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.
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