Despite its somewhat misleading title, Scream… and Die! (1973) is an interesting film directed by José Ramón Larraz that is well worth a look if you enjoy unusual European thrillers. Larraz is a talented Spanish director who’s mostly known by American film audiences as the man behind the erotic horror film Vampyres (1974) and only a few of his other films are easily accessible on DVD and video in the U.S. His 1973 feature Scream… and Die! has been available on video since the ‘80s, but it was recently released by Jef films on DVD.

Larraz’s films tend to generate strong reactions from their detractors. The director seems to enjoy playing with genre expectations and the eroticism and violence in his movies can be rather explicit, but if you’re willing to give Larraz the benefit of the doubt and go into his films without any preconceptions, you might be surprised by what you find. One of Larraz’s strong points is his ability to mix complex and adult story elements into his horror films that can also be enjoyed simply for their entertainment value. His early films like Scream… and Die! are also extremely stylish and creatively shot, especially when you factor in the low budget he was usually working with. Larraz was definitely one of the most interesting directors to come out of Spain in the seventies. His film Symptoms was nominated for a Golden Palm at Cannes in 1974 and he seems to have many fans now, thanks to books like Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984, but even among Larraz’ fans Scream… and Die! is often considered one of the director’s lesser works.

Scream… and Die! features the beautiful British actress Andrea Allan as an aspiring model named Valerie who’s dating a rather seedy fellow called Terry (Alex Leppard). One foggy night Valerie finds herself in the English countryside with Terry, who decides to loot an old estate hidden away deep in the woods. The couple soon find more than they bargained for when the home’s owner unexpectedly arrives at the house with a female guest. Valerie and Terry slip inside a closet and from their hiding place they watch a strange sexual encounter unfold between the homeowner and a woman that suddenly turns deadly. After witnessing the brutal murder of the woman, Valerie flees the crime scene and runs out of the house. When she realizes she’s being chased by the killer she stumbles into the woods and finally finds herself in an old junkyard where she hides in an abandoned car until morning comes. Once the sun rises Valerie hitches a ride back into town without Terry.

While Valerie contemplates the situation that she’s found herself in, she suddenly realizes the killer has returned Terry’s car and parked it outside her flat. Inside the car is Valerie’s modeling portfolio, which is missing a photo. It’s clear that the killer not only knows who Valerie is, but he also knows where she lives and he’s apparently stalking her. Unfortunately for Valerie she was never able to get a good look at the killer so his identity is a mystery. After consulting with friends about her situation, they tell her not to worry and warn her to be weary of going to the police since she could also be charged with a crime. They’re convinced that Terry must be involved in the bizarre events somehow and they offer to take Valerie back to the house where the murder took place, but she’s unable to locate it again. Like a strange dream, the killer and the crime scene seem to have vanished into thin air leaving Valerie confused and troubled.

The story takes another odd turn when Valerie meets a charming young man named Paul (Karl Lanchbury) selling Japanese-style Noh masks he designed at the photography studio where she works. Paul immediately takes an interest in Valerie and she’s instantly drawn to him as well. They quickly start up a romantic relationship, which seems to bother Paul’s Aunt who he also lives and works with. As the film progresses it becomes clear that Paul and his Aunt are involved in a troubling, incestuous relationship and the masks they make together seem to hide a deeper mystery.

In the meantime an unusual bearded man has moved into the first-floor flat of Valerie’s building. He’s a pigeon keeper and the birds he cares for are keeping Valerie awake at night and affecting her dreams. When Valerie’s roommate returns from a trip to Europe and is suddenly murdered, Valerie can no longer temper her fears and she’s forced to deal with the police and tell them everything that has happened. Her bohemian friends, the photographer she models for, the young mask maker and the pigeon keeper all become possible suspects, but most viewers will immediately know who the killer is.

Scream and Die! has elements of classic gialli films such as a killer who wears black leather gloves, but I don’t think the director is all that interested in the mystery aspects of his film. His approach to the material seems to confuse audiences who expect Scream and Die! to be a typical European thriller. Instead, Larraz offers observant audiences plenty of visual and verbal clues as to who the murderer is early on in the movie. Larraz has never seemed to care much for straightforward narratives so there’s no reason to expect typical storytelling here. It’s obvious the director is much more intent on exploring various themes about voyeurism and identity with Scream… and Die! instead of offering up simple thrills.

The film is filled with many telling visual motifs, including countless shots of people peering through windows and cameras that bring to mind Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). As a model, Valerie is constantly the subject of voyeurism from the photographer who takes her photos, the audience who watches her primp and pose and finally the director himself. Larraz clearly enjoys photographing his star and his camera spends a lot of time focused on her. As we watch her undress, take baths and simply drink a cup of coffee in her flat, it’s almost impossible to not feel like a “peeping Tom” yourself. Like Rear Window, an obvious streak of paranoia also runs through Scream… and Die!. Early in the film Valerie questions if she really witnessed a murder and as the film progresses she becomes more and more weary of everyone around her.

Many critics complain about the nudity in Lazrraz’s films and Scream… and Die! does contain nudity, but I personally don’t find it gratuitous. As I mentioned above, Larraz’s camera clearly enjoys photographing the film’s female star Andrea Allan, but her casual nudity in the movie is never very explicit and the mildly graphic sex scene in the film is more disturbing than erotic in my opinion. The scene in question has gotten a somewhat notorious reputation over the years when it’s mentioned in various horror books and publications and has even been called “Larraz’s most explicit sojourn into sordid sexual depths.” It involves the charming young mask maker Paul and his much older Aunt in a passionate, but deeply troubling sexual encounter. As I mentioned above, it’s clear that they’re relationship is incestuous and the sex scene perfectly conveys the domineering sexual power that Paul’s’ Aunt has over him.

Paul is played wonderfully by the talented British actor Karl Lanchbury who was a regular in some of Larraz’s early films including Whirlpool (1970), Deviation (1971) and Vampyres (1974). He’s really terrific in Scream… and Die! but he isn’t given enough to do in the film, even though he makes the most of his limited screen time. I wish the director had used Karl Lanchbury more, but Larraz always seemed more interested in his female stars and the male actors in his films are often given secondary roles. Andrea Allan is also very good as Valerie, but she seems a little reserved at times and not always fully committed to her role.

The film credits make it easy for audiences to assume that Scream… and Die! is a British production, but the movie was actually a Spanish/British co-production. Larraz shot most of the film in Britain, but some of it was also shot in Spain. The director seemed to really enjoy making films in England and many of his movies make great use of the British countryside and isolated country estates, which gives them a gothic atmosphere.

The script for Scream… and Die! was written by Derek Ford who often worked with the talented horror director Robert Hartford-Davis in the sixties. Ford was also a director in his own right and he made many British sexploitation films in the seventies before and after working on Scream… and Die! This film is definitely different from Ford’s other work and I’m sure that Larraz must have been involved in the writing as well as the direction of the film. One aspect of Scream… and Die! that I really enjoy is the creepy soundtrack by composer Terry Warr, which adds considerable depth and an eerie mood to the film. Warr had worked with Derek Ford before on some sex comedies, but surprisingly this seems to be the first and last time he ever composed music for a horror film.

I wish I could recommend the new Jef DVD of Scream… and Die! but it appears to just be a copy of the old video transfer. The film is extremely dark and it’s hard to make out what’s happening sometimes, which can be a little confusing. Hopefully a company like Severin will release Scream… and Die! on DVD in the future. I would love to see a restored widescreen print of the movie made available.

Pierre Clémenti in Belle de Jour (1967)

“He had a legend, the aura of genius, a friend to the mysterious and the strange. I arrived full of holy terror and mad hope all at the same time. I was struck immediately by one thing, only one: he’s a man of whom you only see the face. The fabulous mouth, worked by life, heavily wrinkled skin, the driven eyes, but in their black ring, a sparkling light. I was incapable of saying a word, I don’t even remember if it was a production office, an apartment, a hotel room. I looked at the deep earth of his face, the clear water of his regard. They told me ‘Speak loudly, we don’t know if he’s deaf or if he pretends to be . . .’ But how to speak? I repeated to myself ‘Come on. You have to speak.’ I thought that my silence and my insistence on staring would become intolerable. Someone else would surely have addressed me, would have started to speak, if only to reduce the tension a little. He was content to just look at me. Simply, directly, as if we had met there for a mutual exam and that words weren’t necessary. A guy walked in, perhaps an assistant, I can’t remember. Buñuel turned towards me. ‘This is Clémenti. Show him the script.’ If I understood properly, I had just been hired for Belle de Jour…With no other director did I have such a feeling of confidence.”
- Pierre Clémenti on Luis Buñuel and his role in Belle de Jour from his book Quelques Messages Personnels

My favorite character in Louis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour is Pierre Clémenti’s wonderful turn as the sexy thug Marcel. Pierre Clémenti was a beautiful and talented actor who appeared in many great films before his untimely death in 1999 including The Leopard (1963), Benjamin (1968), Les Idoles (1968), Partner (1968), The Conformist (1970), Sweet Movie (1974), La Cicatrice intérieure (1972) , Steppenwolf (1974), Quartet (1981) and Belle de Jour (1967).

I haven’t written anything substantial about Pierre Clémenti yet, so I thought I’d take the opportunity provided by Flickhead’s Buñuel Blog-a-thon to post a photographic tribute to Pierre Clémenti’s character Marcel in Belle de Jour, which was haphazardly put together from various screen shots I recently took from the film.

To view more screen shots from Luis Buñuel’s film please see my Flickr Belle De Jour Gallery.

Recommended Links and References:
- The Passion of Pierre Clémenti: European cinema’s christ-devil child
- Pierre Clémenti at Paris dans les années 70 (French language fan site)
- Pierre Clémenti - Acteur réalisateur (French language fan site)

My Buñuel Blog-a-thon Contributions:
- What’s in the Box?
- Ode to Marcel
- The Fine Art of Fashion: Yves Saint-Laurent

Critics and film scholars have spent countless hours analyzing Luis Buñuel’s film Belle de Jour (1967) and the mysterious Asian box that appears in one of the movies most memorable and erotic scenes. As someone who has read a lot of Marquis de Sade’s work, I’ve personally never seen the box as being very mysterious or profound, so I thought I would share my own thoughts about the buzzing box for the Luis Buñuel Blog-a-thon currently being hosted by Flickhead.

Many reviews of Belle de Jour seem written by rather chaste critics who often insist on weighing Buñuel’s film down with its clear social implications and debatable morality, instead of fully embracing it for the erotic masterpiece that it is. Like most of the surrealists, Luis Buñuel was clearly inspired and fascinated with the work of authors like Marquis de Sade, Octave Mirbeau and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and traces of Buñuel’s obsession with their work can be found throughout Belle de Jour. From its emotionally distant characters, to its masochistic ideas and brothel setting, the film could be read as a checklist of erotic themes found in early French literature.

When I saw Belle de Jour for the first time and watched the scene with the infamous buzzing box, I was immediately reminded of the sounds of insects and a brief passage in Marquis de Sade’s erotic classic Philosophy in the Boudoir, where he referenced a tale told by the 15th century Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. This titillating tale involves native women in Florida who supposedly made their men place “small poisonous insects in their male members until they swelled up tremendously and caused an insatiable libido.” It also explains that these insects could cause a man “dreadful pain” and “ulcers, ” but the negative implications aren’t as interesting as the erotic ones. With this odd tale lingering somewhere in the back of my mind, my first assumption about the buzzing box was that it contained insects that the box’s owner planned to use on himself as a sort of aphrodisiac to pleasure Catherine Deneuve’s character Séverine with.

This somewhat unusual assumption on my part is also fueled by Luis Buñuel’s own personal fascination with insects which appeared in many of his films, but at first glance could seem notably absent from Belle de Jour. Buñuel’s fascination with insects was first shown in An Andalusian Dog (Un chien andalou, 1929), but you can also find insects in his other films such as the scorpions in The Golden Age (L’ Âge d’or, 1930) and the cockroaches in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, 1972). According to Buñuel scholar Julie Jones who also provides the commentary for the Belle de Jour DVD and seems to agree with me about the insect quality of the sounds emanating from the mysterious box, Luis Buñuel associated insects with “the life of the instincts” and even wanted to make a film about insects.

If my casual assumptions are true and Buñuel is referencing the Amerigo Vespucci/Marquis De Sade tale in Belle de Jour, it could also easily explain Séverine’s sudden joy in participating in a sexual act with that particular client at the brothel. Séverine is clearly a submissive woman who the Madame Anais has insisted needs a “strong hand.” Her desires seem unquenchable and a long session of intense lovemaking with a sort of “super man” would undoubtedly excite and please her. The untranslated conversation between Séverine and the man seems to indicate to me that he will be the one using whatever is in the box during their sexual encounter, which is why he clearly tells her “Don’t be afraid.” It’s also important to notice how the man guards the box and holds it closely to his body in the film. It’s his secret and his possession, which could indicate that whatever it contains directly affects him even more than those around him.

Buñuel never fully explained the contents of the box within the film himself and seemed to enjoy the confusion it caused among critics and audiences, but I think the influence of de Sade’s writing on Belle de Jour and Buñuel in general might betray him here. As I mentioned above, the work of Marquis de Sade greatly inspired the Surrealist movement and Belle de Jour is ripe with references to Marquis de Sade’s novels, including Philosophy in the Boudoir where the tale of strange insects and their effects on the male anatomy are alluded to. It is a book that Buñuel read and must have known well, and I’m sure his own personal interest in insects would have made the Amerigo Vespucci/Marquis de Sade tale incredibly fascinating and appealing to him. Especially because it so deeply and directly links insects to “the life of the instincts” which Buñuel clearly obsessed over.

Renowned Surrealist Margritte’s artistic interpretations
of Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir

Since I’ve never read Joseph Kessel’s original novel Belle de Jour which Buñuel based his film on, I can’t elaborate on my assumptions as much as I would like to, but the inspirations for Kessel’s book seem very clear. It’s obvious that Kessel based his fictitious female character of Séverine on the male character of Severin found in Sacher-Masoch’s book Venus in Furs and he probably found inspiration in the erotic writings of Anais Nin, who I assume inspired the name of the brothel in Belle de Jour and its Madame. With all of these erotic literary references littered throughout Belle de Jour, I think it’s natural to assume that Buñuel’s mysterious buzzing box could possibly be linked to the insects briefly referenced in Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy of the Boudoir.

So the next time you find yourself wondering what’s in the box, I can only suggest considering insects and their erotic implications, as well as their symbolic importance in Buñuel’s own work.

Books Referenced and Recommended Reading:
- Philosophy in the Boudoir by Marquis de Sade
- Marquis De Sade: His Life And Works by Iwan Bloch
- Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
- The Diary of a Chambermaid by Octave Mirbeau
- Delta of Venus by Anais Nin
- Little Birds by Anais Nin
- The Autobiography Of A Flea by Anonymous

Films Referenced and Recommended Viewing:
- Belle de Jour (1967)
- Un Chien Andalou (1929)
- L’Age d’Or (1930)
- Diary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, 1964)
- The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, 1972)

My Buñuel Blog-a-thon Contributions:
- What’s in the Box?
- Ode to Marcel
- The Fine Art of Fashion: Yves Saint-Laurent

I neglected to mention that I reviewed Amando de Ossorio’s The Night of the Sorcerers (a.k.a. La Noche de los brujos, 1973) last month for Cinedelica. Out of the five or six Amando de Ossorio films I’ve seen The Night of the Sorcerers is my least favorite, but it’s still mildly entertaining and it might be worth a look if you’ve enjoyed the director’s other movies.

Oddly enough, one of the recent Horror Roundtable questions of the week was “What’s your favourite creepy tale for around the campfire?” and I answered that it was the Velvet Ribbon story, otherwise known as the Green Ribbon story. It also goes by various other names and seems based on an original story by Washington Irving. The tale involves a lovely woman who constantly wears a ribbon around her neck and once it’s removed by some curious male protagonist, her head falls off. I was really surprised to find out that Amando de Ossorio seems to have referenced that old campfire tale when he wrote the script for The Night of the Sorcerers. I haven’t come across any other reviews of the film that seemed to make the connection, but I found it fascinating so I included a mention of it in my own review of the movie.

If you’d like to see more screen shots from the film you can find them in my:
Night of the Sorcerers Flickr Gallery.

I never made a film thinking that I’d win the Grand Prize in Cannes. Never. I always thought it would be so beautiful for my films to be shown in theaters in the suburbs and the theater is packed with people who are enjoying my films. There it is, That’s more than enough. There’s nothing else. - Jess Franco

Today one of my favorite filmmakers turns 77 and I couldn’t let the date pass without wishing him a very happy birthday wherever he may be.

Franco seems to polarize people in my own experience. There’s a good chance that if you like him, you love him and if you don’t like him, you probably can’t understand what all the fuss is about. Either way you cut it, Jess Franco is a fascinating and creative man who for good or bad, may have made more movies than any other director I personally know of.

I tend to prefer Franco’s early films, in particular the movies he made between 1962 and 1972. The body of work he produced during that period is really amazing. Franco is one of horror cinema’s greatest auteurs in my opinion, and very few filmmakers working with his limited resources have been able to match his creative passion and shear volume of work.

Out of the 40+ films he made during 1962-1972, I’ve only managed to see 22 so far. Naturally I have my favorites such as The Diabolical Doctor Z (Miss Muerte, 1966) and I tend to prefer Franco’s films when they creatively blend horror with eroticism as in Venus in Furs (Paroxismus, 1969), Succubus (Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden, 1968) and Vampyros Lesbos (1971) over his straight up erotic films. Many of Franco’s best movies inventively mix genres, which makes them almost impossible to easily categorize.

I also really like his early spy and espionage films that often featured strong female protagonists saving the day as in Two Undercover Angels (Rote Lippen, Sadisterotica, 1969) or trying to take over the world in The Girl From Rio (The Seven Secrets of Sumuru,1969).

Franco uses music brilliantly in his movies and he’s also a great musician in his own right. Volumes could be written about the numerous nightclub scenes featured in almost every Franco film. He returns to exotic dance clubs and erotic strip joints over and over again in his work. It’s almost as if the musician in him is longing to get out, so these trips he makes to various nightclubs in his movies could be one way that his inner musician is able to express itself.

When I think about Franco’s best films a few words replay in my head such as haunting, beautiful and surreal. There is an otherworldly quality about much of his work that I find utterly entrancing and even after watching so many of Franco’s movies (30+ at last count) I’m still eager to seek out more of his films and return to my favorites over and over again.

For more on Jess Franco I highly recommend visiting one of my favorite blogs: I’m in a Jess Franco State of Mind.

You can also find a nice post about Jess Franco over at Jeremy’s terrific blog Moon In The Gutter.

Tim Lucas also wrote up a great piece about Jess Franco today over at his Video WatchBlog. Here’s hoping that Tim follows up his Mario Bava book with a book on Franco!