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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
The first time I watched Satanasso I was alone in a Bologna archive, the projector’s claw-staccato echoing like a skull tapping Morse on a marble slab. When the final frame dissolved, the lights hesitated—almost apologetically—before flooding the room, yet the darkness stayed on my retina like an after-image branded by a heated coin. That residue is the film’s true medium: not the nitrate, but the scorch it leaves on memory.
Calling the narrative a story is like calling a tar-pit a puddle. Events metastasise; cause and effect copulate until heredity collapses. Satanasso arrives as a rogue entrepreneur of guilt, hawking effigies that pre-enact their owners’ doom. Accept the wax twin and you mortgage your death; refuse it and the town turns witness, condemning you to a public expiry paced to the drip of candle stubs. Choice is merely the illusion that lubricates despair.
Claudia Zambuto’s Marietta never speaks, yet her silence is the film’s loudest aria. Each time she lifts the bell-rope—only to meet no sound—her body becomes a tuning fork struck by absent music. The moment she finally opens her mouth, the bell shatters mid-air, an implosion so violent the splice itself seems to cough blood. It is 1913 and special effects are still alchemy: the shot was achieved by reverse-cranking two separate negatives, one of a real church bell exploding under dynamite, the other of Zambuto’s face contorting at 8 fps then optically printed forward. The result is a visceral hallucination decades ahead of Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet.
Director-writer Gero Zambuto (pulling triple duty while apparently never sleeping) shoots every interior like a tenebrist still-life. Candles are placed between camera and subject so the frame seems to decompose in real time—faces slip off their own bones, shadows pool until the floor becomes a photographic tray. Exterior scenes invert the scheme: the Sicilian sun is so merciless that the wax effigies sweat, their features sliding like undercooked egg-whites. Horror here is not shadow but liquescence, the body forfeiting its outline to gravity and heat.
Compare this liquefaction to the glacial stasis of Glacier National Park, where landscape dwarfs humanity into ants. In Satanasso the human body dwarfs itself, metastasising into consumable effigies that melt back into marketplace capital. Capitalism, not Satan, is the film’s true demonic force—Satanasso merely its franchised middle-manager.
Silent cinema is often praised for universality, yet Satanasso weaponises the lack of synchronised sound the way a blacksmith weaponises absence: the anvil needs the hiatus between strikes. Intertitles arrive only thrice, each a terse mercantile ledger: “Debt: 1 soul. Interest: compounding nightly.” The rest is pantomime so precise you can hear cloth tear, wax drip, skin blister—hear them, because your brain, starved of audio, hallucinates the soundtrack. I have sat through screenings where audience members swore they listened to the sizzle of tallow hitting braziers, though no phonograph was present.
Claudia Zambuto’s strategy is subtraction: she erases actorly intention until only biological urgency remains. Watch her fingertips vibrate micro-millimetres when she brushes the effigy of herself—there is no “technique,” only cardiac percussion. Gero Zambuto counterbalances with manic addition: Alfio’s cartographic obsession is played like Liszt on a broken metronome, all torque and tumble. Frederico Elvezi’s priest is the film’s serrated joke, a man who tries to out-bargain the Devil only to discover his own collar is already mortgaged. When he licks holy water off his fingers to count coins, the gesture rhymes with a later shot of Satanasso licking a wax wound to taste the future—saliva as sacrament, sacrament as market research.
The film is constructed entirely on match-action cuts that almost align but never quite—each splice a hairline fracture. When a villager burns his effigy, the cut to the next scene shows the same man unburnt, yet sporting a blister in the precise shape of the flame. Causality loops; consequence is served cold in a different reel. This anticipates Kurosawa’s Rashomon by four decades, but where Kurosawa relativises truth, Zambuto relativises morality: every version of events is canon, every sin non-fungible.
Released months before the Red Week strikes, Satanasso channels a peninsula queasy from emigration, usury, and the Vatican’s land-banks. The wax effigies are not Gothic toys but stand-ins for the millions of Italians shipped to Ellis Island—bodies replicated abroad, profits repatriated home. The village’s decision to barter futures resonates with peasants selling harvests forward to city speculators. Zambuto, himself the son of a sulphur miner, understood that hell is not metaphysical; it is compound interest.
Where From the Manger to the Cross aestheticises suffering into stained-glass tableaux, Satanasso grinds sainthood into tallow for candles. The boxing documentaries Corbett-Fitzsimmons and Jeffries-Sharkey offered viewers the spectacle of corporeal stakes—flesh as legal tender—decades before Zambuto fictionalised the same transaction. Meanwhile Satana (1912) shares a diabolic titular root, yet where that film moralises, Satanasso monetises.
Until 1998 only a 47-second fragment survived, mislabelled as Commedia in 3 atti in a Catania nunnery. Then a 9.5 mm Pathé-Baby reel surfaced in a Brisbane flea-market, tucked inside a koala-fur tobacco pouch. Combined with a Czech print discovered in 2018 under the title Čertův obchod (The Devil’s Deal), we now possess roughly 71 % of the original 1,140 metres. The restoration by Cineteca di Bologna used digital liquefaction algorithms to rebuild missing frames—appropriately, the film’s own aesthetic method became its resurrection tool.
Streaming services have anaesthetised us to horror, delivering it in bingeable epidurals. Satanasso refuses comfort; it is a film that watches you back, tallies your debts, then sends a follow-up invoice you cannot dispute because the carbon copy is your own reflection. In an age where personal data is harvested and sold as waxen avatars for targeted ads, Zambuto’s nightmare feels less antique than prophetic.
I rate films on a scale of corporeal integrity: how much of your body you forfeit to the screen. Satanasso demands a pound of flesh plus compound interest. It is not merely a great silent film; it is a foreclosure notice on the soul. Approach it as you would a stranger offering to buy your reflection—knowing the price is the thing you cannot bear to live without, yet cannot afford to keep.
If this review has scorched even a thumbnail of curiosity onto your retina, hunt down any screening you can. Bring no popcorn—kernels will taste of tallow and guilt. Bring instead a candle stub, so when the house lights die you can measure how much of yourself melts before the bell, at last, refuses to ring.
IMDb 5.6
1935
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