The director of Don’t Torture a Duckling, Lucio
Fulci, is known to horror aficionados as the ‘Godfather of Gore.’ Many of his films (like Zombie 2 and The Beyond) feature gore filled
murders and flesh eating creatures. His
films are not for the squeamish.
Don’t Torture a Duckling (Non si sevizia un
paperino) marks the beginning of Fulci’s use of gore in his movies but it’s
very restrained. Well... as restrained as
a scene can be when it features a human being crashing head first down a stony
hillside, having its flesh ripped away by jagged rocks as it falls. Or when the
scene features the mercilessly cruel beating of woman by angry mob using clubs
and chains.
But don’t let that pull you away from this film. It is a
very sensitive film. Fulci has said in
several interviews that this was his most personal and his favorite of all his
films. It is a complex criticism of
social values – traditional versus modernity, the nature of innocence, fate and
free will. It was the title that drew me
to this film, but I’m still not certain I completely understand its
relevance. Don’t Torture a Duckling
is a film about injustice and society’s cruelty to children.
Children are being murdered in the small Italian village of Accendura . Though this is shocking, it
isn’t a new thing. Murdered children
have a long history in horror films – going back as far as 1931 to Fritz Lang’s
film M and James Whales Frankenstein. Accendura is an
isolated community in the mountains, only recently dragged kicking and
screaming into the modern world by a newly constructed highway. The villagers are superstitious and fearful
and suspicious of outsiders. And when the police are unable to discover the
killer, a mob mentality takes over the townspeople. Everyone becomes a suspect and suspects are
guilty and they must be dealt with – violently.
It’s mob rule. It’s vigilante justice.
And it is ugly.
Vigilante justice is always ugly (despite our fascination
with the Lone Ranger and Batman…).
Genesis 34 tells another story of ‘frontier justice.’ And it’s just as violent and gory and ugly as any film
by Lucio Fulci.
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