Torso (Italy, 1973)

If you’ve seen my selections from previous years, you’ll know I love Italian horror. The years between the 1960s and ’80s, in particular, were a time of extraordinary imagination and blessedly little restraint, producing some of the most delirious nightmares set on celluloid. The problem I have now, however, is finding Italian classics I haven’t seen yet for my October Horror Movie Challenges. Torso has been on my list for many years, so what better time to do something about that?

Torso is currently streaming on Shudder in the UK.

Synopsis

The disparity between the English title Torso and the Italian I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale (“The Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence”) made me laugh when the opening credits rolled. I can just imagine some American distributor looking at the original name and shouting “No!”

After an opening sequence involving a photoshoot of some sort of sapphic orgy involving a creepy doll, we are taken to Perugia, in Italy, where glamorous young students are learning about art history and being murdered. There is a voyeuristic killer on the loose, equipped with a rough mask and standard giallo-issue black leather gloves, and he really likes strangling women. He does kill a couple of men too, but you can tell his heart isn’t really in it.

After a barely coherent melange of throttlings and lecturers on religious iconography, we finally follow Jane, a student and obvious final girl, as she goes on holiday to the third act with a couple of girlfriends. Here, the film finally settles down into a tense thriller, with the killer inevitably stalking Jane and her friends around their isolated villa.

But who is this killer anyway? What motivates his uncomfortably fetishistic attacks? And does any of that really matter in this sort of film?

General Thoughts

For better and worse, Torso is more like a slasher movie than any other giallo I can recall. The kills, while sometimes effective, feel random and disconnected. What we end up with, at least for the first hour or so, is a vaguely functional framework that delivers sex, violence, and creepy combinations of both. The locations and seventies Italian fashions lend a superficial glamour, but not enough to stop Torso from being a sleazy emotional void.

And sleazy it is. Torso is a horny, horny film. The camera is a drooling voyeur, eroticising the kills in a way you don’t really see anymore, with the killer groping the corpses of his female victims before carving them up. There is a fundamental difference between sexualised violence being used to make amplify horror and simple titillation. Torso is very much in the latter camp.

This is the first giallo I can remember where not being able to see the killer’s face until the reveal has been so alienating. The framing of the scenes around his identity was clumsy, distancing us from the action. This is doubly unfortunate, given how obvious the killer’s identity is. You’ll be unlikely to solve the mystery based on clues, but any knowledge of genre tropes will make it apparent.

A key scene in the final act shows Jane hiding in a wardrobe, having seen her friends butchered, as the implacable killer searches for her. I can’t help but wonder if John Carpenter was inspired by this when making Halloween.

Surprisingly, the dialogue in Torso is in Italian. It was standard practice to dub the dialogue of Italian films at this time (as portrayed in the wonderful Berberian Sound Studio), with the actors often speaking their native languages during filming. As passionate as I can be about watching films in their original language, I’m honestly not sure what it adds when the soundtrack is all dubbed in post-production.

Verdict

Torso is the real disappointment of the month. While it does pull things around eventually, I found it hard to care about much before then. I know mystery is rarely the point of a giallo, but it seems particularly poor here. Any clues to the killer’s identity are minimal, and so lost in the jumble of interchangeable characters and long discussions about art history that my poor little attention span didn’t stand a chance.

For all the problems the first hour, the final act is pretty solid. Jane’s plight, hiding from the killer as he dismembers her friends, is gripping. If the rest of the film had been as effective, I could imagine Torso becoming one of my favourite giallo films. But it all comes too late to save what is otherwise a sadly muddled experience.

I wonder if I would have liked Torso more if I had seen it in the 1970s. It is very much of its time, especially in pace, cinematography, and acting. There isn’t much of interest beyond the sex and violence, and even that feels jarringly old-fashioned now. The dreamlike atmosphere of the best giallo films is absent, and the disjointed storytelling makes it difficult to care what happens to the characters.

If you like the sleazier end of Italian horror, and you have the patience to get through the first two acts, you may well enjoy at least some of Torso. It’s certainly not a terrible film, but it is a frustrating and often a dull one.

The October Horror Movie Challenge

Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on Twitter, BlueSky, Reddit, Discord, or lurking in the dark corners of your home.

If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (USA, 2021)
Tales That Witness Madness (UK, 1973)
When Evil Lurks (Argentina, 2023)
Under Paris (France, 2024)
In a Violent Nature (Canada, 2024)
Torso (Italy, 1973)
Titane (France, 2021)
Rorschach (USA, 2015)
The Coffee Table (Spain, 2024)
Dr Caligari (USA, 1989)
Bit (USA, 2020)
The Guard From Underground (Japan, 1992)
Oddity (Ireland, 2024)
Speak No Evil (Denmark/Netherlands, 2022)
Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (USA, 1982)
Grave Torture (Indonesia, 2024)
Bedlam (USA, 1946)
The Innsmouth School For Girls (USA, 2023)
Daddy’s Head (UK, 2024)
All You Need Is Death (Ireland, 2024)
Eight Eyes (USA/Serbia, 2021)
Poor Things (Ireland/UK/USA, 2023)
Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye (Italy, 1973)
Longlegs (USA, 2024)
Night of Fear (Australia, 1973)
Stopmotion (UK, 2024)
Terrifier (USA, 2016)
Azrael (USA, 2024)
Faust (Germany, 1926)
Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (Hong Kong, 1991)
I Saw the TV Glow (USA, 2024)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.