Cult Memories
written by Barbara Steele

From the October 1994 issue of The Perfect Vision, Vol. 6 Issue 23.
Many thanks to The Perfect Vision for their kind permission to use
this article.

How does one define a cult film? There are certain cohesive ingredients. Cult films usually have an element of unease - anarchy, transgressing certain taboos; they are almost always excessive and camp and speak to the counterculture. Certainly, most have an aura of irreverence, and are usually made on low budgets, therefore requiring a certain energized spontaneity, somewhat like graffiti. After all, film is so porous, and to my mind, so oddly occult, that I think that film itself absorbs odd energies like a living skin.

I don't have an objective overview of Black Sunday. My memories of filming it were totally subjective. It was a series of intense little incidents, partially of the making of the film and partially of one's life around the making of the film. Especially an Italian film, with all its melodrama and chaos.

I had just returned to Europe after an agonizing year of supernatural solitude under contract to 20th-Century-Fox. Upon arriving in Los Angeles one year before, I had been greeted by a coterie of people on the steamy tarmac - one of them holding a stricken-looking black panther on a leash from one hand, and an electric prong in the other. I was obliged to stand there, holding the leash of this creature for their welcoming publicity shots, implying that this was some kind of image the decided to have of me. As what? As a terrified and stricken panther. This Lynch-like landscape, this world of spinning sunlight and flat horizons, overwhelmed me with inarticulate loss. I yearned for the privacy and shadowy dark corridors of shrouded London streets, smelling of wet hawthorne, containing their secret nocturnal pleasures, and the intimacy of Europe.

Returning there to make Black Sunday was an epiphany. Italy - blazing, ripe, optimistic, overfed, feral, fecund, swooning with life - overwhelmed me with an existential joy.
How and why Mario Bava chose me, I will never know. Or John Richardson, for that matter. We had appeared in small roles together in several movies for J. Arthur Rank, where we had both been under contract. He was so handsome. They discovered him walking down Bond Street, a young sailor at the time, and gave him a seven-year contract based on his looks alone. In his screen test, all he had to do was smoke a pipe and smile. Coincidentally, we found ourselves under contract to Fox together. So we were comfortable working together, but John was always somewhere in a little world of his own, not quite present.
Mario Bava was a very private man. Black Sunday was his first feature. Prior to that he'd always been a cameraman and had actually worked for Ricardo Freda as his cameraman on I Vampiri (released as The Devil's Commandment in the US), the first of the Italian horror films. He had a fabulous eye and knew exactly what he wanted. Everything was perfectly orchestrated with his sense of framing and light. He was a lot like Roger Corman. Private, shy, and unobtrusive with his actors, enormously polite, like a Nineteenth Century gentleman. He prefaced every request with "Excuse me, would you mind very much if we..." He was much more concerned with the mood of the shot than the actors' performances. Entering the cool, dark set was like entering a medieval cathedral on a midsummer afternoon. Echoes of an ancient civilization that has been dormant for centuries. This odd silence descended upon us, this hushed, suspended world, spooky and beguiling, elegant, tense, wary. The whole film was so monochromatic that nobody, not even a crew member, wore a single color on the set - hypnotically beautiful, shrouded in fog, luminous and incandescent, with all the elements of a religious manifestation. Black Sunday feels like a silent film, with a sumptuous visual baroqueness and certain images that are incredibly powerful - the coach and horses, for instance, implying the coach of death, as ominous as any Bergman image. In some strange way, it had enormous gravity.

The crew, like all Italian crews, was generous, warm, and enthusiastic. We would disappear to a local trattoria for lunch and return in a stupor of red wine and pasta. This was unimaginable to me, that one could actually have a great time making a film, that it could be a blast despite the medieval solemnity. Meanwhile, Mario Bava would remain alone on the set, making little sketches and feeding his ancient, tiny dog, Maya, little pieces of provolone.

In the sequence where I am burned at the stake, everything was so casual and hazardous that the bottom of my dress caught fire, and the grips became hysterical as they tried to pull me off the stake. And I heard Bava shout the classic line to the cameraman: "Keep shooting!"
We never received a salary for this film, but I couldn't have cared less, really. They gave us our per diem in great chunks of Italian money with notes the size of Life Magazine. They had procured a beautiful apartment for me with a terrace full of overgrown jasmine and a piano, on which I had to learn a Chopin piece in less than ten days.

