MARK OF THE DEVIL
d. Michael Armstrong
and Adrian Hoven, 1970

16 February 2009

A novice witch-hunter arrives in a small town to prepare the way for his master, who is replacing the corrupt local provincial witch-hunter in his duties. As obviously innocent people are accused, however, the novice begins to question his teacher's motives and methods. In the meantime, a lot of cringe-inducing tortures are meted out to the accused.

MARK OF THE DEVIL aspires to some level of historical accuracy, and indeed the locations chosen for the film are authentic and give the proceedings a degree of gravity. So, too, the tortures - which are plentiful and graphic - are recreations of actual tortures inflicted on accused witches.

The nominal realism of these elements, however, is grossly overshadowed by the obviously salacious intentions of the film, and its relentlessly one-dimensional characterizations. The witches are all innocent, the witch-hunters (with the exception of the novice) are all corrupt hypocrites, and the inquisitors all leering grotesques.

Be assured, I don't mean "salacious," "one-dimensional," or "leering grotesques" in a bad way! MARK OF THE DEVIL is solid entertainment of the Grand Guignol kind. I would not recommend it to the uninitiated, but if you are comfortable with sleazy violent Eurohorror films, it is not to be missed.

MARK OF THE DEVIL is, of course, notorious for its graphic scenes of torture. The torture scenes were used as a marketing point in the USA, where a "vomit bag" was handed out to the patrons with their tickets.

I saw MARK OF THE DEVIL when it came out, vomit bag and all, the first Eurotrash film I ever saw in a theater. I would have been 16 at the time. Somehow it managed to escape the Market Street trash palaces in downtown San Francisco and get a run at The Rafael Theater in suburban Marin County. (Of course, my friends and I were off to Market Street a year or so later for MARK OF THE DEVIL II.)

I wonder if I should be bothered that MARK OF THE DEVIL wasn't a more disturbing experience to my 16 year old self. But I remember enjoying the heck out of it. It was certainly the sleaziest film I'd ever seen up until then. However, I'd seen stills in Castle Of Frankenstein which suggested that such trashy delights existed across the Atlantic, so MARK OF THE DEVIL was not so much a surprise as an anticipated confirmation that such films actually did exist. I was wide-eyed for the nudity, and the torture scenes were appropriately ewwwwww-inducing.

Today, I wonder how the hell I got into the theater at that age for such a sleazy film.

I also wonder how much Herbert Lom knew about the torture sequences. When told that a confession has not been extracted from an accused witch, his character says curtly "The tongue..." thereby initiating the film's most notorious bit of sadism. But there's no master shot of Lom and the poor victim in the same frame. I haven't listened to the commentary, but one of the featurette interviews mentions that Lom was gone by the time the more explicit tortures were filmed.

MARK OF THE DEVIL is thematically related to two other films from around the same period. The British/American production WITCHFINDER GENERAL covered very similar ground two years earlier, as did Ken Russell's THE DEVILS in 1971. (I've always assumed THE DEVILS predated and influenced MARK OF THE DEVIL, because the latter was only released here in 72.) MARK OF THE DEVIL is in an odd position. It is more exploitive and less artful than WITCHFINDER GENERAL, but then LESS exploitive than THE DEVILS which is by far more artful than both. Locale and temporal setting aside, I think MARK OF THE DEVIL has at least as much in common with Nazisploitation films as with these other witch hunting films.