RING OF DARKNESS (1979)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

An alternative title for this Italian demon-tale is SATAN'S WIFE. But the story's true focus is actually the devil's daughter, and there are four "wives" in the story, though three of them are minor support-characters. Writer-director Piero Carpi adapted RING, one of just four cinematic works he worked on, from his own novel, UN' OMBRA NELL' OMBRA. The title has been translated as "The Shadow Within the Shadow," and this in turn begat the more evocative name, RING OF DARKNESS. I find this title the more appropriate one. Unlike a lot of Italian EXORCIST rip-offs, RING's low-key horrors seem to suggest a Manichean world, where good and evil are locked in constant battle. An early scene features an agnostic professor prating about how the white and black pieces in chess represent just such a struggle, and he sounds by no means totally committed to the "white" side.

The film opens on a Satanic sabbat, with nude men and women having an orgy, and four of the women have sex with Satan himself. There's a brief mention that they do so with the idea of gaining some temporal power, but when we see them twelve or so years later, the women just seem to be middle-class wives of no particular distinction. All are still glamorous, being played by Irene Papas, Marisa Mell, Valentine Cortese, and Anne Heywood. While other children are mentioned, only the daughter of Heywood's character Carlotta is central to the plot. Said scion is Daria (Lara Wendel), and though she's been raised to think herself the daughter of Peter Rhodes (whom Carlotta's divorced at the opening of the main story), it's clear that Daria intuits her true heritage somehow.

Daria shows contempt for everyone she encounters-- Carlotta, her teacher (the Cortese character) and fellow middle school students. She doesn't perform any EXORCIST-style magic early on, but she predicts that an airplane carrying her false father Peter will crash, and it does, though it's never definite that Daria causes the crash. But a little later Daria responds to a male student's attentions by searing her hand-print in his chest-- though for some reason this doesn't kill him.

Carlotta enlists the aid of her fellow Satanists to find some way to purge Daria of her Satanic nature, which marks a contrast with THE EXORCIST in that Daria's never literally demon-possessed. The Middle-Aged Satan-Society also calls upon the services of a young Catholic priest (John Philip Law). Despite the holy man's doubts about his calling (paging Father Karras) he helps the women create a strange artifact that I *think* is supposed to look like a blood-colored wafer. (Combining both the blood and body of Christ, perhaps.) 

Carlotta then uses the wafer in a ritual of exorcism, one that Carpi almost certainly whipped out of his own imagination. At the home shared by mother and daughter, Carlotta creates a mystic circle and begins reading magical incantations. Daria sneers at her mother's efforts, but they work at first, forcing the young girl to enter the circle. Carlotta almost gets her daughter to eat the wafer, and for some reason the spell also causes Daria's clothes to disappear. But the devil-daughter's power ascends and nude Daria struggles over the wafer with Carlotta in her ceremonial robes. It's not much of a "fight," even assuming that the females are still battling on some occult level. Daria burns Carlotta's hands but does not kill her mother, and that's the last we see of injured Carlotta. Then, in one of the most anti-climactic climaxes in horror flicks, Daria simply hails a taxi and mesmerizes the driver into taking her, sans pay, to the Sistine Chapel. Daria then just stand there, dreaming a demon's dreams for the fate of Christianity, at least in its Catholic manifestation-- and the film ends.

Returning to the question of influence, Carpi claimed that he wrote his novel before the 1971 publication of Blatty's EXORCIST, and that's at least possible, though sources assert that OMBRA wasn't published until 1974. However, Ira Levin's ROSEMARY'S BABY was published in 1967, and Carpi didn't expressly say he took no influence from that work. In some ways, RING seems more like a response to the Levin work, but altered so that the lady Satanists willingly enter into their Satanic bargain. Without access to the novel, I can't be sure, but he might have simply imported a few EXORCIST tropes into his original schema.

One of the more anti-EXORCIST motifs is Carpi's concentration on feminine power. Though the Blatty novel and subsequent film adaptation begin with a conflict between a mother and her demon-possessed daughter, the true battle takes place between two male Catholic priests and the implicitly male demon. In RING, Lucifer spreads his seed to create Daria and possibly other offspring, and the script actually states that none of his mortal "wives" enjoys sex any more, though without specifying why (at least in the dubbed version). But he never appears in the main story. None of the other male figures except the priest have any real agency, and even the priest's use of his holy power is directed by the magical knowledge of the Satanic sisterhood. Not that I'm claiming Carpi was any sort of feminist. His proximate reason for concentrating on the female characters may have been motivated by selling glamour and a little nudity. But there is a school of Christian thought that equates femininity with primeval, even pagan darkness, so perhaps the barely articulated theme of RING is that women unleash the ultimate darkness on humankind by their intercourse with the Devil.

On a minor closing note, Carpi wrote a lot more prose novels and Italian comics than he ever did film scripts. And one of the comics he allegedly wrote for was DIABOLIK-- which in 1967 got an outstanding film adaptation starring two of the performers in RING: John Philip Law and Marisa Mell.