The piano teacher, Professor Ortali, arrived each morning, a beautiful, angular man, haunted by the fact that during the war, as a 17-year-old, he had disguised himself as a street-sweeper and left his little street cart with enough dynamite in it to blow up about 15 Germans. In revenge, the Germans took three Italian citizens, including women and children, for every German soldier, pinned them against the wall of the Palazza Venezia, and shot them.
As David J. Hogan states in his wonderful book, Dark Romance, Sex and Death in the Horror Film: "We'd like to tell ourselves that we live in an ordered, logical world, but the horror film )with its irrational monsters, demented scientists, and often motivationless terrors) exposes the fallacy. Since horror films are acted out on the dark playground of the subconscious, they are often at their best when as illogical as our unfettered minds... the link between sex and death, as well as the cultures of paradoxical attitudes toward female sexuality, a potent force that is feared as strongly as it is desired." This seems to apply perfectly to Black Sunday.
I don't know why Dr. Hichcock acquired cult status. It had a very shaky script, dealing with sexual mania, repression, and necrophilia. It was said that Ricardo Freda wrote Dr. Hichcock in one week on a bet that he could complete a film from beginning to end of editing within one month. I believe it. We worked 18 hour days, charged with Sambucca and coffee. If the dolly broke down, Freda would merely drag the camera on a carpet. Nothing would stop this man. He was ornery, emotional, violent, fueled with passionate energy, and a compulsive gambler.

I liked this suicidal pace. I found the script unreadable, but it hardly seemed to matter, mainly because of the beautiful camera work. Italian cameramen grow up immersed in an awareness of light. It is part of their mythology. Certainly, in Italy, nobody takes light for granted. I can recognize if a film is shot in Italy in a nanosecond by the luminosity of its light. The film seemed to gather its own willful voodoo as we careened on at this mind-boggling pace. Every day, Sr. Freda was visited by his exquisite 18-year-old mistress, who stunned us all, this being August, by arriving in an ocelot coat, high heels, and black leather gloves.

I liked Freda. I understood his frustration and rages and operatic deliveries. His whole life was a mini opera. He smoked large cigars and drove a Bentley. He lived outside Rome, surrounded by his race horses, in a fake castle, comprised of brick and cinder blocks. There were extremely odd building materials for Italy at that time, considering you could buy any Sixteenth Century castle for a dollar and a half. Oddly enough, a couple of years later, when I won an award in Tripoli, I had lunch at Qadaffi's in an almost identical home. But instead of horses, Qadaffi had a private zoo and two pet goats, which were allowed to trot in and out of the house and were fed little nuggets by white-gloved soldiers who would stand behind our chairs with their semi-automatics slung over their shoulders.
It is interesting to note that the best periods of Italian horror films came out of the Sixties, when Italy was enjoying a carnival period of phenomenal optimism, and the shadowy side surfaced with all of its attendant dark, beautiful, baroque, catholic symbolism.

Is 8 1/2 a cult film or merely a masterpiece? (Is Citizen Kane a cult film or merely a masterpiece?) Are any of Fellini's films cult films? Well, perhaps none of his films are cult films, but Fellini is certainly a cult director. I knew when I came to Rome that I would work with Fellini--even before I met him. "Cosa Fai Qui?" people would ask me. And I would always answer them, "I'm here to work with Federico..."

He saw all of Rome when he was casting. He received everybody like an emperor--anyone could get to see him then. He luxuriated in casting; he took four or five months on 8 1/2 alone. He had a tiny little office, its walls seething with photographs of hundreds of faces, and to the exasperation of the producers, he was intensely interested in everybody. Casting was ecstasy and agony for Fellini because he was so intrigues with everybody that he met. The corridor was filled with people waiting to meet him: immaculately dressed counts and contessas, butchers, nuns, ladies of the night, dwarves, one-legged men, women with babies, professors, journalists, actors, acrobats, gardeners, housekeepers, tutto Roma.

This great bear of a man would meet you, his huge eyes totally focused, and out of this enormous fellow would come this tender, conspiratorial voice, dolce and amused. Everyone who worked with him felt they shared a private secret with him--that he, and he alone, could mirror their soul like a great, slightly ironic Buddha.

