Lizard in a Woman's Skin: Fulci's Hallucinatory Giallo

The best-known fact about Una lucertola con la pelle di donna is that it landed its director in court. Lucio Fulci made a sequence in which a character wanders into a room of vivisected dogs, still alive, chests opened. Carlo Rambaldi built them. They were mechanical, and they were convincing enough that Italian prosecutors opened an animal-cruelty case, and Rambaldi had to carry his creations into a courtroom and demonstrate the mechanisms to get the charges thrown out. Rambaldi went on to win Academy Awards for King Kong, Alien and E.T., which means the man who built Spielberg’s most beloved creature first had to prove in front of a judge that he had not eviscerated a kennel for Lucio Fulci.

It is a wonderful anecdote and it has done the film a disservice for fifty years, because it lets people file Lizard in a Woman’s Skin as an atrocity exhibit. It is one of the most formally ambitious Italian thrillers of its decade, and the dogs occupy perhaps ninety seconds of it.

The film Fulci wasn’t supposed to be able to make

In 1971 Lucio Fulci was a working commercial director with a decade of comedies and westerns behind him and no reputation whatsoever as an artist. The gore films that made his name — Zombie Flesh Eaters, City of the Living Dead, The Beyond — were still most of a decade away. So Lizard arrives without the baggage, and what it reveals is a director with a genuine formal appetite who spent most of his career being paid to suppress it.

He had help. Ennio Morricone wrote the score. Luigi Kuveiller shot it, four years before he would shoot Deep Red for Dario Argento, and the through-line between the two films is one of the more useful things a collector can notice. Kuveiller’s signature is a camera that behaves like a curious intruder — low, gliding, arriving at doorways slightly before the character does. In Deep Red that restlessness is the film’s engine. Here it is already fully formed.

Dreams as production design

The premise is a good one. Carol Hammond, played by Florinda Bolkan, is the daughter of an eminent English barrister and the wife of a man she has stopped seeing. She lives a life of committees and correct rooms. Next door lives Julia Durer, played by Anita Strindberg, who throws the sort of parties the English establishment writes editorials about. Carol dreams about Julia — dreams of drugs, of bodies, of finally killing her. Then Julia is found dead in a manner that matches the dream.

Fulci’s decision, and it is the film’s making, is to shoot the dreams with more conviction than the waking scenes. The dream passages are built environments: corridors of fogged glass, drifting feathers, spaces that behave according to their own physics. The waking London is flat, grey and legally correct. So the audience does what Carol does, which is to trust the vivid thing over the true thing. This is the giallo’s persecuted-heroine structure — the same architecture Ernesto Gastaldi was building the same year for Sergio Martino — but Fulci flips its polarity. Martino’s Julie Wardh is interrupted by memory. Carol Hammond is being furnished by it.

The bat sequence is the one everyone remembers after the dogs, and it is worth watching for craft rather than shock. Fulci cuts it fast enough that you never resolve the creature, which is a choice about your nervous system: a thing you cannot see clearly cannot be dismissed. He would use the same principle for the rest of his career, generally with less discipline.

Morricone against the grain

Morricone’s score is the element that makes the film cohere, and he does it by refusing to help. The obvious approach to a dream-thriller is to score the dreams as dreams — floating, unmoored. Morricone instead writes the hallucinations with rhythmic insistence, brass and percussion that push forward, so the dream sequences have drive and the real scenes have none. The effect is that the film’s centre of gravity sits inside Carol’s head, and every return to the drawing room feels like a demotion.

He also does something slyer with the investigation. Stanley Baker plays Inspector Corvin, and Baker — a genuinely major British actor by 1971, a Zulu and Accident man — brings a granite scepticism the film needs. Morricone declines to score him as a hero. Corvin’s scenes are scored as procedure, which quietly tells you that the police are a mechanism rather than a rescue. The film is honest about this from very early on, and it pays off.

The English problem, which is the point

The London setting is doing thematic work that Italian thrillers set in Rome or Vienna cannot do. Fulci is making a film about respectability as a load-bearing structure — a barrister father, a diplomat-class marriage, a family whose reputation is an asset with a book value. The hippie commune next door exists as the thing that respectability defines itself against, and the film is smart enough to notice that the establishment’s horror of the commune is mostly appetite in a wig.

