Page 127 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

When we see our first Radice film there may exist a traditional dialectic of sadistic gaze and victim,
but by the time we reach our third or fourth Radice film there is a sense that this guy is (as are we)
enjoying it! Like masochism, his suffering is repeated over and over, presenting an eternal return that
is both the same and different every time. Interestingly in Italian horror the male body in pain is
frequently enjoyed' by the camera. As well as Radice, most gialli include a relatively balanced series
of male and female deaths (especially in Argentos mid-career films). Gore films also fetishise men in
pain. For instance, this is seen emphatically in the deaths of Udo Kier in Flesh for Frankenstein, where
his hand is cut off and he receives a barge pole through his gall bladder. It is also seen in Dracula
Cerca Sangue dei Vergine e Mori di Sete {Bloodfor Dracula, Paul Morrissey/Antonio Margheriti, 1974),
where his arms and legs are cut off and he is staked, but only after he has vomited his way through two
women and a pool of hymen blood.
It would reduce the impact of these scenes to relegate Kier's and Radices deaths to the binary
option of feminisation, despite the symbolic suggestion of appendage removal and penetration of the
body or head. If this were so the male viewer would desire the feminised bodies and hence the gaze
would become homoerotic, therefore through the homosexual turn the viewer's identification would
also be masochist. Here scenes both trouble and exceed binaries, not simply of desire and pleasure and
pain but of the positioning of content and form, legibility and affect.
What do we desire in these images? What they signify does not seem to encompass the pleasure they
afford. Traditional signification - the sign of a screaming body or the metonym of a drill through the
head - does not begin to explore what it is about these moments that the viewer delights in. Radices
body is the literal incarnation of the materiality Lyotard suggests in the shattered partial objects. He
as a 'character' and we as gendered 'viewer' are shattered into plateaus of expectation, intensity and
pleasure. Lyotard states: '...frontier or fissure? No it is rather the region of transmuration from one
skin onto a different skin.' 5 The screen is neither frontier nor fissure but the region where the image
of one skin directly affects our viewing flesh. We do not see in Radice a face with a mouth and eyes
that appeal to us, or even a head drilled though.
Our pleasure in Radices films (and more importantly his deaths) is the elicitation of ecstatic
excess beyond our demand for narrative or comprehensible pleasure. We no longer desire something
(character, meaning, resonance with reality, obvious beauty), but take pleasure in everything we
cannot vindicate or explain. Deleuze claims:

Our lived relationship with the brain becomes increasingly fragile ... and goes through little
cerebral deaths. The brain becomes our problem or our illness, our passion rather than our
mastery, our solution or decision. The brain cuts or puts to flight all internal associations, it

summons an outside beyond any external world. 10

Watching horror points to the fragility of the dialectic relationship because narrative is subjugated
to effect and empirical succession shows incomprehensible series' of reanimation after death, drills
in the head, living after dismemberment and castration. Watching a film with Radice in it opens the
brain to a certain force that may rely on incommensurable signifiers as creating ideas that redirect
our lines of flight.

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