Original title: La morte ha fatto l’uovo

Fans of Italian horror films and gialli have long been accustomed to the strangeness and myriad illogicalities that go with the territory and indeed positively embrace the – it’s the trademark peculiarities of the genres that keep us coming back for more. But few films are quite as deranged as Giulio Questi’s Death Laid an Egg, an almost indescribable film that may be horror, could equally be a giallo, and certainly has elements of science fiction, political satire and surrealism. But it’s a film that steadfastly refuses to fit neatly into any particular generic box and remains a true one off, the sort of anomaly that makes sifting through hours of dross so rewarding.

On the surface, Death Laid an Egg is a fairly straightforward thriller. Wealthy middle-class couple Anna (Gina Lollobrigida) and Marco (Jean-Louis Trintignant) run an automated poultry farm in the Italian countryside, their chief scientist working on genetic engineering projects to breed larger chickens born without heads or bones. Workers made redundant by the automation process shuffle moodily around outside, occasionally lobbing things into the building. Marco works for The Association, a shady, egg-obsessed advertising agency but is troubled by the direction they want to take his farm. But then he’s a very troubled man all round – in his spare time he lures prostitutes to a hotel room where he seemingly murders them (there’s more going on here than initially meets the eye) while carrying on an affair with Anna’s cousin and secretary Gabrielle (Ewa Aulin). Complicating matters, Gabrielle is herself having an affair with Marco’s fellow ad man Mondaini (Jean Sobieski) and, having discovered what Marco gets up to in his hotel room, they’re plotting to kill Anna, frame Marco for the deed and take the farm for themselves.

So, just a standard issue giallo set among the Italian well-to-do with all the expected sex, violence and labyrinthine plotting then? Not a bit of it! For many years, particularly in British fan circles, Death Laid an Egg was spoken about in hushed, reverential tones. Those lucky enough to have seen it regaled the rest of us with tales of just how strange it was and how it refused to sit easily in any conventional genre and for a while its very title became a byword for weirdness. And it was a reputation that was well deserved – even now it looks and feels like nothing else, a film that both is and isn’t a giallo, is and isn’t a horror film and is and isn’t science fiction – yet still manages somehow to be all of those things at the same time.

Questi and his frequent screenwriting collaborator Franco Arcalli (he also provided the film’s often startling, non-linear editing and went on to write Zabriskie Point (1970) for Michelangelo Antonioni and Ultimo tango a Parigi/Last Tango in Paris (1972) for Bernardo Bertolucci among others before his untimely death in 1978 at the age of just 48) were passionately left-leaning in their politics and they bring some of the radicalism of their beliefs to Death Laid an Egg – by the end, the venal schemes of the capitalist bourgeoisie have resulted in them being literally consumed by the creatures they exploited for profit (“I am proud to be the first filmmaker to show that chickens are terrifying and cannibalistic” Questi once said). Writer and director scratch away at the glamorous surface of bourgeois life to expose the festering sore beneath. They poke fun in all directions – look at the hilariously low-tech stock market that Marco visits, just a few men shouting at each other in front of nothing more elaborate than a blackboard, like rowdy schoolboys in a classroom. And then there’s the corporation that Marco answers to, so obsessed with chickens that huge portraits of them hang in board rooms and corridors.

It’s that sort of film. You can take everything that happens at face value and still have a good time with it but shifting around beneath the surface is the same brand of revolutionary politics that informed Questi’s western Se sei vivo spara/Django Kill…If You Live, Shoot! (1967). Dario Argento’s redefining of the giallo would begin two years later with L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo/The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970) but Questo and Arcalli were already trampling all over the conventions of the genre as defined by Mario Bava earlier in the 1960s, mixing class warfare and potent satire with the by now already well-established, black-gloved killer trope, a trope it then so very neatly subverts.

Death Laid an Egg seems more indebted to the experimentation of the French New Wave than to the nascent giallo, taking inspiration as much from that other cinematic political provocateur Jean-Luc Godard as from Mario Bava. In a particularly weird moment in Questi’s film, Arcalli’s editing goes into overdrive as Marco and Gabrielle speed along a stretch of road, stroboscopic images of a bloodied woman staggering from a burning, over-turned car possibly a tip of the hat to the automotive carnage of Godard’s Week-end (1967).

Bruno Maderna’s wild score is as demented as the film’s plot, all discordant piano, percussive guitar and strange folk songs mixed with lush strings to hallucinatory effect. It’s a disorientating sonic barrage that makes even the more mundane moments in the film – and it says a lot that those mundane tend t be the genre regulars like the sex scenes – seem like they’ve been beamed in from another planet.

There’s a conventional thriller chugging along nicely beneath all the camera tricky, oddball editing and head-scratching plot twists and turns, but Questi isn’t all that bothered about that – he finds other, far more interesting stories to tell and that’s what makes Death Laid an Egg – which also saw release as Plucked or A Curious Way to Love, baffled distributors desperate to make the film more commercially viable – so unique.

Death Laid an Egg exists in two forms, the heavily cut 91-minute version that seems to have been the version exported outside Italy and the more expansive 104-minute director’s cut. The latter is the way to go of course but it’s a remarkable oddity in any version, a film that continues to defy classification and remains as fascinating, baffling and excitingly disorientating as it ever was.