cinema history class: macabre (1980)

The session: Bring Your Own Movie Month
The annual session whe5re everyone in the class takes a turn presenting a favored movie

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 5 (Joe's choice): Macabre (1980)
Directed by Lamberto Bava

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
A married woman’s lover is decapitated in a car accident after her young son dies under suspicious circumstances. After a year in a psychiatric hospital, she returns to their old love nest, where it becomes clear that she has preserved her lover’s severed head and resumed their grotesque relationship.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Yes, I fully expected the severed head in the freezer.

That was probably the movie’s biggest drawback for me. The eventual reveal is clearly supposed to be a major shock, but I had been expecting it for a while. So when it finally came, my reaction was less “OH MY GOD!” and more “Well, there it is.”

Fortunately, the movie had plenty of other places to go. And boy, did it go there.

This was an amazing psycho-thriller that just kept getting weirder and weirder as it went along. Necrophilia? Check. Cannibalism? Check. Both were suitably gross. Yuck! But strangely enough, the grotesque visuals weren’t what I enjoyed most.

My favorite part was Lucy finally screeching at her mother about how she had drowned her little brother. It’s a deeply disturbing scene, obviously, but I got a kick out of the sheer deranged intensity of it. For me, that confrontation was the highlight of the movie and helped make for a great climax.

Then there was Robert Duvall.

No, not that Robert Duvall. For reasons known only to the filmmakers, there is actually a character named Robert Duvall. He’s blind, but also remarkably resourceful—sort of a blind MacGyver—and watching him figure things out and improvise his way through increasingly bizarre circumstances was one of the more interesting aspects of the movie.

There were also some amusing Mommie Dearest echoes in the mother-daughter relationship. Of course, Macabre actually came out a year before Mommie Dearest, so technically Joan Crawford should probably be accused of ripping off Jane Baker.

The New Orleans setting seemed like an odd choice for an Italian psycho-horror movie. On the other hand, the city’s above-ground burial practices actually make the setting relevant to the story, so it wasn’t just exotic window dressing.

I’m less certain what I thought about the supernatural ending. On its own, it’s a classic horror-movie ending and a pretty effective final jolt. But the rest of the movie hadn’t really established itself as supernatural, so it felt a little as though the movie suddenly changed the rules at the finish line. Joe pointed out that supernatural possibilities had been hinted at throughout, albeit ambiguously, so maybe the ending was more earned than I initially gave it credit for.

There were even some moments along the way that made me wonder whether the filmmakers were deliberately setting up those possibilities—or just messing with us.

Either way, by the time it was over, I had seen a movie involving a drowned child, a decapitated lover, a head in a freezer, necrophilia, cannibalism, a blind MacGyver named Robert Duvall, and a supernatural punchline.

What more could you reasonably ask from Bring Your Own Movie month?

Since this was Joe’s choice, he didn’t get to rate it.

But we know it’s a ten in his book.