Il caso Valdemar (1936)
*** (out of 4)
I was completely unaware of this movie until recently when it started to pop up on various fan boards being described as "Italy's first gore movie." A lot of times these headlines are just made to bring views and "likes" but that's certainly not the case as this forgotten horror film actually lives up to the hype.
The film is a 12-minute adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" and there's not any sound here so if you're unfamiliar with the story then you might want to read it before watching. I'm really not certain if this was originally shot silent or not but it actually plays out well as a silent movie. The story itself is pretty simple as a dying man asks for a doctor to hypnotize him before death so that he can continue living. Years later the doctor goes back to wake him up with shocking results.
Co-directors Gianni Hoepli and Ubaldo Magnaghi have no other credits listed on IMDb so it appears this was their only effort and what a memorable one it is. The film manages to be quite entertaining during its first ten-minutes and especially when you consider that not too much happens. There are a lot of fancy edits that don't always work but you can at least give the director's credit for trying to do something different. The thing that they really do different is during the final minute where we get an extremely gory sequence that manages to be ahead of its time by at least twenty-years if not more.
I think it's safe to say that this type of gore wouldn't be witnessed again until Hammer started to make their horror films in the 1950s. I won't spoil what the gore effect here is but it's certainly very effective and what's more important is that it actually looks real. Horror fans will certainly want to track this one down.
