In short: The Psychic (1977)

Original title: Sette notte in nero

Ever since she saw the death of her mother in a vision when she was a child, Virginia (Jennifer O’Neill) has had powers of clairvoyance. For a time, she had been working with parapsychologist Luca (Marc Porel) to understand her gift, but that project fizzled out when she married rich Francesco Ducci (Gianni Garko).

While her husband is away on business in London – the couple live in Italy – Virginia has another vision, concerning a murdered woman bricked in behind a wall. She realizes that the place where the body is hidden is a country house belonging to her husband that’s pretty much abandoned and dilapidated. Pretending to go on a bit of redecoration spree, she breaks down the wall from her vision. Behind it is indeed the corpse of a woman. As the police quickly find out, the dead is a former girlfriend of Francesco’s, making him a rather hot suspect in what is quite obviously a murder case. He quickly lands behind bars, and it is up to Virginia to follow other clues from her vision to save him.

Quite a few people – I’m not an always an exception - tend to reduce the body of work of Lucio Fulci to a couple of masterpieces and a load of crap that is supposed to have come after, but if you do that, you tend to ignore quite a few good to great movies, like this supernatural giallo and its sibling in Poe-nods made around the same time, The Black Cat.

The Psychic is a particularly interesting film because it shows that Fulci could work inside the realms of logic if he wanted too, here presenting a mystery that, if you’re willing to accept the psychic angle, makes rather a lot of sense. Despite the script like most of the things Fulci did at this time being co-written by Fulci’s brother in dislike of logic, Dardano Sacchetti, there’s a clear throughline to everything going on here, with discernible human motivations and reactions. Why, you might call this a traditionally well-plotted movie without blushing.

Unlike Fulci’s earlier giallos, this one seems particularly inspired by Hitchcock and his ideas about suspense, following that kind of structure very well, leaving this a film that still feels surprisingly exciting even once you’ve figured out where it is going. It also goes to show that you can make a suspenseful film that still has a murky, dream-like atmosphere; it also demonstrates that you can create such an atmosphere even in a film whose plot is comparatively (this is still a giallo about a psychic) down to earth.

For modern thriller tastes, this is probably still a somewhat slow film, but to my eyes, the film’s slow-ish pace is a perfect fit for a tale of the slow unravelling of a horrible truth, and of someone unwittingly becoming an accomplice in their own destruction.