I am not a fan of the Italian niche of horror known as “giallo” but it intrigues me, so I keep digging deeper into the genre.
Shock was Mario Bava’s last film and…let’s just say his career didn’t end on a high point. This is far from the worst horror movie I have seen. It isn’t even the worst giallo I have seen. Unfortunately, it is not very original, it doesn’t have many thrills, and some moments were so absurd that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. And go figure: there was one truly astonishing scare, and I can’t say anything about that without giving away every secret of the plot.
And that plot is rather simple: Daria Nicolodi plays a recently remarried mother, whose previous husband died at sea. Want to place any bets against his body never being recovered? No? Damn—here I thought I was going to make some easy money.
Anyway, she has a young son from that first marriage, who is starting to develop some pretty disturbing behaviors. The only scene I will single out is when he is in bed with her (nope—not the weird part yet) and, while she’s sleeping, he starts touching her. Just touching her shoulder, or thereabouts, but she responds in her sleep by writhing in a very suggestive manner. From the kid’s perspective, his hand is that of an adult, rotting corpse. But that didn’t weird me out, because all I could think about was how fucked up it was that his mom was getting so aroused.
There isn’t much of a mystery here and I didn’t feel any satisfaction at figuring out most of it before the reveal. Even though I figured out what was going on, most of the scenes were so preposterous that I felt the movie didn’t truly build up to its conclusion. A predictable ending can still be enjoyable if we’re along for the ride, and what we see logically leads to up it. Shock feels like scenes discarded from other horror scripts strung together with barely enough connective tissue to be mistaken for plot.
I’m sure I will keep watching giallo, though I’m unsure I could ever be an enthusiast of the genre. I hope I’ll see significantly better ones than Shock, and I assume I will see much worse, but this is a movie that only completists could enjoy (barring one scene I still refuse to spoil).
Dir: Mario Bava
Starring Daria Nicolodi
Watched on Arrow blu-ray