Tarantino’s proposed remake starring Bridget Fonda never happened and so we have only Lucio Fulci’s 1977 original of The Psychic (aka The Psychic, Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes aka Sette note in nero) to scare us, though in all honesty it’s not so much scary as an exercise in Italian gothic style and 1970s advertising imagery. Which sounds like a put-down but Fulci turns the sleek, airbrushed looks to his own ends, in a story about a young woman who sees dying people, in particular a woman at some unspecified time in the past being walled up alive in the palazzo belonging to her husband Francesco (Gianni Garko).
It turns out that Virginia (Jennifer O’Neill) has some sort of psychic gift – we have seen her having a vision of her mother throwing herself to her death in a pre-credits sequence – and that a woman really was walled up in the palazzo at some point. When a skeleton is discovered, and it’s ascertained that it belongs to a young woman with whom Francesco had an affair five years before, he is hauled off by the police and thrown into a cell. The police are obviously being lazy and arresting prime suspect number one because it makes for an easy life, Virginia believes. Convinced her husband is not guilty, Virginia turns detective to clear his name.
Not much of this plot detail matters very much until it suddenly becomes important again right towards the ending, when Fulci flips details about and jeopardy re-asserts itself. For the most part we’re in the realm of the crime thriller, Virginia sifting and digging, aided by her psychiatrist, Luca (Gabriele Ferzetti), though he doesn’t do very much. In fact his secretary, Bruna (Jenny Tamburi), seems to be more on the ball. Smart and switched on, Bruna emphasises the theme running through the whole film: female competence versus comparative male uselessness.
O’Neill satisfies giallo’s need for a resting American actor who can be pressed into service, the better to sell the film abroad. You might also remember her from Rio Lobo or Scanners. Fulci’s camera is very up in her face, which can take it. And when he’s not lingering on his star’s lips or eyes, he’s giving us what appears to be catalogue snapshots of the sort you might have seen in an advert for cigarettes back then. The Rolls Royce that Francesco drives, his palazzo, the sharp tailoring everyone wears, all say opulence, aspiration, while Fulci lays on the soft focus and the starburst filters.
As ever with giallo, there is rough along with the smooth. Some of the acting by side characters is very ropy, and the post-dubbed sound is also distracting, though it also undoubtedly adds an air of the uncanny, as does all that hyper-stylisation and Fulci’s more obviously artificial camerawork – those zoom shots, weird edits, sudden fades, plus the gothic lighting laid on by DP Sergio Salvati.
Throughout, the male of the species is guilty, because he’s dick driven, which clouds his mental faculties, though Fulci does deliver a funny “yes… but” at a certain point, when a taxi driver Virginia is questioning about the dead girl recalls picking her up five years earlier, because she was wearing no panties. It could be can’t-be-bothered plotting or Fulci’s idea of a joke.
The score by a triumvirate of Franco Bixio, Fabio Frizzi and Vince Tempera, contains echoes of The Exorcist, which had dominated the zeitgeist four years earlier. Maybe The Psychic had ambitions to do the same but really the storytelling just isn’t strong enough. Fulci’s film succeeds on the level of style though, but then that was always his strong point.
The Psychic – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
