Original title: La casa dalle finestre che ridono

Made just after Dario Argento started work on his baroque masterpiece Suspiria (1977), this striking film from his former collaborator Pupi Avati (he worked on the screenplay for Profondo rosso/Deep Red (1975)) couldn’t have been more dissimilar, a moody, rural tale that favours a steady accumulation of strange and seemingly inconsequential details over the sensory blitzkrieg of Argento’s film.

A strikingly ghastly title sequences, in which a half-naked man is trussed up and tortured to death by a pair of masked and cowled assailants – in slow motion no less – gives way to what at first seems to be a rather more mundane film. Artist Stefano travels to a remote region of north-east Italy, to a small village in (Lino Capolicchio) arrives in a village nestled in the lagoons of the Valli di Comacchio area, to work on a decaying fresco in the local church. The painting is revealed to be a depiction of the suffering of St Sebastian painted by legendary artist Bruno Legnani, known locally as “the painter of agonies,” who tortured his models to death while capturing their suffering on canvas. He died many years ago after setting himself on fire and Stefano finds himself staying at the former home of his two sisters who have been missing since his death. He begins an affair with schoolteacher Francesca (Francesca Marciano) but apart from catching the eye of a promiscuous older woman is largely treated with suspicion by the other townsfolk. When people start dying in horrible ways, Stefano suspects that someone is trying to stop him from uncovering a terrible secret about Legnani and his family.

The lone art restorer has been a surprisingly common character in Italian horror, tracing its lineage back perhaps to Nicolas Roeg’s Anglo-Italian, Venice set Don’t Look Now (1973). The Argento produced, Michele Soavi-directed La chiesa/The Church (1989) and Massimo Dallamano’s Il medaglione insanguinato (Perche?!)/The Cursed Medallion (1975) feature similar characters in similarly lethal situations. Art, it’s creation and appreciation courses through the veins of The House with Laughing Windows, taking the murderous mad artist trope of films like Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Color Me Blood Red (1965) and treating it with a grim seriousness that those films lacked. As soon as we see that the fresco that Stefano is being asked to restore is of the martyrdom of St Sebastian, alarm bells start to ring and the scene will play out in the film a number of times.

Like Deep Red, The House with Laughing Windows hints at possible supernatural forces hovering just beyond the reach of the characters – the tape recorder that starts playing even after the electricity has been shorted out, people disappearing unexpectedly and Legnani’s continuing malignant influence that has seeped into the very fabric of the town whose inhabitants are a wonderful assembly of supporting characters of varying degrees of oddness. But it pulls back from a full-blown other-worldly explanation and in the climax, guaranteed to trigger all sorts of unintended responses these days, reveals the root cause of the horror to be very human.

Avati had taken inspiration from a childhood story of a priest who had been exhumed in a nearby village and there’s a decidedly anti-clerical thread that sits neatly alongside a study of a small community’s instincts to protect itself, to bury its secrets and shield the guilty from the prying eyes of outsiders. If horror films have taught us anything, it’s that these kind of superficially bucolic, picturesque and out of the way places are always a hotbed of sex, violence and insanity and outside of Twin Peaks and The League of Gentlemen‘s Royston Vasey, this out of the way village in the Valli di Comacchio is one of the most disquieting you’ll ever visit. It’s also one of the most gorgeous, Pasquale Rachini’s ravishing photography making atmospheric use of, not the Valli di Commacchio itself, but the equally breath-taking Lido degli Scacchi in the Ferrara province of the Emilia-Romagna, not far from Avati’s native Bologna. It’s a region rarely seen in Italian horror films and its alienness is both seductive and terrifying.

Avati’s script, written in collaboration with his brother Antonio (the film was the first product from their AMA production company) comes complete with one of the most audacious twist endings in Italian horror, a sub-genre not unfamiliar with outrageous last-minute reveals and revelations. It’s one not worth spoiling as it’s completely unguessable even to those paying the closest of attention and not a little crazy. Whether you’ll buy it or not is another matter but it’s in keeping with the film’s many concerns and brings this fine and creepy film to a suitably strange conclusion.

The House with Laughing Windows was barely seen outside Italy for many years, earning itself a cult following through word of mouth and often shoddy video bootlegs until a subtitled and restored print was finally made available, confirming that the film is indeed one of the finest horror films ever made in Italy. From its hideous, sepia-tinted opening title sequence, complete with a harrowingly vile voice over that we later learn are the tape-recorded rantings of Legnani, the film never lets up its grip, Avati keeping the suspense and suffocating sense of decay and corruption that has settled over the town bubbling along nicely.

Avati had already cut his genre teeth on the 1968 film Balsamus, l’uomo di Satana/Blood Relations and had contributed to the script of Lucio Fulci’s vampire comedy Cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula della Brianza/Dracula in the Provinces (1975), He didn’t direct many other horror films, though the ones he did – Zeder (1983) and L’arcano incantatore/The Mysterious Enchanter (1996) – are equally impressive, but he also had a hand in writing Lamberto Bava‘s directorial debut Macabro (1980).