[REVIEW-CAST #2] LA SETTA (THE SECT, 1991)

[NOTE: This is the second in a new series of capsule reviews that will focus on genres related to the Krimi and Giallo; for more info, read this post. In short, these reviews are less rigorous, more associative, and are my way of flagging films that relate to the Krimi and Giallo genres that, in their own ways, appeal to the same sensibilities.]

[GENRE]: Euro-Gothic
[VERSION WATCHED]: Cecchi Gori DVD

I was familiar with director Michele Soavi's reputation for some time, mostly because of his association with Argento (both as assistant director and sometimes actor [that's him, e.g., in TENEBRAE's garden flashback, with Eva Robins]). I had watched the Blue Underground DVD of Soavi's STAGEFRIGHT, as it had been described to me as both a Giallo and a Slasher, one that had style in spades and announced Soavi as part of a new generation of Italian horror masters (by "new," I mean post-Argento).

I had avoided his other work, though, despite the obvious skill and hyper-style on display in STAGEFRIGHT, because their capsule summaries suggested that they wouldn't quite be up my alley (granted, my alley has been significantly widened since then). In the case of 1991's LA SETTA (THE SECT), the notion of a modern-day cult manipulating a woman, ROSEMARY'S BABY-like, into bearing the devil child whose birth they are seeking to bring about as blasphemous advent seemed like a project doomed to failure (or, at least, lackluster imitation). It's a subgenre that's been done to death, and rarely done with the level of filmmaking and oppressive mood achieved by Polanski's landmark. Add to that that this is an Italian film (a film industry known for their shameless appropriation of whatever genre is popular that second**), and an Italian cult/devil baby movie being made at a time when Italian genre films found themselves well past their golden age (and well past appropriate levels of funding), well ... I had pretty low expectations going in.

Instead, what I found in THE SECT was a film that distinguished itself as one of *the* key Italian horror films in my personal canon. Sometimes a mood piece a la Val Lewton; sometimes body horror, insect horror, gore horror; sometimes the deeply realized codes of a dream. A few of the reasons it worked so well for me: 

1. HERBERT LOM. Ever since I saw Lom in MARK OF THE DEVIL, wearing Orson Welles' nose from MR. ARKADIN and using his character's impotency as an excuse to beat Reggie Nalder's witchfinder to death, I've wanted to see as many of his horror performances as possible. He always feels like he's classing up the joint; always feels like, though he carries that gravitas, he also carries a deeply embedded flaw, something that feels constantly on the verge of being "off" about his character. Whether that offness be evil, or tragic, or some psychosexual hangup.

In THE SECT, Lom plays a once-famous professor of the occult who has been missing, and presumed dead, since the 70s. He's not dead; he's instead been in hiding, preparing an alignment of the planets that will force Kelly Curtis to carry the devil's child. Everything about the accessories accumulating around his character—his fingerless gloves, his stubble beard, his mat of unkempt hair, his low-intensity but crazy-eyed "I'm talking to either myself or maybe it's the devil" line delivery—everything worked for me, creeped me out, even (at times) made me cheer for his acting chops. He alternately presents a near-epileptic state of evil and a sympathetic, homeless-lost-father performance. He inhabits the role to a startlingly degree, and does more work with his vibrating physicality and the muscles in his face than I've seen in an actor in a while. Lom's thousand-yard, from-the-other-side-of-the-abyss stare is something that haunts the entire film.

2. WHAT IT DOES WITH DREAMS. Beyond the unnerving stuff with the giant, cruel-eyed stork (shades of the similarly cruel-faced swan attacking Florinda Bolkan in her dreams in Fulci's LIZARD WITH A WOMAN'S SKIN), there's the irrational, id-dream stuff. In a nightmare induced by an extinct insect inserted into her nose by Lom, Kelly Curtis' character wanders into a strange open field that seems to be (impossibly) built underneath her house. In the field is a towering tree, its branches hung in what look like pewter runes. Tied to this tree (St. Sebastian came to mind) is a faceless, naked man. At no point does the camera pan high enough to show his face. Instead it focuses on Curtis' view, who finds herself eye level with the man's bound feet. She tries to untie him, but becomes so desperate that she begins to chew through the ropes, intent on freeing him by any means (we as viewer have no idea why, where she is, what will happen, other than the outcome is bound to not be good). 

She then suddenly finds herself on her back in the field, dozens of feet away from the tree. The dozens-of-feet-distance is filled by her dress (and, by extension, her now impossibly long legs). Emanating from the tree are the ropes that had previously tied up the faceless man—they are taut, from the tree and into her dress. (Presumably, all the way up to the top of her legs; linking her consciousness to the tree's, and creating an impossibly long passage between the two that exists now inside the bolts and bolts of fabric from her dress.)

