Page 122 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

pleasure of the 'pain of viewing baroque Italian horror images, defined by their defiance of reality for
the affective potentials of the flesh and its possible contortions.
Throughout books, journals and fanzines on Italian cinema two stills prevail as the most
frequently reproduced. One is the spike-punctured face of Barbara Steele in Mario Bava's The Mask
of Satan (La Maschera del Demonio, 1960) and the other is Radice, with head parenthesised by the
drill. What is the possible function of desire elicited through viewing his suffering? The scenes have
no third-order signification or iconographic quality to the destruction of this body. Although this is
the site of contention which many theorists claim reduces horror to low art, they fail to address that
the power of horror is that it is about flesh, quality, volume and affect that connects image to viewer.
Radices presence in a film often heralds elongated torture and visceral death. Any follower of horror
film accepts the signifier 'Giovanni Lombardo Radice' not as indicative of a certain role, style or
quality of acting but a certain possible affect due to the probability of a visceral death. The spectatorial
investment in differently gendered bodies performing similarly is evinced in Deep Red 5, in which
Chas Balun reviews Ricardo Freda's L'Orrible Segreto del Dr. Hichcock (The Horrible Dr Hichcock,
1963) and Lo Spettro (The Ghost, 1962). He premises the reviews with 'Let's talk Barbara Steele ...
That face. Those eyes. Those lips. That body.'2
It is interesting that the same issue of Deep Red has a pioneering article on Radice by John Martin,
but the focus shifts entirely to a heterosexual and traditional gender stance. Radice is said to 'head-
butt drills, splitting his guts in sewers and donating brains to hungry natives'.3 Grammatically Martin
describes Radices body as volitional rather than passive and any sense of the actor in a victimised
or masochistic sense (and any seduction this could insinuate) is avoided. Although these semantics
alter during the 1990s, he is yet to receive the attention of Steele or any of a number of other Italian
and French female horror film stars. The fetishisation of the male and pleasure at his suffering
simultaneous with his potential capacity to make others suffer constitutes somewhat of a blind
spot in the celebrations and analyses of European horror. Carol Jenks' extensive analysis of Steele
primarily points to the failure of psychoanalysis to fully explore the nuances of what is importantly
and particularly a European version of the actress. She points out that 'supposedly only a woman can
constitute a fetish object'.4 The fetish, the part that stands in for the whole, and repudiates maternal
castration, acts primarily as catharsis to the trauma of female lack.
But precisely why the deep ambiguity of Steele, what Jenks calls her 'ambiguous ecstasies',5 her
threat which exists simultaneous with her deliria inducing beauty, conforms to fetishism, traditionally
aligned with the purely cruel woman, remains unclear. Ambiguity in its simplest definition offers
a conflation and diffusion of a binary. With Steele we have pleasure and pain but also, in these
psychoanalytic interpretations, the binary positioning of the (male) viewer and female fetish object.
Thus spectatorship and gender invest for their meaning in their opposition. Because she is ambiguous
Steele, like Radice, offers a primary site of binary diffusion. The casualty of this ambiguity is the
viewer's capacity to comprehend or orient desire psychoanalytically through opposition.
If Steele opposes herself as both cruel and frail or beautiful and hideous the viewer takes a third
position. Risking the charge of fetishising European film I would claim the European (and, especially
because of its gore) Italian, horror film frequently depends on this ambiguity to sustain its affective
purpose - that of a beautiful or pleasurable horror. We often see the elicitation of a protracted look

108