That reading of English institutional life would come back the following year in Don’t Torture a Duckling, transposed to a southern Italian village and aimed at the Church, and Duckling is the better and angrier film. But Lizard is where Fulci discovers that his real subject is a community protecting itself, and that the murder is usually the community’s immune response.

The ancestor to point at here is Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques for the gaslight mechanics, and, more precisely, Repulsion. Polanski’s film had shown in 1965 that you could build a horror picture entirely out of a woman’s interior architecture and let the audience live inside a failing mind. Fulci takes the method and adds a plot, which is either a compromise or an improvement depending on your temperament.

Bolkan, and the title

Florinda Bolkan is the reason the film survives its own plotting, and her performance is a masterclass in a very specific problem: how do you play a woman whose interior life the audience has already seen, in more vivid colour than her exterior one? Bolkan solves it by playing Carol as slightly behind her own face. There is a lag in her reactions, a half-beat where she seems to be checking what the correct response would be before producing it. In the drawing-room scenes it reads as class, the trained blankness of a woman raised to be photographed. In the dream scenes the lag vanishes and she becomes fluent.

That contrast is the whole title. A lizard in a woman’s skin is a thing wearing an exterior that is not its own, and it is also — Fulci being Fulci — an image of something cold-blooded that has learned to pass in a warm-blooded room. Bolkan builds the pass and lets you see the seams. She would work with Fulci again on Don’t Torture a Duckling the following year in a role that goes to a genuinely appalling place, and the two performances together make a strong case that she was the most interesting actor the Italian thriller ever had access to.

Watch, too, what Fulci does with her eyes in the dream passages. Kuveiller lights them so that the pupils catch a hard specular highlight the waking scenes never give her. It is a tiny, cheap trick, achievable with one lamp and a decision, and it means that across a hundred minutes your subconscious learns that this woman is only fully alive when she is asleep. That is the sort of thing a director does when he cares, and Fulci’s detractors have spent decades insisting he never did.

The case against

The film has real problems. The middle is over-plotted; there are witnesses, blackmailers and a pair of young hippies whose function is to be available when the script needs someone to have seen something. Jean Sorel’s husband is written thin. The psychiatry is 1971 psychiatry, which is to say it is a set of confident assertions that have not survived contact with the subsequent half-century.

And the film’s history is a mess. It circulated as Schizoid and under other titles, in prints that were cut for length, for the dogs, for the sex, and sometimes for all three at once. For decades the version you saw determined the film you thought you had seen — a chase through a vast, near-empty Victorian hall that plays as a bravura set-piece in a complete print plays as an inexplicable digression in a butchered one. The restorations of recent years are the reason this film’s reputation has climbed.

Where to watch: seek out a full-length restoration and check the running time before you start. Kuveiller’s compositions depend on colour separation, and the grey-brown transfers that circulated for years destroy the distinction between dream and drawing room that the whole film is built on.

Spoilers below

The film’s solution inverts its own premise. Carol’s visions are authored rather than suffered. The dreams that appear to be symptoms are a constructed defence, laid down in advance through the psychiatric apparatus so that when the murder arrives there is already a documented history of a woman who cannot distinguish her fantasies from her acts. The analyst’s couch is the crime scene; the killing is just the part that happened outdoors.

This is what makes the film cleverer than its reputation. Fulci spends an hour training you to read Carol as the genre’s standard persecuted woman — unreliable, disbelieved, the men around her exchanging significant looks — and every one of those beats is a thing she has arranged. The audience’s sympathy is the murder weapon. You are not deceived by the film; you are deceived by your own fluency in the form, which had already taught you that the frightened woman is always telling the truth.

Corvin’s unravelling of it is procedural and unglamorous, which is consistent with everything Morricone’s score has been telling you about the police. There is no catharsis in the reveal, and the family’s real interest at the end is the same as its interest at the beginning: containment. The scandal is the emergency. The corpse is an administrative matter.

Fulci would spend the following decade making films where the dead came back and the plots stopped mattering, and the received wisdom is that he lost something along the way. Watch Lizard and the received wisdom looks about right. He had the equipment for this kind of cold, architectural cruelty, and the market kept paying him for something louder.