Buio Omega: Beyond the Darkness

Dark Dusk.

Following our Italian trend we give maestro Fulci a rest to allow  another maestro to delight us with one of his best movies: Buio Omega (Dark Dusk) AKA Beyond the Darkness, is a 1979 Joe D'amato horror film. Joe D'amato is a well known cult Italian film maker who's specialty is to imitate massive Hollywood blockbuster with his personal touch, of course. His filmography is so vast and varied that he has almost tried every genre you can think of. Horror, softcore, thriller, Giallo, porn, you name it!

Regarded as his tour de force movie, Buio Omega, tells the story of rich orphan Francesco Wyler, a spoiled kid who can't part ways with his recently demised girlfriend Anna Völk (Cinzia Monreale steals the show in a very special kind of role) In order to move on with his life, his nanny, Iris (Franca Stoppi) will do whatever it takes to help Francesco, and by "whatever it takes" she means doing all sorts of nasty things only perverted minds would enjoy. 

Death won't keep us apart.

Mr. Taxman.

D'Amato's notorious horror film is a glorious amalgam of Poe (The Premature Burial), Franju's Les yeux sans visage, Hitchock's Psycho and the furthest reaches of Freudian psychology, with the Oedipus complex finding its climax in an act of castration by the mother imago. It's a compelling and repellent film, an astonishing feat of visual storytelling and an overwhelming mesh of stunning cinematography, fierce editing and driving disco-infused score courtesy of The Goblin. D'Amato manages to both create one of the most punishing nasties in the horror cannon whilst at the same time leaving us with some truly visionary images of twisted love, obsession, death and decay.

The story, unlikely to the rational mind but with the clarity of a dream, tells of a young orphaned heir to a fortune, living in a mansion and spending his time at his favorite pursuit, taxidermy. His insane governess/surrogate mother colludes with an occultist to put the voodoo on the heir's fiancée, causing the beautiful girl's death, which coincides with a kiss he gives her on her hospital bed. Breastfeeding by his governess does little to console our hero, so he disinters his beloved's corpse, brings it home and stuffs it as he has been stuffing various animals. Yet, as so often in drama, one crime leads to another and another, as various young women have to be dispatched after they stumble on his secret. But this state of affairs can't continue, and society in the shape of a greedy mortician who witnessed the body stealing gradually catches up with him, but normality is only restored by the death of our hero and his mad "mother"; her last act is to castrate her errant son.

Are you happy now master Francesco?

I could do this all day.

The heir's predicament is visceral and in some ways universal. He wants rationality and normality but is thwarted by the governess, who represents dark forces and old magical ways (there's a touch of Medea about her). Her spell prevents him from being with his perfect love, but she aids and abets him in maintaining the embalmed corpse of that dream, at the same time as protecting him from the outside world. One extraordinary scene has the heir bringing a young woman into his bedroom and making love to her in the bed next to the stuffed cadaver of his betrothed – he ruts on top of the new girl whilst staying fixated on the old, and when the new girl notices the corpse in the bed, she screams and meets her end by being ravaged, bitten and partially devoured by the crazed young man.

The taxidermy sequence is stomach-churning in its explicitness, and was notorious at the time of release because of rumors D'Amato had used read corpses in the filming. Cuts are explicitly studied by the camera, entrails are unraveled from the stomach, the heart is removed, kissed and bitten into by the love-sick male. To love somebody is to love their body, but the implications of this when the body is deceased is a horrific extension of the loving instinct, and what gives the film its power. The film concentrates on the fate of the body after death, with burials, cremations, dismemberments, taxidermy, rendering in acid all shown in lurid detail. The film is partially about the sea changes that these processes wreak on the body. The most striking of these is the acid bath, where the fleshy corpse of a victim is submerged only for the head to rise again, just a pair of eyes in and a ragged mop on a grinning skull, the death's head. The rendered remains are finally poured into the garden, to disappear into the ground of an unconcerned nature. The film confronts the most terrible truths about death, the body, desire and warped human relationships, and shows us no way out other than death.

Aren't you tired of bringing teenage girls here, master?

Acid: better than soap.

Eventually, the dead fiancée's sister shows up at the mansion and things come to a head. The heir seems to realize that the living thing is better than the dead, but the governess won't allow this, emblematic guardian against life that she is, and she runs at the heir with a knife looking exactly like Norman Bates dressed as his mother. The knife cuts into the young man's sex, the fruition of that castration anxiety which Freud posited as a deep-seated fear in boys and young men. He and the crazy faux-mother rip and bite each other, bringing both of them to their doom. The mortician finds what he takes to be the stolen corpse, and returns it to its coffin, but it's the living sister (mortified into a state of paralytic shock), and she finally bursts from the grave, maddened with horror.

That crazed lady escaping from the jaws of death, reborn from the coffin, is the visual paradigm of the audience at the end of this stunning film – a movie which truly takes us beyond the darkness and brings to light the rotten, the warped, the weird and the dissolutions which we'd prefer not to be confronted with, except in the genre of horror, of which this is surely a masterpiece. 

an eye for an eye?

Jogging kills.

Buio Omega, premiered in the USA in 1984. The original VHS release came in two different editions, the Italian edition, which features extended plot scenes, while lacking several of the gory scenes. On the other hand the German VHS featured every gory scene but lacked the extended plot scenes, of course, both of this editions are long gone out of print. Fortunately, the film was re-released on DVD a few years ago and you can still obtain a copy of the fully uncensored edition. 

Despite the gory hype this film has, the graphic violence sequences are brief, and not as many as people tend to think, and that's where D'amato's creativity peaks because, each scene is carefully crafted to add to the perverted atmosphere in which Francesco & Iris spend their days and as matter of fact, Iris' complicity with Francesco seems to go back a long time  because every time they have to get rid of a dead girl, it seems like the most natural thing to do. Cinzia Monreale, steals the show as Anna. Although she's playing dead 90% of the movie, she does a tremendous effort to keep her eyes from blinking, and breaths very slowly to avoid her chest from being noticed, playing dead for as long as she does is trickier than it seems. Unfortunately, her career wouldn't last that long and clearly, this film along with The Beyond are her greatest parts.  

Death never looked this beautiful before.

Shit just got real!

Overall, a must watch just because it's the birth of the gore genre and its one of the finest Italian horror movies ever filmed. Nevertheless, do yourself a favor and try to watch it in its original language, since most of these Italian films were awfully dubbed to English, significantly diminishing the essence of the characters thus inevitably affecting the plot, because Buio Omega is a horror movie based upon the twisted minds of its characters, so nothing beats original language when it comes to captivating the viewer's mind.

Here's the movie trailer and be careful where you go jogging, you could be the next victim of a twisted couple...

Bonus video, "Goblin" the official theme song to the film: