Pupi Avati will celebrate his 87th birthday on 3 November and CinemaItaliaUK marks the occasion with a special Halloween screening of the Bolognese director's giallo masterpiece, The House With Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono, 1976), which has been lovingly restored in 4K. Employed by a frozen food company, Avati was all set to become a jazz clarinetist when he saw Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963). His filmography is notable for its diversity, but this simmering small-town chiller - along with the similarly themed, Zeder (1983) - has made him a cult favourite among horror aficionados.
Over the opening titles, the rasping voice of an unseen artist insists upon the need for purity in his brushwork and use of colour. However, this fevered obsession has excruciating consequences for the model (John Marquette) posing for a fresco depicting the brutal martyrdom of St Sebastian. Several decades later, a ferry transports art restorer Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) to the remote village where the church stands. He has been hired by the diminutive Mayor Solmi (Bob Tonelli), who hopes that the painting can become a tourist attraction and make the benighted area some money.
The parish priest, Don Orsi (Eugene Walter), isn't a fan of the fresco, but he shows Stefano around the church that he had himself restored after it was used as an SS barrack during the war. Some in the village want the picture to be left alone and one woman phones the guest house where Stefano is lodging to ward him off.
While dining at the restaurant owned by Poppi (Andrea Matteuzzi), Stefano runs into the local teacher (Vanna Busoni), who tries to flirt with him before she is interrupted by Stefano's old friend, Dr Antonio Mazza (Giulio Pizzirani), who had recommended him to Solmi. He is recovering from a nervous breakdown and Stefano is surprised when he confides that he has made a disturbing discovery about the fresco and its creator, Buono Legnani (Tonino Corazzari).
Having spent the night with the teacher, Stefano stops at the river to see Antonio, who is examining the water quality after it was contaminated during the war. He tells Stefano about Lugnani becoming known as `the painter of agonies' after going insane in the house with laughing windows that he shared with his two sisters. Solmi passes by and warns Stefano that Antonio has become prone to flights of fancy. They pause to watch an elderly woman gathering flowers and Stefano asks Lidio (Pietro Brambilla), the young church sextant, who keeps leaving them in a vase on the altar.
Following an altercation with Solmi's chauffeur, Coppola (Gianni Cavina), Poppi shows Stefano the collection of Lugnani paintings owned by his estranged wife (Flavia Giorgi) and reveals that Solmi is keen to purchase them. Poppi explains that Lugnani had syphilis and that no woman would pose for him. So, he became his own mirror model and used his arm as a palette so that the paint on the canvas had been in contact with his skin. They are interrupted by a call from Antonio asking Stefano to meet him in his hotel room. However, Antonio falls from the window and the police marshal (Ferdinando Orlandi) is uninterested when Stefano reports that he saw a shadowy figure leaving the room after pushing his friend to his death.
When the concierge (Ines Ciaschetti) informs Stefano that he needs to move out because a party of tourists has booked in to use the nearby thermal baths, Lidio finds him a room in the house occupied by a bedridden paraplegic (Pina Borione). She accuses Lidio of being a thief for bringing her stale food, but she welcomes Stefano, as he will break the silence of the neglected old place. When he packs his bags at the hotel, however, he is surprised when the chambermaid (Carla Astolfi) tells him that there are no tourists coming and he wonders why the concierge had lied. However, he is also distracted, as he has seen Francesca (Francesca Marciano), the replacement teacher he had seen on the ferry when he first arrived.
Unpacking at the Legnani house, Stefano hears footsteps, but the old lady assures him that they are the only occupants. She is happy to have him visit, although he is spooked when he notices the same kind of flowers from the altar on her dressing table. He is further unnerved by footsteps in the church when he is working and he finds a tape recorder in the cellar when he goes to investigate. Despite blowing the fuses, the machine plays the speech heard over the credits and Stefano seeks out the priest, only to run into a woman with a veiled hat carrying some flowers. Now disturbed, Stefano goes to visit the teacher, but discovers that Francesca has moved into her room and she shows him the snails that are slithering around her fridge.
Having uncovered previously unseen female figures in the composition, Stefano attends Antonio's funeral. Lidio boasts that he has put a live rat in the coffin and Stefano thinks he can hear it scrabbling, as he notices the woman with the veiled hat. He lunches with Don Orsi, who takes him fishing in his boat and confides that his landlady is suffering from a venereal disease and wants nothing to do with the church - just as the priest is disinterested in the fresco and its painter.
Arriving home in the dark, Stefano finds Francesca playing the Legnani tape and he offers to cook for her. She asks if he slept with her predecessor, but he avoids the question. He notices she has a lighter with the initials `B.L.' engraved on the case and she claims to have had it for years. They sleep together and she moves in. But they argue when Stefano goes to play the tape for Coppola (who watched as a boy when Legnani painted his laundress mother on her death bed) and finds the voice has been erased. Stefano blames Francesca, who tries to get back in his good books. But she finds his fixation with the Legnanis creepy and reluctantly remains in the old house after Stefano finds a folder full of letters and scribblings in Antonio's room, which lead him to believe that the family came into contact with tribal magic while in Brazil and that the sisters procured models for Buono to paint in their death throes.
