Don't Torture a Duckling: Fulci's Village of Suspicion

Say the word giallo and a very specific set of images assembles itself: a black-gloved killer, a modernist Milan apartment, a beautiful woman in expensive clothes, a straight razor catching the light. Lucio Fulci looked at that glossy formula in 1972 and moved it somewhere the tourists never go — a poor, sun-cracked village in the deep Italian south, where the roads are dust and the loudest institution is the church. Don’t Torture a Duckling is a giallo with the glamour boiled off, and it is one of the most quietly furious films the genre produced.

Before Fulci became the “Godfather of Gore” — before the zombies and the eye trauma and the wet apocalypses of his later career — he made this, a murder mystery with a social conscience and a real target. The film was hobbled on release, partly by its own savagery and partly by a subject that Italian distributors and the Italian censor found genuinely dangerous. It has taken decades and the boutique-label restoration circuit to establish it as one of Fulci’s two or three finest hours.

A different map

The setting is the whole argument. Fulci films the village of Accendura as a place caught between two centuries, where a new motorway flyover cuts across the sky above peasant hovels and a modern world of pop songs and city journalists brushes against a bedrock of magic and shame. Into this comes a series of murders: local boys, pre-adolescent, are being killed one by one. The village does what villages in these stories always do — it looks for someone to blame who is already an outsider.

The suspects are a study in how a frightened community distributes fear. There is Maciara, played by Florinda Bolkan, a wild-haired local woman who practises folk witchcraft, makes wax dolls, and is instantly assumed to be the killer because she is strange and poor and female. There is Patrizia, played by Barbara Bouchet, a bored, wealthy city woman drying out from a drug scandal in her father’s country house, whose casual sexuality scandalises the village. And there is the visiting journalist Andrea Martelli — Tomas Milian — who arrives to cover the killings and stays to investigate, functioning as the film’s outsider eye and the audience’s proxy for rational doubt.

What Fulci understands, and dramatises with real cruelty, is that the village’s instinct to blame the witch is itself the engine of horror. The community does not need a supernatural monster; it has superstition, and superstition is quite capable of manufacturing atrocity on its own.

The scene that stops the film cold

Every giallo has its set-piece murder, and Fulci, who would later build entire films around single unbearable images, delivers one here that has nothing to do with the black-gloved killer at all. Maciara, wrongly suspected, is set upon by village men in a cemetery and beaten to death with chains and belts, slowly, in broad daylight, while the traffic hums on the flyover overhead and no one comes.

The sequence is unbearable for a reason beyond its violence. Fulci scores it to Ornella Vanoni’s tender, wistful pop ballad “Quei giorni insieme a te”, and the collision of the sweet song with the sight of a woman being flogged to death is one of the cruellest editorial decisions in Italian horror. The music does not comment or console. It carries on, indifferent, exactly as the modern world carries on above the ancient brutality it has failed to reach. This is not a killing the plot requires. It is the film’s thesis made flesh: the real horror in this village is the mob itself, and the mob kills in sunlight with a love song playing.

Why it works

The film’s power comes from Fulci refusing the genre’s usual pleasures at precisely the moments you expect them. The gialli of his rival Dario Argento are ecstatic about violence, staging murder as operatic spectacle; Fulci here stages violence to make you complicit and ashamed, and reserves his real venom for the institutions that trade on innocence, ignoring the sex-fear the genre usually indulges. The whole picture is built to lead your suspicion toward the strange woman, the loose woman, the city outsider — the people a moral panic always burns — and then to make you sit with how readily you accepted the direction of travel.

Sergio D’Offizi’s photography is crucial and under-praised. The film is bright, dusty, wide-open, the antithesis of the shadowed urban giallo, and that daylight is what makes it frightening. Evil here has nowhere to hide because it does not need to; it operates in the open with the community’s blessing. Riz Ortolani’s score, veering between that aching pop tenderness and genuine menace, does the same work as Peter Maxwell Davies’s music in another film about a village hunting a scapegoat.

The cross-references write themselves. This is the same year and the same country that produced Fulci’s later gates-of-hell delirium in The Beyond, and watching Duckling first shows you the rigorous, angry filmmaker underneath the surrealist who came later. Set it beside Argento’s Deep Red and you can see two temperaments splitting the genre between them — one reaching for beauty, one reaching for a wound. And for the film’s true sibling, look to Spain: Who Can Kill a Child?, released four years later, is the other great Mediterranean horror to weaponise bright sun and the murder of children, and to ask what a supposedly innocent community is really capable of.

The title, and the trouble it caused

The strange title is not arbitrary. It comes from a battered Donald Duck toy belonging to a mute, disabled girl — a small, wounded object that becomes a clue and a piece of the film’s texture, a scrap of imported American childhood lying in the dust of a village that has barely entered the twentieth century. The toy is the film in miniature: mass-culture innocence dropped into a world of chains, wax dolls and clifftop confessions, unable to survive there intact.

That collision is exactly what made the film hard to release. Fulci’s frontal assault on the Church, arriving in a still deeply Catholic Italy, ensured a difficult passage past distributors and censors and a muted commercial life, and the picture never got the run its craft deserved. Fulci himself reportedly regarded it as among his best work, and its long unavailability — for years it was the great missing title in his filmography — is part of why its rediscovery has felt like a genuine reappraisal rather than mere nostalgia. Tomas Milian’s journalist, the rational outsider trying to read a village that does not want to be read, gives the audience a steady eye through the delirium, and his slow arrival at the unthinkable answer is the film’s real suspense.

Where to watch, and why it matters

The film circulated for years in poor prints and was long the hardest of Fulci’s key works to see properly; it has since had the full restoration treatment from the horror-preservation labels, and it repays a good transfer, because the daylight clarity is the point. Watch it as the film that proves Fulci was a real director with real anger before he became a gore brand — and as a giallo that used the machinery of the murder mystery to say something true about how frightened people decide who to destroy.

Spoilers below

The killer is the reason the film was dangerous in 1972 Italy, and the reason it still lands. After the plot has walked us past the witch, the seductress and the village idiot, the murderer is revealed to be Don Alberto, the young, gentle, universally trusted parish priest. His motive is the film’s most disturbing idea: he kills the boys to preserve their innocence. Tormented by his own desire and convinced that adolescence will corrupt these children into sin, he murders them while they are still pure, believing he is saving their souls from the men they would become. The Church, the one institution the village never thinks to suspect, is the source of the horror all along.

Fulci drives the point home with the priest’s death. Unmasked and pursued, Don Alberto falls from a cliff, and Fulci films his descent in slow, prolonged detail, his face smashing against the rock face on the way down until it is ruined. It is a grotesque, almost unwatchable sequence, and it is aimed squarely at an institution that Italian cinema of the period was rarely permitted to attack so directly. The village spent the whole film looking for its monster among the poor and the strange and the female, and the monster was in the pulpit, killing children out of a warped and pious tenderness. That inversion — the safest man in town as the murderer, the persecuted outsiders as the innocents — is why the beating of Maciara curdles in the memory. The mob got the wrong person, in daylight, with a love song, and the man they should have feared was the one blessing them from the altar.