The Case of the Bloody Iris: The Edwige Fenech Giallo

The original title is Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? — “Why Those Strange Drops of Blood on Jennifer’s Body?” — which is the giallo’s title convention operating at full absurdity, and which tells you nothing whatsoever about the film. The English retitle, The Case of the Bloody Iris, is tidier and equally unhelpful. What neither conveys is that Giuliano Carnimeo’s 1972 thriller is one of the genre’s most rigorous exercises in using a building as a murder weapon.

It opens in a lift. A woman rides up alone; the doors open at a floor; someone steps in. The doors close. She is killed inside a moving box that nobody else can reach and everybody can eventually see. In one set piece Carnimeo lays out the film’s entire proposition: this tower block is full of people who are perfectly visible to each other and completely unable to help each other, and the killer lives in it.

The tower and its tenants

The building is a modernist high-rise in Genoa, and the film’s most interesting decision is to treat it as the primary character. Jennifer Lansbury, played by Edwige Fenech, is a fashion model who moves into a flat in the block with her friend Marilyn — into the flat, specifically, where the last murder happened, because it is cheap and because Gastaldi’s script requires it. Andrea Barto, an architect played by George Hilton, is attentive, charming, and has the significant professional advantage of having designed the place.

The residents are then arrayed as a suspect list: a neighbour and her father, a nightclub performer whose act involves challenging men to overpower her, various tenants with secrets in proportion to their screen time. Jennifer’s ex-husband, the leader of a free-love commune she escaped, turns up to reclaim her. A police commissioner investigates while conducting a running conversation about his stamp collection.

The architecture does the work the plot cannot. Carnimeo and cinematographer Stelvio Massi stage almost everything in the building’s circulation spaces — lifts, stairwells, corridors, thresholds, the gap between a door and its frame. These are the parts of a home you pass through rather than live in, and the film makes them the only places anything happens. A tower block is a machine for stacking strangers, and The Case of the Bloody Iris is about the specific dread of that arrangement: you know your neighbours’ footsteps intimately and their faces barely at all.

What Bruno Nicolai is doing

The score deserves an argument, because it is the reason the film’s tone holds. Bruno Nicolai — Morricone’s conductor and one of the great Italian genre composers in his own right — had scored All the Colors of the Dark the same year, and he brings the same technique: a main theme of genuine loveliness, jazz-inflected, with a wordless female vocal floating over it, played against violence with no apparent concern for the mismatch.

The technique matters. A conventional thriller score tells you when to be afraid, and in doing so it takes over the audience’s judgement. Nicolai declines. His cues sit at a slight angle to the image — cool, lounge-adjacent, faintly melancholy — so the murders arrive without permission and without a stinger to organise your reaction. The lift sequence plays out under music that would be at home in a cocktail bar. The effect is a kind of civic indifference, which is exactly right for a film about a building where nobody comes when you scream.

Massi’s photography works the same seam. He shoots the block’s interiors with a lot of hard geometry — frames within frames, doorways bisecting the image, characters caught in the vertical of a stairwell — and the compositions keep the human figures small and boxed. The film looks like an estate agent’s brochure with something wrong in the corner of every photograph.

The ancestor: Bava’s atelier, Bazzoni’s blueprints

The collector’s cross-reference here runs straight to Blood and Black Lace. Bava’s 1964 film is the template this whole subgenre works from: a closed institution full of beautiful women, a masked killer, a series of designed murders, a mystery that exists to justify the design. The Case of the Bloody Iris is that film with the couture house swapped for a property developer’s tower and the mannequins swapped for tenants. Bava’s fashion salon and Carnimeo’s block serve the identical structural purpose — a sealed community where everyone is a suspect because everyone is already inside.

The nearer relative, and the one worth seeking out, is The Fifth Cord. Luigi Bazzoni’s 1971 film, shot by Vittorio Storaro before he became the most celebrated cinematographer alive, made the case that a giallo could be organised entirely around built space — concrete, voids, brutalist geometry — and that the mystery could be subordinate to the floor plan. Carnimeo’s film is the popular version of that idea, less austere and considerably more commercial, and the two together make the argument that the Italian thriller’s real innovation was environmental rather than narrative.

And the third reference point is Fenech herself. She had made The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh with George Hilton the year before, and would make Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key the same year. The Fenech–Hilton pairing was, by 1972, a brand — a guarantee to the distributor that a certain kind of glamour and a certain kind of threat would be present in the correct proportions. Watching the run in sequence, you can see an industry discovering that it had a star and then declining, repeatedly, to give her anything to do.

The case against

Carnimeo was a journeyman, and the film shows it. He had spent the previous years directing spaghetti westerns under the same Anglicised pseudonym, and he brings a western’s efficiency and a western’s indifference to interiority. Nothing here is felt. The film is beautifully arranged and emotionally inert, and where a Martino picture at least attempts to inhabit its heroine’s panic, Carnimeo is content to photograph it.

The comic relief is a genuine problem. The stamp-collecting commissioner is played broadly, and the film cuts to his badinage directly after its most brutal material, which flattens the dread the architecture has spent twenty minutes accumulating. This was an industry convention — the Italian thriller of the period habitually inserted a bumbling policeman to release tension — and it damages the film every time it appears.

Then there is the suspect pool, which repays a hard look. The film’s shortlist is assembled almost entirely from sexual nonconformity: the commune leader, the neighbour whose desires the film treats as a symptom, the performer whose act inverts the era’s expectations about who overpowers whom. Each is offered as a plausible killer on the strength of not being conventional. That is the era’s moral logic showing its working, and it dates the film more severely than any amount of wallpaper. Fenech, meanwhile, is given a character defined by a past she escaped and a present in which she is looked at, and the camera’s priorities are never in doubt.

What survives is the building. Strip out the comedy and the sociology and The Case of the Bloody Iris is ninety minutes of a well-lit modern tower quietly becoming intolerable, and on that count it belongs in the giallo canon with room to spare.

Spoilers below

The killer is a resident, which is the only answer the film’s architecture permits and which Carnimeo has been signalling since the lift. Gastaldi’s construction hides the culprit in the floor plan — in the traffic of a building where everyone has a reason to be in the corridor, everyone passes everyone on the stairs, and proximity generates no suspicion at all because proximity is what a tower block is for. The solution is a matter of who could be where, and the film has been showing you the geography honestly the whole time.

The motive, when it lands, is a pathology of sexual disgust dressed as moral cleanliness — the killer selects women whose lives offend a private code of purity, and the film delivers the psychology in the form the giallo always used: a rush of explanation in the last reel, half confession and half psychiatric lecture, tying an adult’s homicidal career to a single formative wound. Gastaldi wrote this speech, in one variation or another, for most of the decade’s major gialli. It is a formality. The genre required a rational floor beneath the spectacle, and the floor was always the same plank.

The honest verdict is that the whodunit is the least interesting thing in the film, and that this is true of the form generally. Consider what the reveal actually costs The Case of the Bloody Iris: for ninety minutes the tower has been the threat — an environment where surveillance and isolation are the same condition, where a lift is a room you cannot leave, where a scream travels beautifully and helps nobody. The last five minutes reduce all of that to one deranged individual with a childhood. The building is exonerated. Everyone else can go back to their flats.

Which is precisely the wrong conclusion, and I suspect Carnimeo felt it. The film’s real proposition — that stacking two hundred strangers in a concrete frame produces a specific and permanent kind of danger, and that the danger is structural — is more frightening than any single culprit, and the genre’s conventions oblige him to abandon it on schedule. The murders are solved. The tower is still full.

The film’s best joke is buried in that gap. Andrea, the architect, spends the picture as the most obvious suspect precisely because he designed the murder machine. The film’s need for a red herring means it must eventually clear him. But the block he built is the thing that killed those women, and no reveal touches that.

Where to watch: the Celluloid Dreams and Shameless restorations both present the film uncut with Nicolai’s score properly balanced, which matters more here than usual. Follow it with The Fifth Cord for the same argument made seriously, or with Blood and Black Lace for the couture original that all of this descends from.