Black Magic Rites (1973)
Salvation DVD (region 1)
d. Renato Polselli; scr. Renato Polselli; ph. Ugo Brunelli; m. Romolo Forlai, Gianfranco Reverberi; ed. Renato Polselli; cast. Christa Barrymore, Mickey Hargitay, Rita Calderoni, Moschera Consolata, Raul Lovvechio, Christa Barrymore (90 mins)
Also known as The Reincarnation of Isabel, Black Magic Rites was filmed by long-time toiler Renato Polselli.
A decade earlier Polselli had ventured into sex and horror with the nudie film L’Amante del Vampire but that film’s timidity by the time of Black Magic Rites was replaced by explicitly decadent sexual fantasy horror in demented, psychedelic colour and with a decidedly trippy score. It’s a ghoulish example of the sexy Satanism of the 1970s, a time of ritual sacrifices by weird cults and hedonistic sexual indulgence – the requisite world of carnal terror. Sex and fear are interchangeable in these films, and Black Magic Rites embraces the mix for a potently stylized erotic fantasy horror movie.
The budget and production design is initially minimalistic, giving the sadistic sexual content a seedily abstract quality – threadbare reincarnation mythology – though segues into an ornate, Gothic extravagance.
In order to reincarnate a witch, a man and his followers deep in the dungeon intend to torture and execute seven naked virgins in preparation for an orgy. After vampiric repercussions, the locals seek vengeance in this colourfully sadistic sexual nightmare. Off-screen wolves and howls add to the virgins’ screams and pleads as these cultists eviscerate them, soak up their blood and offer it to their Goddess witch. Without much dialogue initially, Black Magic Rites starts as a giddying melange of sexy, gory images, creating an atmosphere of intense religious madness – ritual sacrifice whilst appealing to God for forgiveness.
The horror of the decadent classes is a theme here, as it was in the Edward Dmytryk remake of Bluebeard, also about sadistic murder in an old castle. But where Bluebeard concerned European neo-fascism, Black Magic Rites concerns sheer religious hypocrisy in clever inter-cutting between the Satanist horror and the equal Christian horror of the witch-burners. Amidst burning alive, organ music and warped pledges from a male lover to bring an “innocent” (?) woman burned as a witch back from the dead, Black Magic Rites evokes a cursed, devastated Romantic despair. The suffering of innocents runs throughout this film, reminiscent of the witch-burning horrors Witchfinder General and Mark of Satan. Yet, an abundance of sexy Italian women recoiling from the rampant vampirism and ghostly witch adds an erotic charge to an intensely macabre sexual fantasy of religious superstition gone dangerously perverse.
Director Polselli likes to contrast modern costumes and attitudes with what he sees as a monstrous tradition rooted in religious fear, hence free and open scenes of the Italian country and lifestyle segue in and out of shadowy, theatrical castle dungeons.
The result is a film which shifts effortlessly between contemporary and traditional genre moods – at times reminiscent of Amando d’Ossorio, Jess Franco and Jean Rollin. Hallucinogenic heights of naked female hysteria adorn this decadent Eurosleaze. Sex and subjection combine in a heady concoction more about mood and forbidden eroticism than plot logistics: the motif of vampires needing virgin female blood (uncontaminated by semen) concurrently deployed by Paul Morrissey and Antonio Margheriti in Andy Warhol’s Blood for Dracula.
The atrocities committed in the name of religion 500 years ago result only in modern atrocities in the name of an inverted religion. In that, Black Magic Rites makes for a curious addition to vampire lore. Elegantly shot, creepy and decadent, Black Magic Rites brings to Italian horror a heavily sexualized sense of fear and menace. Witchcraft is treated with some ambivalence as the film is more concerned with a kind of warped Romantic grandeur – the inescapable legacy of our religiously fearful past. Humanity is doomed in service of this past religious superstition in this bleak horror film: hence, the last straw in the local townspeople’s ability to tolerate the protagonists is a sudden burning cross, just the sign they need to show their horribly unchanged superstitious madness: once witch-burners, always witch-burners as reality crumbles and the film descends into its ritualistic dungeon of sexual torture for an orgiastic climax of sex, torture and stylization.
