Don’t Torture a Duckling

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.