Panic Beats (1983)

Original title: Latidos de pánico

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Paul de Marnac (Paul Naschy) is the descendant of noble family, but has grown up in what he calls poverty. That’s not what we call living in a mansion and having enough money to go to university around here. Anyway, he has managed to marry rich Geneviève (Julia Saly), and has apparently worked pretty hard in her family’s company.

When Geneviève is diagnosed with a dangerous heart condition, Paul convinces her to leave her beloved Paris with him and go live in his old family mansion. There, they are supposed to live a quiet life with Paul’s old housekeeper Mabile (Lola Gaos) and Mabile’s young, sexy niece Julie (Pat Ondiviela), who Mabile has taken in after some unpleasantness at reform school.

There’s a gothic pall hanging over the house, though. Mabile and Julie both dive into the tale of Paul’s ancestor Alaric de Marnac (also Paul Naschy, of course), who brutally murdered his wife when she was unfaithful to him. Alaric is said to return every century or so to kill any de Marnac wife he encounters. And wouldn’t you know it, his hundred years are nearly over.

Geneviève takes the tale rather seriously, and soon begins to see Alaric in his plate mail whether she’s awake or asleep. Snakes appear and disappear in her room as well whenever she is alone, and someone does just love to put something into Mabile’s tea that makes her very sleepy indeed, so she is of little help. Why, you might think someone’s trying to induce a fatal heart attack in Geneviève.

So yes, this entry into the body of work of house favourite Paul Naschy starts out as one of those thrillers in which the villains attempt to kill or drive crazy their rich wives to better get at their victim’s money. Making matters morally even worse, it’s not as if Geneviève were keeping Paul on a short leash – she’s clearly very much in love with him; he, is very much in love with that guy as well.

Which does of course make Paul a typical Naschy protagonist in his darker period beginning in the 80s. Where Naschy’s various versions of wolfman Waldemar Daninsky in earlier years always had a whiff of gothic tragedy around them, Paul is an utterly despicable bastard who is only pretending to have any kind of moral core when it fits into his plans, and instead of tragedy, Paul has put some irony in his way. Namely, that he encounters a partner in crime in Julie who is even worse than he is – as well as more patient.

So the film turns into a different kind of thriller in the middle, one where the villains first have to cover up their deeds by committing further murders – there’s a brilliantly sharp and brutal bit where Julie kills Paul’s other lover – and then eventually turn on each other.

That’s not enough for Naschy, however. Just showing terrible people being terrible to one another is all well and good, but letting the final survivor stumble into a horrible supernatural end by exactly the force they pretended to be earlier is a delight. Particularly since Naschy – also in the director’s chair this time around – decides to realize this bit in a pitch-perfect scene of EC comics imitation, with the grim, grinning delight in dramatically ironic carnage the best – and most of the other – EC horror stories had.

Before Panic Beats gets there, Naschy also delivers a mansion-load of gothic atmosphere, obvious but still highly effective twists, and some moments of the kind of bitter misanthropy that increasingly began to dominate his films without ever quite hiding the big, monster movie loving heart of our hero.