WEREWOLF and BYLETH: New Severin Titles Reviewed

Coming to Blu-ray tomorrow - Tuesday, November 5th - from Severin Films are two Italian horror items: Paolo Heusch's WEREWOLF IN A GIRL'S DORMITORY (1961) and Leopoldo Savona's BYLETH, THE DEMON OF INCEST (1972). Though produced a decade apart, the two unrelated films prove to be fairly well-matched as a double feature.

Giallo touches in the Werewolf film.

Its American title makes a ready mockery of WEREWOLF IN A GIRL'S DORMITORY, originally titled Lycanthropus. It's actually a humorless tale of stirred and thwarted male libido set in a girls' reformatory - an important key to its subtext. Though an early entry from the Golden Age of Italian Fantasy, it's unusual in that it's a contemporary gothic, with its whodunit aspect more akin to a giallo than a supernatural horror movie. Surprisingly, it even includes a scene involving an archetypal black-gloved killer, wielding a scary syringe, a few years before Mario Bava made such imagery his own in BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (Sei donne per l'assassino, 1964).

Mark Damon as the haunted anti-hero of BYLETH.

On the other hand, BYLETH, THE DEMON OF INCEST (Byleth, il demonio dell'incesto) was made six years after the last gasps of Italy's classic horror cycle (1957-66) and thus represents one of a few vain attempts to revive or sustain a specifically Italian twist on the genre. A historical gothic with kinky elements, it's about a noble-born incel who comes unhinged when his more-than-beloved sister pays a visit to his isolated castle with a new husband in tow.

Weirdly, WEREWOLF, the more contemporary of the two films, is set in England and shot in black-and-white, while BYLETH, the historical thriller, takes place in 19th century Italy (it's incredibly rare for an Italian thriller to admit its nationality) and is lensed in color. Also, though I could not find a perfect match to illustrate my point, the exterior locations in both films seem related and they may have shared one or two exterior locations (see below). In his book Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1970-1979 (McFarland) Roberto Curti reveals that BYLETH was filmed at "the baronial palace in Borgo del Sasso, in Cerveteri."

Not precise matches, but eye-catching nonetheless.

Not your hairiest werewolf.

Scripted by Italy's genre-writing machine Ernesto Gastaldi, WEREWOLF IN A GIRLS' DORMITORY was given the usual English camouflage before it was released - Heusch credited as "Richard Benson," Gastaldi as "Julian Berry," and composer Armando Trovajoli as "Francis Berman," etc. Indeed, in the States, MGM swept away most of these irrelevancies from the outset to focus for maybe 10 seconds on a tie-in theme song, "The Ghoul In School" by The Fortunes - not to be confused with the same-named British beat group who scored a hit around this same time with "You've Got Your Troubles." The song was released with some self-respecting distance on MGM's Cub Records sub-division label. Cursory but contractually obliged actor credits were clipped from the front and tacked onto the end. The film's producers did not renew their MGM contract when it expired, so that version fell into the public domain, resulting in several poor quality, incomplete, and ultimately misleading versions infiltrating the marketplace.  

Barbara Lass.

Running about a minute longer than the American version, the original Italian cut presented on Severin's disc is, by far, the best the film has ever looked or played in this country. The original opening titles show a Saul Bass influence and allow the film its intended somber quality. If you choose the Italian language option with English subtitles, you'll find that a more adult film results, one in which the characters and their teachers come across as more mutually compromised and corrupt. Carl Schell, the male lead, is a new teacher at the reformatory, sent there as penance for a charge of manslaughter; the female charges, led by the soulful and winsome Barbara Lass (née Kwiatkowsa, the first wife of Roman Polanski - who plays Brunhilda in the Italian version, Priscilla in the English dub), are accustomed to selling their sexual favors in exchange for preferential treatment; Sheena, an icy aging instructor in the Harriet Medin tradition is married to an impoverished nobleman (Maurice Marsac, whose career extends to much American television including The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres) whose sexual trysts with the werewolf's first victim lead to blackmail and a not-very-energetic police investigation. The film is sometimes criticized for its not-very-hairy werewolf but this is a cultural variation and one probably truer to actual case histories of lycanthropy than what movies like THE WOLF MAN (1941) gave us. The script stops just short of drawing a pronounced parallel between the werewolf and the sexual predator but the pieces are certainly there to be connected, as is the similar relationship between the respective partners who have perhaps enabled their behavior to prolong the illusion of their own happiness.

Curt Lowens and Luciano Pigozzi.

