With gently haunting music and the leisurely pan of a city skyline, before moving onto the balcony of an elegant apartment house, the opening of The Perfume of the Lady in Black is reminiscent in tone of Rosemary's Baby. And the plot, while having nothing to do with conceiving Satan's child, is similarly driven by a web of occult conspirators tightening around a hapless female protagonist, Silvia (Mimsy Farmer). But perhaps, unlike poor Rosemary, Silvia isn't the innocent she appears to be. The 1974 Italian film by director Francesco Barilli has just been issued on DVD.
Lovely title aside, The Perfume of the Lady in Black falls short of Roman Polanski's exquisite horror classic. Many of the supporting actors were better suited as George Romero extras and the screenplay was written with heavy hands on the typewriter. But this is not to say that Lady in Black, a cult favorite among fans of the era's Italian B-films, is a bad movie. The cinematography is beautiful, the edgy modernist score is excellent and the Euro chic '70s setting is wonderful to watch. Some of Silvia's disturbing hallucinatory bedroom scenes may have influenced David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and the weird moments are creepier than anything that passes nowadays as "horror."
