The Bloodstained Shadow



By popular demand I’ve finished off Anchor Bay’s box set of giallo films with The Bloodstained Shadow (1978). This film opens with young woman being strangled to death in field, then jumps to years later with over-worked math professor Stefano (Lino Capoliccho) arriving on an island near Venice for a much needed vacation. Stefano’s brother Paolo (Craig Hill) is a priest on the island, and on the train ride to the ferry James strikes up a conversation with Sandra (Stefania Cassini), a pretty young artist.


Sandra is traumatized by wandering on to the set of The Exorcist.

On the island Stefano reunites with Paolo. That night Paolo witnesses the murder of a medium to exclusive clients, and begins receiving threatening notes warning him not to squeal even though he couldn’t actually identify the murderer. Stefano takes up with Sandra, and together they start investigating the medium's murder, as well as the still unsolved murder of the woman years before. Was it one of the medium’s clients, like the baron who likes little boys or the midwife with the mentally retarded son? One of the island’s policemen, who seem to place investigating murder somewhere below talking about the imagined sex lives of the various women they meet? Or is it Sandra, who owns a painting which appears to be mixed up in all this?

Actually, the solution to the mystery is rather obvious. And just in case it isn’t obvious enough the movie trots out one of my least favorite giallo clichés – at the end of the movie Stefano simply remembers that he saw the murder of the girl in the field when he was child and he’s been repressing it this whole time. Stefano isn’t willing to let all his research go that easily, however. Even after he confronts the murderer and tells him/her that he saw the murder all those years ago, Stefano still enumerates all the other clues he’s figured out. Calm down Stefano, your witnessing it is really enough; the painting doesn’t matter anymore.


Can you draw this? Then you may be the right material for the Art Instruction School!

The Bloodstained Shadow is just an average giallo, obviously influenced by Don’t Look Now (1973) and Deep Red (1975). There isn’t really anything to make it stand out. The characters are less flamboyant, the deaths less gory, and the clues less outrageous than the best (or at least most entertaining) films of the genre.

Posted: Wed - July 21, 2004 at      

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