L'anticristo (1974)

The Horror Channel (about which I just won't SHUT UP) are currently having a world cinema season. Every Friday night they're showing a horror film from somewhere that's not the UK or the US.

To promote this season of fine, fine broadcasting, they had an advert which did exactly what adverts are supposed to do: It battered the synapses into submission and made me determined to soak up every single minute of their quality programming in the coming weeks.

OK. So far I've watched one film. It entailed staying up really late, and then not ten minutes ago I find the exact film to be on Youtube in its entirety.

Had I known I could have watched it from the comfort of my own blog I may not have bothered.

But, in the immortal words of Uncle Bryn, there really is something about watching it live, isn't there?

L'anticristo is a bit like an Italian remake of The Exorcist. That's to say that it details the demonic possession of a young woman, only this time everybody's dressed beautifully and more people get naked. Also, there's a strange series of flashbacks to a previous life set during the inquisition threaded through the narrative.

In scope, then, L'anticristo is ostensibly much broader in scope than the film it so clearly wishes to be. On the whole, though, it's let down by some zero budget cut'n'paste effects and a general mood of over-the-top hamminess which serve to pull the wary viewer out of the otherwise nightmarish world so brilliantly realised when the film's on its best behaviour.

Ippolita is "she who becomes possessed". Or does she? She's partially paralysed, sexually frustrated, grieving for her dead mother and suffering through some kind of spiritual crisis. On one level it could be argued that we're not so much witnessing a possession here as a severe nervous breakdown. However, that would be to ignore the spectral hands Ippolita is able to summon from thin air; not to mention her ability to make love across the temporal divide with a goat-headed lover from her past life.

So, yes. If you're interested you can watch L'anticristo in its entirety on Youtube. I've embedded it below for your safety and convenience.

It's worth watching if you've a spare 1:51:50, if only for the pagan woodland orgy scene, in which everyone's painted to look like a corpse. That appears about 40 minutes into proceedings. I warn you, though – it looks utterly ridiculous when taken out of context.