Il medaglione insanguinato

All it needed was to polish up the screenplay and this could have been an excellent atmospheric horror movie. Unfortunately, because of the sprawling narrative and a number of unexploited motifs, The Cursed Medallion remains precisely halfway between a toilsome bit of trash riding the coattails of the trends at the time and a gem of the genre. The film has a great, evocative form thanks especially to the outstanding cinematography, plus a wonderfully chilling and peculiar child actress who can make your skin crawl with her creepy grimaces – but the truth is that these elements characterise a large part of contemporary Italian production, and even though they help the film considerably, they can never quite keep it afloat. Everything thus collapses because of the half-baked story, or rather because of its ambivalence. The Cursed Medallion was obviously supposed to benefit from the success of recent films about possessed children and Satanism, such as Friedkin’s The Exorcist and Bava’s Lisa and the Devil (surprisingly, especially for a knock-off Italian production, this film predates the iconic horror flick The Omen, though it does have certain motifs in common with it). However, the story here actually becomes banal and formulaic when it turns everything toward the eternal evil of the Christian tradition. The motif of the daughter clinging to her father and haunted by nightmares after her mother’s death could have been developed in a different direction, even while preserving the basic framework, which here is the question of whether Satan exists, made plot-specific in the occupational interest of the father, a British documentary filmmaker who comes to Italy to film scenes on the subject from the Christian perspective. It’s a shame that the Italian filmmakers remained predictably faithful to Christian mysticism instead of daring to deny it and venture into the unsettling darkness of the human soul tormented by the agonising feelings of adolescence. (2014.12.22)