I was very lucky. I was sent straight to costume fittings. No one received a script, we were merely given pages every day. Some kind of fabulous alchemy occurred out of the collective turmoil.
Marcello Mastroianni would arrive for makeup in his striped pajamas. He slept in his makeup chair while they poured espresso into him. Many times he would leave the set in a horse-drawn carriage--they were available as taxis in those days. Sandra Milo was all perfume and breasts like pomegranates, covered in sultry breath of perspiration, exuding such staggering female hormones that the rest of us felt utterly eclipsed. Had she been an American, she surely would have been a gorgeous, lazy Southerner with a slow elongated drawl. Anouk Aimee, remote and beautiful, like some ancient goddess, allowed them to trim her eyelashes for this role, but nothing could alter her aristocratic beauty.

Fellini's universe was filled with processions and parades: occult, mystical, generous, bestial, allusive, full of the fantastical, of mythic odyssey and solitude, composed with great tenderness. All of this with his own internal mythology. The deserted piazza, invariably seen at night in every Fellini film, that allows one to have an encounter with solitude and the soul, the wind another constant, and always a sense of space, the space of a dream, the internal space, and the eternal return to the sea, representing hope; the sea as a mirror of the soul, the sea of departure, eternal, infinite...

Cronenberg--the first director to bring gynecology into the cult film, much to the horror the feminists. In They Came From Within he took a seemingly banal situation and made something horrific out of it. In the endless, suburban apartment complexes lurked some putrefying, hideous menace. Cronenberg, with his obsession for bodily fluids which I must say have become rather a la mode lately, Coppola's Dracula with its dazzling sequences of magnified blood corpuscles both astral and otherworldly, imploding stars and sperm and blood, both beautiful and deadly... sex and death, sex and life.

I really don't know how Cronenberg found me. I didn't have any agent; I've never had an agent. I do remember him arriving at my house, on a stormy day at the beach, with a huge bunch of marigolds. I had no desire to do another horror film at this time. Outside it rained and rained, the wintery sea spewed up sullen waves. We drank some wine. It got dark. Willie Nelson wailed away. We drank some more wine... "Okay," I said, "Great. Can we do it in five days?" "Sure," he replied. He knew exactly what he wanted. and he always got exactly what he wanted, just as he did on the set.
One December morning, I was walking down Sunset Boulevard having just bought a slinky, red slipper satin dress, a la Jean Harlow, to go to Robert Altman's Christmas party. I was thinking that I had never had a glamorous dress in any of the films that I had made. I always seem to end up in a serious of ghastly flannel nightgowns, whereas my peers (Martine Beswick, etc.) always seem to find themselves draped in some Helmut Newton fantasy of leggy, glamorous bondage of one kind or another. Suddenly, this enormous, sky blue, Fifties Buick with shimmering silver fins screeched to a stop and double parked. Jonathan Demme jumped out with a big smile and said that he'd been looking for me everywhere. He was going to start shooting Caged Heat in two days, and would I please play the role of a repressed lesbian prison warden. "Sure," I said, "anytime."
He had worked with Roger Corman as a producer and this was his first feature, directing. They had just completed The Hot Box, a film shot in the Philippines with a steamy woman-in-prison script that had been very successful. Roger promised Jonathan a film to direct if he came up with a script of women in prison set in the USA. He did, and created a faceless prison that no one knew existed, where all kinds of hideous experiments took place. What was radical about this film was that, for the first time, women really fought back. We shot in Lincoln Heights jail in Los Angeles on a budget of $165,000. I was given a dream sequence in a top hat and fishnet stockings. A wink to the audience and a tip-of-the-hat to Von Sternberg. I remember Jonathan, a compulsive film buff, being in a state of total rapture during the shoot. I have never seen a man smile so consistently and widely, and with so many teeth.

The poster for the film tried to represent it as a steamy women-in-bondage film. Evelyn Purcell, his wife at the time, and the film's producer, told me, just prior to the film's release, that she and Jonathan took a couple of hundred posters and glued them all the way up and down Santa Monica Boulevard. The next day they went back to look at them and there were only three left.
I think the age that one first sees one of these cult films seems to define the degree on is hooked. See Black Sunday at 12, and spend the bulk of your thirties explaining the experience to Cahiers du Cinema. These films take us back to our adolescence, with all of its heightened vulnerability. We are suspended for a moment in time, transported back to a private and somewhat deliciously guilty world. They seem to remain an intensely personal experience, and become so much more powerful when they are shared with others... especially at midnight!