Cycling in the darkness, Stefano compares the photo with the figures either side of St Sebastian and Don Orsi agrees that they resemble the artist's sisters. When Stefano notices clay on his shoes similar to that outside the Legnani house, the priest claims that he was called to give the old woman the last sacrament. Stefano shows the snapshot to Poppi, who confirms that it shows the siblings, whose incestuous antics shocked everyone except his wife, who fell for Buono. Poppi explains how the authorities tried to incarcerate the painter after he finished the fresco, but his sisters protected him right up until 4 June 1931, when he immolated himself. When Stefano goes to the library to consult the death certificate, he discovers that Buono was only `presumed dead', as no body had ever been found.
As he leaves, Solmi complains about the state of the restoration and Stefano dashes to the church to find that the fresco has been vandalised. Lidio seems to find it amusing, but Stefano is furious, as he now knows beyond doubt that Antonio was murdered to keep him quiet. He promises Francesca that they can leave the next morning and he leaves her packing while he resigns to Solmi. Instead, he finds Coppola (who has been fired for drinking) and he tells Stefano that the Legnani sisters are still alive. Moreover, he takes him to the dilapidated house with laughing windows, where he digs up the bones of the St Sebastian model.
As a storm starts to break, Lidio bursts into the house and tries to rape Francesca. They are watched through a half-open door and Stefano and Coppola arrive on a motorbike and sidecar to find Francesca's bloodied bodied hanging by her raised arms from a ceiling hook. However, when Stefano fetches the marshal, the corpse has gone, as have the bones that Coppola showed him in the shallow grave. When his body shows up in the river, the marshal cautions Stefano that he's in big trouble. But he notices the blade scars on Coppola's torso and realises he was telling the truth when he had claimed that the sisters had tried to kill him for their brother to paint.
When he gets a phone call from Francesca at the hotel, Stefano goes to investigate. Hearing a man screaming, he goes to the attic to find the old woman and her sister stabbing Lidio so that Buono - who is disfigured and propped in the wardrobe - can paint him. Horrified, Stefano tries to escape, but Laura Legnani stabs him and chases after him when he stumbles into the marsh reeds.
Waking next morning, Stefano rides the motorbike into the village. No one answers their door to him, although Solmi calls the police in Ferrara. Bleeding heavily, Stefano seeks sanctuary in the church, only to discover that Don Orsi is the second sister and Laura emerges from behind a curtain in the sacristy to cackle menacingly, as Stefano starts to despair, even though a police siren can be heard in the middle distance.
Once you're over the fact that Lino Capolicchio looks so much like J.D. Vance, there's much to intrigue in this meticulous exercise in suspense building. The storyline, co-written by Antonio Avati, Gianni Cavina, and Maurizio Costanzo bears a passing similarity to that in Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973), as Stefano is lured into a nest of vipers while seeking to uncover a sinister conspiracy. However, it has been pointed out that Avati might also have been echoing the theme of Michael Findlay's slasher, Snuff (1976), by exploring the connection between death and the creation of art.
It appears to have been pure coincidence, however, that Avati should have focussed on this particular victim of the Diocletianic Persecution at the same time that Derek Jarman was shooting Sebastiane (1976). Indeed, Avati had written the first draft of the screenplay (under the title La luce dell'ultimo piano) earlier in the decade after hearing a story about the exhumation of a priest in the village of Sasso Marconi. But he only returned to the scenario (which he heavily revised) after the box-office failure of Bordella (1976). Although we don't learn how the Legnanis fared during the war, the mere mention of this period suggests that Avati was still mindful of his uncredited contribution to the screenplay for Pier Paolo Pasolin's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 1976).
The fact that Avati places the Legnani sisters in the place usually occupied by the archers firing arrows into Sebastian's torso or St Irene and her holy companions tending to her wounds gives the fresco a blasphemous frisson, which Avati reinforces by revealing that Don Orsi is the unnamed second sister. He/she is played by Eugene Walter, who had memorably played the Mother Superior in Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits (Giulietta degli spiriti, 1965). But some have taken exception to the depiction of women in the film, as incestuous psychopaths and loose-moralled teachers who hop into bed with the rather charmless Stefano at the drop of a hat.
Capolicchio never quite convinces as the finest restorer in the Academy, while his stoicism prevents him from conveying the dread he professes to feel. Nevertheless, Avati and cinematographer Pasquale Rachini trap him in a doorway while retreating along a dark corridor in the best shot of a film filled with memorable images, most notably the view of the Rocky Horror red lips painted around the window frames of the abandoned house. Production designer Luciana Morosetti merits mention for this alone. But the interiors are also splendidly atmospheric, as are the tableaux that take their cues from Guido Reni's `St Sebastian' (c.1615). Giuseppe Baghdighian's measured editing and Amedeo Tommasi's Goblinesque score are also highly effective. But it's Avati's mastery of mystery and mood that make this so absorbing and unsettling.
