Diabolicamente... Letizia / Sex, Demons and Death (1975)

“The oppressed have assimilated their fate so well that they become indignant if we offer them a less repressed sexual future.” – Emmanuelle Arsan – Mon Emmanuelle, leur pape et mon Eros  

The name Letizia means “joy,” and one can’t help but feel joy when a name like Letizia rolls off the tongue. So, there’s a bitter irony to the title character of Salvatore Bugnatelli’s Diabolicamente… Letizia baring the sweetness of joyful pleasure only to turn out to be quite the devilish killjoy.

Diabolicamente… Letizia (also known as Sex, Demons and Death) is another peculiar erotic Italian horror that kind of stuck with me after only seeing it once about six years ago. There is something off-kilter and ominous about it, with a repressive, isolated autumnal villa setting involving a capricious young woman, Letizia (Franca Gonella- Zelda 1974), moving in and sexually perturbing the idle and seemingly peaceful lifestyles of her Aunt Micaela (Magda Konopka) and Uncle Marcello (Gabriele Tinti). The resulting erotic situations are intentionally built up only to push back and break the spell with some sort of unease, be it emotional confliction, humiliation, mockery, or even a jump scare, brought about by the sexually manipulative Letizia. Is she really some kind of sexual she-wolf demoness or do these characters have some serious hangups?

 

Marcello is an architect who lives in a sweet Italian villa, with a live-in French maid Giselle (Karin Fiedler) and a groundskeeper/butler Giovanni (Gianni Dei), not to mention an absolutely gorgeous wife Micaela (Konopka just pours her soul into this performance of a housewife pushed to hysteria). Micaela is unable to have children, so one day she decides to give up trying and instead adopt her adult niece Letizia, pulling Letizia out of boarding school in the process. For the household, Letizia fills a kind of void, which, if the title didn’t give it away, ends up being a woeful course of action for all involved.

 

Director and co-writer Salvatore Bugnatelli did not seem to be a lucrative filmmaker, with only a handful of films credited to him as director, all of which he did have writing credits for. Diabolicamente… Letizia looks to be the only horror/thriller film he made, and it’s kind of a hard one to love. 

It’s not the most beautiful film, with dull colors (except for Micaela’s psychedelic caftan dress) and a somewhat depressive setting. The story isn’t the most streamlined and does seem to meander at times, and the isolated countryside mansion in this case feels a little more claustrophobic than cozy. Despite this, I still have a weird attraction to it. 

The synth/harpsicord/organ laden main theme by Giuliano Sorgini is a melodic mood builder that I like to think of as Letizia’s theme, as the mood feels quite curious and entrancing but also potentially fatal.

 

Letizia is kind of the movie’s monster, but she is also a catalyst for a lot of unease and drama. In her own way, with her advances, and apparent magic spells, towards everyone in the household, revving up some serious sexual tension, she’s essentially turning several characters against one another, making the women hysterical and the men confused (and terrified at one point). She’s here to unsettle. She is shameless, but it’s not necessarily because she is taking charge of her sexual freedom or demonstrating what sexual liberation looks like; it’s more for a vague and insidious agenda. Older men and women seem to lose themselves around her. It isn’t always their fault since she does sinfully tempt them before rebuffing them, laughing as she rudely humiliates them for daring to receive her advances. (Watch for an amusing moment when Letizia briefly transforms into a werewolf to scare off the butler. It worked as an effective jump-scare for me more than once.)

 

Letizia can also remotely cast some kind of spell, usually by channeling energy into photographs, that puts Micaela into an entranced state of hyperarousal, so that she offers herself at different times to the butler Giovanni, her husband, or even the maid Giselle. It’s a trance, so that when the spell is broken and Micaela comes to, she ends up indignant regarding her own sexual behavior, getting hysterically mean to the other person she came on to, blaming them for taking advantage of her and a host of additional problems. Someone is also off-screen snapping photos every time Micaela or Marcello commit sexual transgressions.

 

The only person Letizia seduces to fully make love, without rebuffing them, is her aunt’s husband Marcello. This occurs after she comes home late one night following some kind of highly suggestive off-camera initiation ritual that her mob of new hippie friends push and drag her off to. She comes home in a non-responsive state, possibly traumatized or maybe on drugs, but she ends up pulling Marcello in when he shows concern, placing his hand over her breasts. It’s like a kind of horny spell she’s under that also rubs off on Marcello leading to their affair that the hidden photographer also captures, assumedly for scandalous reasons.

 

After sleeping with her, Marcello maintains a fondness for Letizia, but he also feels awkward, which is most apparent when she pulls him to the dance floor with a much younger crowd in one of the film’s night club scenes. He tends to regard himself as too busy and professional to be hanging around Letizia and her younger crowd of friends. She compliments him and assures him she enjoyed their affair and was not high when she took him. He seems mildly flattered but also uneasy. She’s trying to awaken him and to help him understand the youth culture of the era better by sleeping with him and convincing him to buy a motorcycle. Since she’s diabolical, it should be obvious that this isn’t the generous and altruistic midlife crises support we might think it is.

 

Her true intensions come down to a kind of “revenge” by her dead mother that is not really explained, so that the end revelation ends up being no surprise while also confusing without much in the way of a payoff. Unless I’m missing something (possibly something unjust about Letizia’s mother’s death), the nature of this revenge is hard to grasp, since Micaela is taking care of Letizia with love and care, fulfilling an apparent promise she made to her sister on her deathbed, so all that comes to pass seems harshly undeserved. (Unless the “revenge” was simply for putting Letizia in boarding school where she ended up into the hands of an occultist.)

 

Even though I’ve mostly been talking about the title character, here, I also really like the sexually assertive French maid, Giselle, who seems legitimately interested in making love, with sincerity and confidence. Unfortunately, Giselle is also caught in Letizia’s web. A brief but memorable side character, the professor’s wife Eva (Ada Pometti), tries to console Micaela about her previous physical interaction with Giselle, assuring her that there can be love between women without shame.

 

Xiro Papas’s mysterious occultist character is a bit of a wild card here. He’s in the background, usually strolling the grounds of the villa with mysterious motives and obviously up to no good. No one seems to notice the sizeable, alarming mustachioed man in a dark hat and trench coat in the background. He reminds me of a bad guy in a western. Seen in a cheap skull mask at times, he sometimes comes off as death, as he does accompany several demises.

 

Diabolicamente… Letizia does work as an interesting erotic horror film, despite being a bit of a slog at times. It manages to make its erotic situations dark and depressing, courtesy of a convincing young sexual antagonist. It’s not always the most exciting, and boy is there some serious drama on hand, but it does have a nice atmospheric, dark erotic ‘70s mood to it that makes it a certain kind of attractive to me. This film stayed on the backburner for review for some time, but I can say that it is worth revisiting, especially if erotic Italian horror is your thing. 

Like I said, it does deliver on the erotic level, but the characters are usually conflicted since they find themselves crossing lines they usually wouldn’t cross if not for Letizia. She is able to take advantage of this neuroticism everyone seems to have towards erotic freedom and turn them against each other. I can’t help thinking if the characters would’ve embraced this breakdown of their inhibitions, without jealousy and shame, then Letizia would’ve been powerless against them. When everyone has forgotten how to love, the evil seductive love witch wins. 

© At the Mansion of Madness