Gastaldi is the real auteur here, as the story and its characters resonate with others he created in other films; Heusch's direction is not particularly inspired but competent. The atmosphere is due entirely to Renato del Frate's cinematography and special effects and particularly the oboe-driven Trovajoli score, alternately glimmering and gloomy, which bears many similarities to his music for Mario Bava's HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD (Ercole al centro della terra, 1961), made that same year. Bava favorite "Alan Collins" (Luciano Pigozzi) also brings interest to the film as a disfigured groundskeeper, as do uncredited walk-ons by the similarly ubiquitous John Karlsen and SUSPIRIA's Giuseppe Transocchi.

Severin's 1.66:1 disc includes a new interview with Gastaldi, which focuses almost exclusively on this film and reveals that Paolo Heusch was gay, known to his crew as "Paolina," and often directed his scenes while reclining on a chaise longue. (I can't wait for the Tim Burton movie.) The set also includes David Del Valle's interview/commentary with the film's werewolf Curt Lowens from the previous Retromedia DVD, a booklet reprinting an article on the film from one of the old Charlton horror magazines, and a second disc of Trovajoli's score (14 tracks, previously released by Digitmovies with the same composer's score for ATOM AGE VAMPIRE, Seddock, l'erede del Satana, 1960).

BYLETH, on the other hand, is a genuinely fresh discovery, never previously available in this country and a film that Severin discovered on the cusp of extinction, surviving only as a mildly imperfect German print called Trio der Lust, which is matched here with the incomplete surviving Italian track, both playable with English subtitles. It may be an Italian film, but the audio track defaults to German so much, and so distractingly, I recommend sticking with the German track - which is better acted anyway. Director Leopoldo Savona is probably best-known for the movie he did not make: it was he who began shooting the Viking Western Helmut il solitario, which ran out of funding and was later completed as KNIVES OF THE AVENGER (Raffica di coltelli, 1965) by Mario Bava.

Lionello spies on his sister's marital happiness.

After a pre-credits, post-coital murder that establishes the film's voyeuristic, psycho-sexual terrain, we cut to the opening titles, illustrated with various details of Gustave Doré etchings from Dante's Inferno, before Mark Damon is introduced as Duke Lionello Shandwell, to the tune of someone's electric fuzz guitar. (The score is credited to Vasili Kojucherov, who would subsequently score Damon's THE DEVIL'S WEDDING NIGHT.) Prone to nervous breakdowns as a child and incestuous longing for his sister Barbara (Claudia Gravy) since puberty, Lionello has spent some years alone since Barbara placed some deliberate distance between herself and her sibling. Left to his own devices, Lionello has become a solitary voyeur spying on the hayloft frolics of the hired help - but word of Barbara's pending return raises his hopes for the shared life he's always dreamed of. Unfortunately, she arrives with a husband, Giordano (Aldo Bufi Landi), who tries his best to befriend the brother who can only see him as a hated rival. Other expendable women pop up, allowing more murders to take place, and Giordano eventually traces the cause to a demon named Byleth - the most beautiful of all demons, according to legend, garbed in black astride a white horse. Barbara recalls that this obscure name was first invoked by Lionello as a child, around the time of his mother's violent death, and he has invoked it once again, summoning Byleth to punish the sexually active ladies with a trident-like neck impaler. The film's back story invokes the Catholic rites of exorcism more than a year before William Friedkin's THE EXORCIST (1973). 

Lionello unburdens himself to Barbara.

Italian Gothic horror encompasses a good many supporting characters like Damon, ranging from Franco Nero in THE THIRD EYE (Il terzo occhio, 1965) to Alessio Orano in Bava's LISA AND THE DEVIL (Lise e il diavolo, 1973), and Damon takes his performance through the roof, reminding us of Oliver Reed in CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1961) and almost every role ever played by Michel Lemoine. Unfortunately, none of the other roles are as persuasively cast, with Gravy most bland of all as the object of Lionello's obsession, so the story's perversity becomes more deadweight than pleasure. Savona's directorial bag of tricks is limited, his lack of visual imagination aggravated by a propensity for zooms, plodding POV shots of boots climbing stairs, and subjective handheld murder scenes. Despite these traits, BYLETH's rarity makes it a necessity for Italian gothic completists, but most any film of similar genre from this time and place is better. I could best compare it to Aristide Massaccesi's DEATH SMILES ON A MURDERER (1973), as I imagine it might play if deprived of Klaus Kinski's commanding cameo and Berto Pisano's literally enthralling score.

In his aforementioned book, Roberto Curti lists BYLETH's original running time at 95 minutes and the German version at 81 - the running time here rounds out to 83 minutes, so there must be a great deal of footage missing from the irretrievable Italian version. This may be one of those cases where the tighter presentation is the kinder gift to posterity.

(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.