THE THIRD EYE is yet another important Italian Gothic that somehow eluded international release and recognition till the last 15-20 years, at which time unsubtitled copies from an Italian TV broadcast began to appear on the US trading circuit. Even in Italy, the Mirko Guerrini film ("diretto di James Warren") had experienced a somewhat delayed impact. It was actually shot in 1965 and represented the first lead performances by theretofore supporting players Franco Nero and Erika Blanc; however, it was an usually candid film for 1965, a true turning point in the genre, and was found objectionable by the Italian censors and suppressed until certain cuts were made. Though the film has never been fully restored to its pre-release form, it remains a shocking picture for its time.
Produced by Luigi Carpentieri and Ermanno Donati (who financed the first Italian horror film, 1957’s I Vampiri aka THE DEVIL’S COMMANDMENT), and given a second-hand musical score by Francesco de Masi (lifted from the partnership’s other production THE GHOST, which adds to its dark obsessive undercurrent), the story concerns the domestic problems of Count Mino Alberti (Nero, acting as "Frank Nero"), a handsome taxidermy buff whose engagement to Laura (Blanc, acting as "Diana Sullivan") is overcast by his morbid Oedipal attachment to his mother (Olga Solbelli, acting as "Olga Sunbeauty"), who finds the beautiful blonde unworthy of a man of his station.
Station is also an all- consuming issue with the household maid Marta (Gioia Pascal) who is also biased against Laura as an obstacle to her dreams of marrying Mino herself and earning a place in the family she has served since childhood. Marta sabotages Laura’s sportscar (her cutting of the cables cleverly intercut with Mino’s tearing a large bird open manually) leading to the drowning death of Mino’s fiancee before his eyes, a trauma compounded in parallel by the death of his mother after a private showdown with Marta. Mino becomes unhinged and begins to act out his psychosis, which involves luring strippers and prostitutes back to the family villa to be seduced in a double bed whose veiled neighboring mattress holds the corpse of Laura, necessary to inspire him sexually. (His revelation of the corpse beside them is reserved for the right psychological moment, as with the mirror attachment of Karl Boehm's mirrored camera attachment in Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM, 1960). Marta assists his murders and their clean-up in exchange for the power of position, but Mino's promise to marry her is forgotten at once when Laura’s lookalike younger sister Daniella (also Blanc) arrives at the villa.If the scenario (written by Carpentieri under the name of 15th century serial killer Gilles de Rey) sounds familiar, this is because Joe D’Amato later remade it as BEYOND THE DARKNESS (Buio omega, 1980), one of the most gruesome and flagrantly sexual Italian horror films of the 1980s. In this earlier incarnation, which omits any graphic representation of the acid baths awaiting Mino’s cold conquests, the black-and-white film is still startling for its violent and erotic candor; it would never have been considered by a US distributor at the time because it’s in no way suitable for children. It's also the most pronounced of the four features in this collection as an elegant segue from classic Italian Gothic into contemporary, bloodletting horror.
While Guerrini’s direction of suspense sequences is appropriately baiting and alluring, sometimes recalling the best of Hitchcock, he is less attentive to character development. If we watch the film in English, the characters (each of whom takes center stage as a protagonist at some point) parade their shallow make-up all the more. Laura, who should be the film’s heart, isn’t part of the film long enough for us to know her, nor is her replacement Daniella cultivated in any sort of personable way, which prevents us from feeling any empathy for them or for Mino’s trauma or psychosis. Nero’s performance has its moments and works best in Italian but in the third act, as he flees the villa with Daniella in tow, his rantings sail way over-the-top and become ludicrous, especially in English. In an interesting thwarting of expectation, cinematographer Alessandro D’Eva (working as "Sandy Deaves") strives to make the film terrifying in settings of broad daylight, without the usual emphasis on eerie shadows, and this too seems part of the film’s decisive move outside the traditional realm of Italian Gothic. In addition to a single startling split diopter shot, the climactic image of the police flashlights spilling over the hillside and tumbling down the beachfront like so many fireflies is particularly impressive.
When I first saw THE THIRD EYE many years ago, in Italian without subtitles, I was startled by how far it went, how much it prophesied Italian Gothic's future propensities for shock and eroticism, which became so much more pronounced in its silver and bronze ages. Alas, as time has passed, and as the film itself has acquired subtitles and revealed all its narrative meaning, I find that its initial shocks have dimmed slightly while its camp value has become much more obvious. This aspect resides mostly in Nero's performance which, while silly and laughably demented at times, also has a few boldly iconic moments—such as his bold advance toward nightclub dancer Marina Morgan, whose eyes are as accentuated by makeup as his are naturally. His character has obvious antecedents in Mark Lewis (PEEPING TOM), Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins, PSYCHO) and Charles Campbell (Grant Williams, THE COUCH), but if we look at the similar characters that would follow in Italian and especially the Spanish Gothic for the next 20-30 years, like John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth, HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON) or Juan (Renaud Varley, A BELL FROM HELL), it is Nero's performance the later roles most seem to invoke.
Rachael Nisbet has recorded a very useful commentary for the film, which puts all the contributors into their proper context and speaks persuasively about the film's qualities while acknowledging its few detriments - which include its title, Mino's subjective description of his own experience of his ritual murder sprees, which she admits is poorly developed. (The film would have done well to stick with its original title, THE COLD KISS OF DEATH.) Lindsay Hallam provides the film's visual essay, "Necrophilia Becomes Nostalgia" (12m), which focuses on the film's narrative, its several debts to PSYCHO, and how the rise of all forms of Gothic cinema took place in historic parallel to the social anxieties surrounding changing gender roles in the 1960s. There is also a 15:14 second interview with Erika Blanc, who recalls her involvement in the film with strong and amused memory, noting for example that she was required to wear purple lipstick to make her lips look more luscious in monochrome. She explains the story behind her "Diana Sullivan" alias (which she chose herself), her good rapport with her fellow players and co-workers, and Franco Nero's solitary nature on the set as he studied English between scenes because he wanted to go to America ("Mamma mia! He did what he set out to do"). There is also an image gallery, though this is a rather grandiose way of describing one German still and one Italian locandina.
Taken as a whole, these extras form an effective bouquet that enhances the main feature—an arresting, if ultimately imperfect distillation of the Italian Gothic's most passionate excesses.
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