A Lizard in a Woman's Skin

• Release Date: February 18, 1971
• Directed by: Lucio Fulci
• Written by: Lucio Fulci, Roberto Gianviti, Jose Luis Martinez Molla and Andre Tranche
• Runtime: 1 hour 44 minutes

A couple of years after dipping his toes into the giallo subgenre with One On Top of the Other, Lucio Fulci took another step towards the world of horror with A Lizard in a Woman's Skin. Released in 1971, the movie came out at a time when giallos were undergoing some pretty big changes in style and structure. One year prior, Dario Argento gave giallos some international attention with his directorial debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. In the same year as Lizard's release, Argento would further hone his skills in the genre with The Cat o' Nine Tails, and Mario Bava would show off one bloody death scene after another in A Bay of Blood. Giallos were moving into a more explicitly horror-driven direction, away from straightforward mystery and sexy thrills and more towards the prototypical slasher films that the term "giallo" would come to be associated with. A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is quite a bit darker in tone compared to One On Top of the Other, and that tonal shift can possibly be chalked up to the fact that this was the first film that Fulci directed after his wife tragically committed suicide in the previous year. Because of this darker tone and some of the themes it covers, I consider Lizard to be Fulci's first "true" horror film.

The movie centers around a woman named Carol, the well-off daughter of a successful lawyer who lives next door to a woman named Julia. Julia spends her nights holding rowdy parties at her apartment that are filled with pounding music, rampant drug use, and orgies among the hippie attendees. Carol has been seeing a therapist for her recurring dreams about Julia - one dream involves a sexual encounter between the two of them, and in another, Carol brutally kills Julia with a knife to the heart. When Julia is found dead in her apartment in a manner that seems to match Carol's dream, her and her family are sucked into an investigation that leaves her questioning where her dreams end and reality begins. What makes A Lizard in a Woman's Skin get off to a great start is that it rides the line between a "sexy giallo" and a "true" horror giallo. The early parts of the movie feel a lot closer to One On Top of the Other in that they rely pretty heavily on showing off the thrills of new-age sexuality. The opening dream sequence and scenes that show Julia's parties feature a lot of quick-cut trippy imagery of mass male and female nudity, and the themes of repressed lesbian / bisexual urges from Carol are established in the first few minutes. It sets up the expectation that you're about to watch another sexy thriller about a scandalous relationship, and once the murder is revealed and Carol starts to question what she's capable of, the movie shifts into a darker examination of a woman who can't trust her own perceptions. It's an excellent rug-pull that drops the audience right into Fulci's first serving of psychological horror, and I like to think that he was consciously stringing along the viewers who were expecting something lighter before hitting them head-on with an entirely new type of movie from him.

Because Carol is constantly questioning whether or not her dreams actually occurred, there are a lot of neat editing choices that are used to make you wonder if what you're seeing is truly happening in the movie's reality. Fulci's handheld camera zooms and facial close-ups are present as always, but when they're used in Carol's dream sequences, they take on an entirely different form than they normally do. A quick zoom-in on her face may be repeated five or six times in a row, or a zoom might quickly shift in and out of a subject at random. When cut together quickly, these repeated frantic zooms give the dreams a psychedelic quality that feels right in line with the movie's recurring idea of drugs blinding their users to the world rather than enhancing their view of it.

The movie also features Fulci's first use of explicit onscreen bloodshed, and the sometimes-surreal nature of the violence fits hand in hand with the dream sequences in that they both can seemingly come out of nowhere and will leave you questioning Carol's reality. One standout moment shows Carol's entire family dead in a darkened room and seated at a dinner table, all mutilated and some with their guts on full display. But no other violent moment in the entire movie compares to when Carol accidentally stumbles into a room in a hospital where several dogs are being used as living experiments. Each one appears to be crucified on a metal pole, with their chests cut open to reveal their still-beating hearts. It's a reveal that was so shocking that, when I first saw it, my mouth actually fell open! Most of the time, I'm only used to seeing that level of animal violence in an Amazon cannibal film, and there's no other sequence that compares to it in any of Fulci's films that I've seen. In fact, the special effects in the dog scene are so realistic that Fulci nearly faced jail time for animal cruelty before the props were eventually shown to the court. I don't claim to speak for everyone, but in my opinion, when an artist makes a fictional portrayal of violence that's so effective that the law has to get involved, it's an easy way to tell that the artist in question is truly a "master of horror!"

In my writing for One On Top of the Other, I made a comparison to Fulci's later giallo The Psychic because both movies lean more on their characters and mystery rather than bloodshed and gore. While that is true, I do think that A Lizard in a Woman's Skin makes a better companion piece to The Psychic despite Lizard's increased levels of violence. Both movies revolve around women who are plagued by mental images of murders that may or may not end up occurring in the movie's reality. In addition, the heroines each find themselves being chased through large, derelict buildings near the third act. The chase scene in Lizard is a bit more flashy and exciting compared to The Psychic's dread-inducing chase, but it still delivers some thrilling highlights. My favorite moment has to be when Carol tries to hide behind a large pipe organ. When she trips and falls into a switch, the organ suddenly turns on, supplying both the characters and the soundtrack with a loud stinger that ramps up the tension in an awesome way. While both movies are very different in terms of atmosphere, I think they would make a great double feature with one another. Pop on Lizard when it's still evening time, and when night falls, let the creeping quiet of The Psychic swallow you up.

A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is another solid giallo from Fulci, and one that shows that he was quickly learning the tricks of the trade to leave his mark on Italian horror. Just one year after this movie's release, he would make what would end up being his darkest and most controversial giallo yet, Don't Torture a Duckling. Even though I do prefer Duckling as a whole, Lizard should not be skipped over. If you want to see where the Maestro first got in touch with his darker side, track this down and give it a watch!