Originally released in 1985, the 18-minute Fabio Salerno short film was shot in Italian and can be found on the Blu-ray set “The Other Dimension and the films of Fabio Salerno”. Likely originally shot on Super 8, it was most likely then lifted off VHS for this set (as the film elements are lost). Salerno was a DIY filmmaker, and you can definitely tell in this effort.
It starts with a voice, layered over a few occultish pictures, which says “The Gods saw that the daughters of men were beautiful. They fell in love with them and they took them as wives. Since then, many have become creatures of the devil. Among these, the vampire. Ancient Slavic superstitions spoke of ghosts that came out of the corpses to suck the blood of the living. Of course, it’s just a legend. But each legend contains a grain of truth.”
 |
| driving through the city |
The intro gives us a pause for thought, invoking a strange mix of Gods plural along with the Devil of monotheistic Christianity, as it strays towards the idea of the vampiric ghost. The film is that bit weirder still. A woman drives through the city - an opening that invoked a feel of Hanno Cambiato Faccia's opening scene. She stops, removes her headscarf and goes into a building, whilst holding a cat carrier. She goes to an apartment. Another woman answers the door and the first asks for Mrs Tinetti. The woman who answered is her niece but her aunt is away. The first woman had brought her cat because the Aunt was going to cat sit and the niece offers to do so. Left with instructions that the cat eats only eggs and will open them herself, she watches the first woman leave.
 |
| the neice |
There is a moment of getting back in her car, putting the headscarf back on and then, with brolly in hand, leaving the car and walking the city streets. Elsewhere police are investigating the stabbing of a woman – clearly, in the filmmaker’s mind, connected, I can only assume she was a victim of the vampire. Meanwhile, the niece has got an egg out and dropped it,, the egg cracking open to reveal a chick (I think, the quality of the film stock is atrocious). She is afraid of the cat, a wall (I think) bleeds, the cat becomes a man who chops her neck with a cleaver, the first woman materialises on a chair and goes to the niece to feed from…
 |
| feeding |
It is all really strange, narratively uncommunicative and the DIY filmmaking (beyond the atrocious print quality) doesn’t help. I was taken by the idea (though I may well have got the wrong end of the stick) of the cat being a type of Trojan horse, a familiar of the vampire who kills the prey allowing the vampire to feed. It is not suggested that this is a cat vampire. Is it an important part of the history of vampire films? No, not really. But it is part of the oeuvre.
The imdb page is here.
No comments:
Post a Comment