident.

One lingering effect of that terrible event is that my mother had difficulty making decisions ever after.

Guilt would continue to plague my mother throughout her life: guilt over her friend’s death, the failure of her marriage, remarrying out of fear, subjecting her children to an abusive stepfather, and excessive drinking – and guilt over the latter would just fuel more of the same.

She was determined to punish herself.

Like my mother, Julia has a hard time sleeping, and spends her nights self-medicating while the days pass in a vacant haze.

As she explores her new neighbourhood, she goes to the park and sees a child that she thinks is her daughter, but when she approaches, the girl disappears, and what’s left behind in the sand is a mutilated animal and a bloody knife.

Julia picks up the knife and is unhinged again.

To make matters worse, a nearby mother and child witness her holding the dead animal and chastise her as a nut.

She runs off home, and for the third time in the film, she has to wash blood off her hands.

At night, Julia hears sounds in and around the house, which may or may not be Magnus trying to scare her into returning to her loveless marriage.

Lily sees fit to bring a group of whack-jobs over to Julia’s new pad for a séance – a move so insensitive that it only proves further that Magnus and his sister are trying to drive Julia insane in order to get her declared incompetent and thus take over management of her trust fund.

Julia’s reliable best friend Mark – who is secretly in love with her — thinks the same thing.

The séance turns sour when the medium is scared witless and makes vague pronouncements that something “wicked” is in the house, and another guest inexplicably goes plummeting down the stairs.

Julia decides to investigate the former inhabitants of the house, and discovers that a little girl named Olivia once lived there, a girl so beautiful that she could get away with anything – including the murder of another child.

After hearing the gruesome tale of a young boy mutilated by Olivia and her pack of devoted schoolmates, Julia self-medicates to go to sleep, and has a visit in the night from the child, who touches her face and hands in an exploratory (and from what we know, threatening) manner, but Julia is not threatened; she identifies with the child’s murderous guilt, playing the roles of both child and the child’s redeemer.

She is going to help the terrible child find peace.

In a madhouse in Wales, Olivia’s ageing mother, Mrs. Rudge, is visited by the increasingly obsessed Julia, who asks her about the child’s death.

“Not dead”, protests Mrs. Rudge, “I’m the one who is dead. All safe and dead… all safe and dead. Have you ever seen evil, Mrs. Lofting? I have. I’m safe though. Evil is not like ordinary people – evil never dies. She’s not dead – and you’re not safe. You killed your daughter… like I killed mine… she choked, she choked on her own wickedness.”

After she visits Mrs. Rudge and hears it voiced aloud that she “killed her daughter” (thereby confirming what she’s been feeling all along), she goes home and faces Olivia (who she sees as a reflection of her own guilt) and finds her redemption… in suicide.

Mirroring the revelation at the end of Mario Bava’s haunted-woman film Shock, the ghost’s murderous hands are in actuality the protagonist’s own.

In the book American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, Richard Lippe has pointed out that Julia’s sense of guilt is intensified by the fact that her daughter’s death allowed her to escape from an unhappy marriage.

It is fitting then, that the dead girl ‘haunting’ her killed and castrated a male child, symbolically reflecting Julia’s resentment toward her own husband.