The camera at times shows the pov from inside her dress, and it's in these shots that it looks forward to a similar shot in Sion Sono's SUICIDE CLUB, where there's a person tied up in a sack. When the camera is outside the bag, it looks like it's no larger than the person it's holding. When someone opens the mouth of the bag, and the camera climbs in, the bag is suddenly the size of a tent. The kind of terrifying subjectivity that shows up in dreams. (I'll also say: It's uncanny how, from certain angles, Curtis looks like Anita Strindberg in the face. Just adds another layer to the whole thing.)

 

 

3. IT'S IN THE DETAILS. A strong example of this is the stuff with the "death caul" (shown below in the caps). As Lom is dying in the occult labyrinth that inexplicably exists under Curtis' home, he covers his face with a handkerchief that seems to sponge up his essence as he takes his last breaths. This handkerchief lives on in the film, in his stead, imprinted (religious relic-like) in the moment of death with his features.

At times it seems sentient, suffocating characters in order to possess them toward their own self-destruction (in this way it feels like the cursed, runic paper that Karswell uses to mark his victims in Jacques Tourneur's NIGHT OF THE DEMON). At other times, it moves through the movie as a harbinger of Lom's impending return from the dead. (The "hook surgery" ritual that's used to bring him back into a physical body is another example of how well it handles what is gut-level horrifying about the occult aspects of the movie. They never feel generic, knocked-off, lazily compiled.)

Plus Soavi's command of style: The camera snakes and tracks and trails obsessively along pipes that cut in and out of the architecture of Curtis' mysterious, damned house, not only acting as a portent of the occult doom that is hopelessly directing her life, but also cinematically "explaining" the spatial relationships in the movie. The camera swirling in the same spiral patterns that are built into the entire film. Or the way he  layers weird television broadcasts into the narrative (including one of a magician played by Soavi the actor, pulling a rabbit out of a hat while Curtis' pet rabbit [fertility images abound in the film, esp. around Curtis' character who has been unable to conceive] watches). Or the aforementioned surreal spatial distortion of the "St. Sebastian/Stork" scenes. Or the hyper, macro closeups on the details churning in the background of each scene ... all these stylistic tics define Soavi's eye, and are one reason why he (rightly) gets so much credit for carrying the Italian horror torch lit by people like Argento.

4. PLENTY OF OTHER PHANTASMAGORICAL MOMENTS. Mariangela Giordano, who plays Curtis' colleague at the school they both teach at, is "possessed" by the Lom's death caul while visiting Curtis' home. In the wake of this (an episode that makes it seem as though the scrap of fabric is going to suffocate her), she races home, changes clothes, and does herself up in layers of makeup that seem like a visual reference to Clara Calamai in DEEP RED. She then trawls the local truck stop for one of the drivers, played by genre regular Giovanni Lombardo Radice, who she seduces into the back of one of the trucks. There, instead of making love to him, she psychically convinces him to stab her to death, either because she has been instructed by Herbert Lom's handkerchief to dam his soul to hell. Or because, through some sort of sex-death masochism, the state her own soul's been brought to actually desires such an outcome for itself.

The fact that, after she dies during surgery on her stab wounds, her body gets up off the operating table when Curtis enters the room (she is devastated by Giordano's death, and wants to mourn), attacking Curtis physically and accusing her of being responsible—it's a ratcheting up to 11 the dread and general perversity of the set-pieces so far. (And deserves massive credit for not coming off as completely ludicrous.)

(Another example: The disgusting, body part-infested "soup" that exists in place of Herbert Lom's body in his casket, hidden in the bowels of the hospital. Also the "hippie killer," "Charles Manson-alike" prologue, which just begs to misfire, considering how badly it's been done in so many movies. The pitch-perfectness clued me in to how precise and well-delivered the details would be in the rest of the movie.)

For me, it easily vaults ahead of Soavi's other work, even relatively well-known movies like CEMETERY MAN; a real unassailable classic, in my Euro-Gothic Top 25: http://letterboxd.com/ipcress/list/a-top-25-creeping-in-the-dark-euro-gothics/

Leonard Jacobs

February, 2015

**Btw, as I think those who are familiar with my reviews will know, I'm making the above comment about the Italian film industry with nothing but love; I've lost count of the number of Italian "rip-offs" that are better, that transcend, that kick the cinematic tail of the original they're supposedly only copying.