[REVIEW-CAST #12] 1981’s NIGHT SCHOOL and How it Makes a Hybrid Out of Two Italian Genres

Fans of underseen Gialli like THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE and DEATH STEPS IN THE DARK will recognize Italian-American actor Leonard Mann, who here plays the lead detective investigating the baroque and ritualistic murders overtaking a certain Boston college.

[The REVIEW-CAST series was set up as a way to include shorter, less formally rigorous reviews for the site—less formally rigorous than the GIALLO IDENTIKIT and KRIMI POCKET REVIEW series for example. I'm still working on a way to get the backlog of these shorter reviews posted. Also, as with every single post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

Having now finally seen 1981’s NIGHT SCHOOL, I can confirm that it fits comfortably under the banner of the larger Giallo genre. Certainly it qualifies as part of my sub-genre of Post-Gialli, which includes movies that are expressly working in, and referring to, a recognized Giallo tradition, but that fall outside of the initial Giallo boom (1970–75)—and most often are being shot and produced outside of Italy. (They are films that also sometimes get classified as part of the Slasher genre ... for more on these sub-categories, and the representative films in each, check out my ever-growing Intro Page here). 

Here, the presence of Italian genre stalwart Leonard Mann** also helps certify it as a Giallo, as does the baroque and elaborate style of its murder set-pieces (I’m thinking esp. of the murder in the dreamy, museum-sized aquarium). Further, the distinct costuming of the killer, which is cribbed from both WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS? and STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER, cements the Giallo link pretty securely. (I hope to cover the evolution of the killer’s look in an upcoming [SOURCE CODE] entry.)

There’s also the film’s twist re: the killer’s identity, a reveal that is, unfortunately, the weakest expression of its Giallo influences. For anybody who’s seen even a handful of Gialli, it’s a twist that gets telegraphed almost from the start of the film, and thus comes as no surprise at all. Essentially, we get the twist that Argento made fresh in his seminal BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, where the husband of the actual killer confesses to the killings and sacrifices himself when the police close in, in order to shield his unhinged wife from punishment for her crimes. 

THE CRYSTAL CONNECTION: Drew Snyder and Rachel Ward, as the anthropology professor and his live-in lover. On one level, Snyder’s character is no different than the Alberto Ranieri character from BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, a protective and delusional husband who sacrifices himself in order to protect the real killer, his wife Monica (here inhabited by Ward).

What’s positively more interesting, though, is how NIGHT SCHOOL’s Giallo influence gets mixed-and-matched with another Italian “boom” genre that I’ve been watching a lot of lately: the Italian Cannibal film.

Just like in those taboo-busting movies from Deodato, Lenzi, et al., here we get a main character who is a university professor/researcher (Drew Snyder), who spends a fair bit of his screen time showing “authentic,” “mondo,” documentary-style photos of native people and their rituals. We get didactic, heavy-handed conversations suggesting that, when compared to native peoples from around the world, Western “civilized” societies (and the people in them) are the truly barbaric ones. And we get a crass, bald-faced appropriation by Western, white characters of the rituals and cultures to which they’ve supposedly devoted their lives.

 

ITALIAN CANNIBAL MOVIES 101: As Snyder’s anthropologist intones, “Scenes like this are a direct link to man’s primitive past. Modern man has only to take a short step to wind up in the primeval jungle of his ancestors.”

Snyder’s anthropology professor has taken his teaching assistant (played by Ward) as his live-in lover. It’s suggested that their relationship—which is now marred by repeated accusations of infidelity on the part of the professor—started with their research work in the field. What we find is that the trauma caused by this relationship’s ebb and flow is what fuels the killing spree running through the film. 

And, that this tortured, volatile relationship between Snyder and Ward is the movie’s most sustained expression of Cannibal film appropriation. For it is these two Western characters who appropriate and re-use the sacred rituals that they have fallen in love studying—and they use them, of course, in the most sensational and insensitive of ways: as an excuse to kill college coeds.

First, we get the appropriation of these “native” rituals in the bedroom, with Snyder and Ward using ceremonial dyes and markings as a part of their sexual buildup. It seems clear that this use of ritual is both part of their initial attraction to each other (a kind of “exoticizing the other” as foreplay) and an attempt to repair whatever has gone wrong between them:

When this sexual healing fails to take, the appropriation then turns to violence—“uncivilized” primeval rituals begin intruding, violently, into the “civilized” modern day. Like in so many Cannibal exploitation movies, a major metropolitan city (usually New York) gets “invaded” early on in the movie by a “native” killer whose ritual murders baffle the modern-day detectives investigating them. 

(And, in the case of the Cannibal films, these rituals most often get chased back to their supposed source, in some undeveloped, third-world nation. I’m thinking, e.g., of the structure used in Marino Girolami’s ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST, Umberto Lenzi’s EATEN ALIVE!, Antonio Margheriti’s CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE, and, to a lesser extent, Ruggero Deodato’s CUT AND RUN, which also happens to star Leonard Mann.) 

Further, what we learn of the killer’s motives, and the particular form her violence takes, reveals that everything she does is based in some way on those same rituals studied by the unhappy couple. 

Ward, in her guise as killer, is killing to protect the “sacred” family unit that she and Snyder studied so earnestly while out in the wilds of their field research. We learn that each female victim has had some kind of relationship with Snyder’s professor—from innocent flirtation to full-on sexual affair—and Ward’s understanding of the rituals that bind the societies she’s studied has convinced her that it’s ethical, proper, and (indeed) necessary for her to murder these women in order to keep sacred and whole her union with Snyder. (Her sense of this is only amplified once it’s disclosed that she is carrying Snyder’s child.)

Further, her insistence on decapitating each of her victims—and then storing their heads in water after the kill—stems from those native practices she studied. As she explains to Mann’s detective:

Ward: “How can you make a comparison between this kind of butchery [the current murders] and the tradition of Eastern culture? These rituals existed years before this continent was even discovered. The headhunters of New Guinea are not cannibals or savages. They seriously believe that in taking the heads of their enemies they are possessing their very life force.”

Mann: “And by putting the heads in water?”

Ward: “In this way they believe they’re cleansing the evil spirits from the souls of their enemies, leaving only the purity of the spirit.”

Mann (nodding skeptically): “Mmm-hmm.” 

So, in Ward’s motorcycle-masked killer, we get the intersection, the embodiment, of these two Italian genres that the film repeatedly references. We get dream-logic styled murder set-pieces, whose dream logic is shaped and defined by the violent, mondo-style rituals we find in one Italian Cannibal film after another. We get the haunted, modern spaces of a major metropolitan city á la the Giallo, with the haunting stemming from the lost wilds of New Guinea—and it raises the question: Just how many other Giallo/Cannibal hybrids exist?

 Leonard Jacobs

March, 2016

**I’ve covered Leonard Mann’s work in the Giallo genre in a couple [IDENTIKIT] entries on the site: 1977’s DEATH STEPS IN THE DARK and 1986’s THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE.