Genre

Horror

Year of Production

1971

Time

109'

B/W - Color

C

Distribution

Panta Cin.ca

Produced by

DC 7 - Terra Filmkunst - Paris Cannes Production

Reviews

Why WEB OF THE SPIDER?
by Squonkamatic, Jan 04 2005

Antonio Margheriti's WEB OF THE SPIDER is my favorite Eurohorror film, and possibly my favorite movie regardless of genre.

While the court is still out on that particular verdict, one of the questions I have never formally posed to myself before, is what is it about this dingy, obscure, misunderstood movie that appeals to me so deeply and on such a profound level? Is it just the "deformed/mutant kid" affection one feels for a sadly twisted freak? Or is there some quality, or perhaps a series of qualities, about the film that strikes a chord? And if so, what qualities, and why do they resonate with me so much?

One of the reasons why I have avoided this essay -- while fully intending to write it -- is that such an approach to critical discourse is more about the writer than the work of art in question. This may very well end up being an essay about my own predilections & tendencies as a consumer of the film medium, something that would presumably be of zero interest to your everyday/casual reader who does not know me nor care about what I may think makes for a good movie experience.

As such I usually confine my writings to advocating the movie itself: I want people to watch and enjoy this film if possible regardless of what my particular feelings for it may constitute. I cannot stand by someone's TV set and provide a commentary about the film as it plays out to explain, elucidate or expound upon what takes place onscreen. Folks have to figure that stuff out for themselves, though I will assure you that WEB OF THE SPIDER is not just about a shook who takes up a sucker bet that he can't stand an entire night alone in a supposedly haunted castle. There is much, much more going on here, open to interpretation on so many different levels that to impose my own take on the affairs would, to a certain degree, ruin the fun of those who have not seen it and arrived at their own conclusions.

But let's assume, for the sake of this one body of writing, that we all have. And that we are also familiar with Margheriti's CASTLE OF BLOOD/Danza Macabra from 1964, WEB OF THE SPIDER's immediate predecessor & essentially the same story told with a different cinematic approach and different players in the various roles. We know who Allan Foster is: American writer, sometimes poet, with a tendancy to observe the philosophical aspects of life, and a pre-disposition towards being a romantic. We also know that the film's two Allan Foster's are very different people plugged into the same role: CASTLE OF BLOOD's Foster is realized by a British actor named Georges Reviere, a distinguished & sensitive actor who's Allan Foster is a man of a certain amount of sophistication and wit. WEB OF THE SPIDER's Allan Foster is embodied by Anthony Franciosa, and American/Italian actor of the method variety, known for his ability to play both high class/societied types and gritty western gunfighters effectively, with equal amounts of histrionics as required by the nature of whatever script is at hand.

I had a professor who used to advocate the idea that movies should always be about people and things that happen to them, usually resulting in a change in their basic character -- for better or worse. The process of watching a film is usually about watching this happen to the character, and it is very important to note that the ordeals that the two films subject their Allan Fosters too are very different experiences, if only for the sheer elemental fact that one film was made in 1964 -- a period of relative restraint & naivite about what films could portray -- and one was made in 1970, at a period when both film in general and the horror genre in particular were changing their attitudes about what is permissible or appropriate to show an audience. By 1970 horror audiences in particular were becoming more "jaded" and "worldly", not only accepting but to a certain extent demanding explicit or graphic content to the films they would patronize. Blood, gore, profanity, heaving bosoms and even outright graphic sexual displays became a part of the formula for ensuring a movie's success or failure. Especially to the horror movie audience, in that horror films have always been about taboo issues -- Horror movies are sex movies, to a certain extent, because they are about the base, gutteral responses we have to visual & audio stimulations.

So in 1970, Margheriti and his collaborators were allowed to indulge this nature of their craft to a greater degree than in 1964. CASTLE OF BLOOD is a fine movie, one of the best ever made -- it is an experimental horror film in that Margheriti and his collaborators specifically chose to work with the Black & White film medium, and as such the film is a study in how light can be used as a storytelling motif in itself. CASTLE OF BLOOD revels in it's "artiness", where the reality depicted onscreen is murkily defined & other-worldly, with every flaring of a match to light a candle an event within the framework of a shot. It's depiction of an alternate reality of ghosts, shadowns, crumbling crypts and ghostly wooded English manors is served well by Margheriti's choice of B&W film, and he himself often lamented that WEB OF THE SPIDER was ruined by the addition of the element of color photography to it's still very potent concoction.

While it is more likely that Margheriti preferred CASTLE OF BLOOD due to romantic feelings for his female lead Barbara Steele [for which he can be naturally forgiven: Steele is one of cinema's great beauties and her exquisite presence helps to define CASTLE OF BLOOD's singularly unique & often imitated experience as a film], he was essentially correct, but perhaps too close to the subject at hand to be dispassionate or clinical in assessing WEB OF THE SPIDER's strengths & weaknesses when directly compared to the earlier film. My main thesis about the two films maintains that they were made with different objectives, motivations and during very different times, resulting in movies that while they may tell the same basic story could not be more different.

CASTLE OF BLOOD is more of an experimental art house film masquerading as a ghost story and is very classical in nature, complete with an orchestrated, harpsichord dominated fully "cinematic" sounding musical score by the great Italian composer Riz Ortolani, who won an Oscar in 1963 for his John Barry/007-esque brassy, jazzy soundtrack for Margheriti's THE VIRGIN OF NUREMBERG starring Christopher Lee and CASTLE OF BLOOD's George Reviere. Ortolani also returned to do the score for WEB OF THE SPIDER, and like the film's visual qualities his music -- while also serving the same role within the framework of the story -- could also not have been more different. Instead of "quaint" sounding chamber music themes contrasted with an almost Kitsch like use of the Ferriman, an electronic musical device that produces the "wwoooOoOoOo" monster movie music sounds that flavor CASTLE OF BLOOD's creepy sections, Ortolani's WEB OF THE SPIDER score is an all-out aural assault of acid rock, freakout atonal jazz, atmospheric frenetics and contrasting lyrical ballad sections. It is a totally unconventional & unique musical score, more reminiscent of the "progressive" jazz/rock sound of British "art rock" bands like King Crimson than anything from the Hollywood approach to film scores that is more evident in CASTLE OF BLOOD's music.

So along with a different "sound", WEB OF THE SPIDER also embraced a different look, which is the world of decorated sets, costumed Eurobabes in push-up bra's and more blatant onscreen sexual conduct that was being popularized in 1970 by Britain's Hammer Films. Director Roy Ward Baker's sumptuous 1970 film THE VAMPIRE LOVERS appears to be the main inspiration for the "look" of the film, right down to the casting of the very Ingrit Pitt-esque Karin Feild in the role of Julia. Where CASTLE OF BLOOD had existed in a sparse, poorly lit and defined netherworld, WEB OF THE SPIDER exists in a realm of tightly packed & decorated sets abounding with the accouterments of Eurohorror: Candleabras and candlesticks, bookshelves, long wooden tables, suits of armor & mounted weapons displays, paintings, draperies, cushioned dias and couch like chairs, sweeping hallways lined with sitting chairs and wall hangings ... There is even a costumed ball, where the dolled up actors & actresses dance a fully orchestrated waltz that is remarkably similar to the one shown in THE VAMPIRE LOVERS [which in itself was no doubt inspired by the waltz scenes in CASTLE OF BLOOD: history repeats itself].

In order to display all of these wonderful sights -- and to do so with the then popular and inexpensive Eastmanstock coloring process common to so much of Eurohorror -- Margheriti found he had to light designer Octavio Scotti's sets to not only allow viewers to see what was onscreen but to do so with color film stock. 

The result was a completely different viewing experience from the arty surrealism of CASTLE OF BLOOD, which was so strikingly original in 1964/1965 that it's appeal crossed genre lines: CASTLE OF BLOOD is widely regarded as a masterpiece even by those who may not usually be drawn to Italian made horror films.

By contrast, WEB OF THE SPIDER is a much more conventional looking movie, and in fact it is prescient to observe that one of it's objectives was to have the "look" of Eurohorror be one of it's main selling points. It lacks the novel visual invention of CASTLE OF BLOOD, is less "arty" in nature and as such was widely regarded as a disappointment by both those who went to see it and those who participated in it's creation. The fact that Margheriti and company opted to further up their ante in the film by featuring a big name star [Klaus Kinski] further added to the confused reception that the film continues to receive even thirty five years later. It had a bigger budget, a bigger cast, a higher profile "A-list" sensibility, and yet the result was almost a null sum gain. By telling the same story the effort inevitably engendered comparison to the earlier film, an effort that reveled in it's almost purely cinematic nature. In comparison [and especially in the truncated, dingy, full-frame English language version that most readers of this essay will be familiar with], WEB OF THE SPIDER plays out more like a Soap Opera, with elegantly costumed actors reciting lines and engaged in various activities while photographed on brightly lit sets to show off their faces & the pretty trappings of the medium. WEB OF THE SPIDER seems to have more in common with the Dan Curtis DARK SHADOWS television series that Margheriti was doubtlessly aware of by 1970, itself an inspiration of the Hammer Horror effect translated for daytime TV audiences in a serialized form.

A working example of this "Dark Shadows Effect" is in the use of light itself: One of the phrases I like to coin is that in CASTLE OF BLOOD the striking of a match or the lighting of a candle is an event within the framework of any particular shot. In WEB OF THE SPIDER, the matches, candlesticks and candelabras are, by comparison, reduced to being props that the actors carry around to help establish a mood or moment. The densely packed & overtly designed sets are even already fully lit when Franciosa's Allan Foster first enters Providence Castle, making a viewer wonder why finding a torch or a candlestick is such a big deal. The big deal is to give the actor a prop to better define or characterize his or her actions and the meaning of the scene in question, rather than provide actual illumination. The light brought into Providence Castle by George Reviere in CASTLE OF BLOOD is not only used to illuminate sets, but to define the reality presented onscreen: Move out of the flickering candle light and you enter the world of the dead, but strike a match and you create a small pocket of reality inside of this netherworld. By shunning that narrative construct, WEB OF THE SPIDER plays out more conventionally, cues into the imagination of it's viewers less, and leaves only the sets, actors, music and story as it's fodder of consumption.

And that is ONE of the reasons why I respond to WEB OF THE SPIDER more acutely: It is equally about it's narrative story and the genre that it is a part of, and less about the artistic nature of film as a medium. We are able to spend more time engaging the story without being swooned by the visual dynamic -- by being a more "boring" and straight forward visual telling of it's story WEB OF THE SPIDER seems to serve it better. Another catch phrase about the films that I like to use is that CASTLE OF BLOOD may be a better film, but WEB OF THE SPIDER is better Poe, though current research indicates that the base story for both films may have been more accurately inspired by the works of British supernatural author Algeron Blackwood crossed with certain themes from two or three Edgar Allan Poe stories. In either event it's literal visual depiction of a Victorian era setting with all of the trappings of a European gothic horror film speaks more clearly to me of these roots than CASTLE OF BLOOD's intoxicating, arty, cinematic melange of sight & sound. Some things are better left to the imagination for some, and as such CASTLE OF BLOOD will probably always be the more preferred version of the story amongst devotees of the genre: It is a much more dynamic and self-aware experience that exists in the realm of the fantastique. WEB OF THE SPIDER is more of a gross elaboration on it's storytelling ideas, with the bright stage lights needed for a Technicolor production washing out the ir-reality, and replacing it with a more documentarian approach to telling it's tale of madness, supernatural manifestations, and death.

WEB OF THE SPIDER allows us to more directly participate in the fantasy of Poe himself, or perhaps more correctly the irrational, macabre and mouldering realities that Poe and Algeron Blackwood's writings suggest. When seen in it's properly widescreened Italian form the results are breathtaking: This is a movie with a much more aggressive and sweeping agenda than CASTLE OF BLOOD, which was happy to seduce and intoxicate and exist in the realm of the imagination. By staking it's claim in a more cold bright of day "reality", WEB OF THE SPIDER places it's emphasis upon The Strange Tale of Allan Foster, and the traditions of the Eurohorror genre it is relegated to by those insistent upon classifying forms of expression.