The plot’s terrible but the mood is tasty in All the Colors of the Dark (Tutti I colori del buio), an Italian/Spanish giallo from 1972 that does its best – and breast – work early on.
The opening sequence is formidably unsettling. A lurid montage of nudity, distortion, doubled imagery, a hideous pregnant woman in a fright wig on a gurney, a man dressed as Bo Peep, the camera pulsing in and out as if on psychedelics while children sing tunelessly on the unnerving soundtrack.
After that, waking from the horrendous nightmare reliving the night her child died, Jane Harrison (Edwige Fenech) hops out of bed and into the shower in her skimpy nightdress, for a teasing wet t-shirt intro to her character.
The director is Sergio Martino, who delivered films like Torso, Slave of the Cannibal God and the formidably titled Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key. To be fair to him, once he’s got his quota of bosoms out of the way in his opening scenes, he takes his foot off the porn pedal a touch and starts dialling up the psychological-horror atmospherics.
Jane’s husband, Richard (George Hilton), is “just a pharmaceutical sales rep”, we learn from a conversation Jane has with her sister Barbara (Nieves Navarro), who clearly thinks Richard is too low in status for her sister.
But Richard’s sales rep position means he’s a good source of the happy pills that are keeping Jane on the straight and narrow since her child’s death in a car accident. She’s also seeking therapy from Dr Burton (as the IMDb has it) – or is it Barton (as the actors seem to be pronouncing it)? It’s hard to tell? Either way, he’s played by Jorge Rigaud.
A third leg of this therapeutic stool arrives when Jane’s blowsy new friend Mary (Marina Malfatti) suggests that Jane’s neurotic belief that she’s being followed by a strange man with piercing blue eyes cannot be addressed conventionally. She needs an alternative form of help.
Mary suggests a satanic sabbath, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And before Jane knows it she’s being fed warm blood from a freshly sacrificed animal sacrifice and is having her body palped by fellow participants at a black mass. Martino’s foot is suddenly back on the porn pedal.
It is the old “is this all really happening or is she going mad?” plot. Women may be hysterical – it’s suggested – but the men in this movie are even worse. Starting with the ineffectual Richard, and ranging through the pointless shrink, the menacing guy with the blue eyes (Ivan Rassimov), the satanist leader (Julián Ugarte), they start at useless and end at positively malevolent. Until, as if waking from his own dream very late on, Richard discovers his inner man just in time to save the day in what is effectively a complete change of character.
Fenech is very good. Born to play a bride of Dracula, she has the dark gothic looks the role requires. She was married to Martino’s producer brother, Luciano, when this was made but she’s more than just a case of keeping it in the family.
She holds together what rapidly becomes a bad case of “one damn thing after another” plotting. Suddenly, for instance, Jane is being menaced by a decomposing sheep’s head. Suddenly she’s being chased by Alsatian dogs. Where did they come from? But at least Martino conjures a sense of mounting disorder and frantic paranoia. That’s what the film is good at, though DP Migueal Mila’s milky shooting style and his gauzy treatment of all the ladies pulls in the opposite direction.
Does it have anything at all to do with the recent best-selling novel of the same name by Chris Whitaker? No, not in the slightest. That misunderstanding disappears under the alternative titles – Day of the Maniac (nonsensical) and They’re Coming to Get You! (much more like it).
All the Colors of the Dark – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2026
