Even before the hallway she’s in transforms from a coach corridor to a residential entrance full of naked strangers, Florinda Bolkan’s heaving breaths sound erotic. As Carol Hammond, the actress transmits a calm anxiety as she runs from her stalker, frantically shaking door handles and wrestling through the orgy of writhing bodies before falling slowly into a black abyss. Spread upon red satin, a slender, blonde woman awaits her, wearing nothing but a black robe. Smiling seductively, the stranger removes Carol’s fur coat, lowers her gently onto the bed and kisses her softly, their nude figures sliding against each other. For all of the film’s low-budget cheesiness, the opening dream sequence to Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) remains as mesmerizing as ever.
Born from a genre that challenges the concept of rigid compositional categories while also eschewing a number of thematic and stylistic tropes that make it instantly recognizable, the film remains a strange bundle of many such contradictions over half a century after its release. A 105-minute priapism that’s terrified of sex, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is an utterly ridiculous yet ideologically grounded (even somewhat progressive) male fantasy that indulges in violence and eroticism to varying degrees of self-awareness. Written and directed by a major purveyor of Italian giallo whose adherence to the genre’s fetishes implicate him in its sexism almost by default, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin still somehow includes one of the more compelling onscreen depictions of female desire to come out of the 1970s.
A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin deals with its queer subject matter explicitly, revolving around a sexually repressed London housewife named Carol (obviously) who has erotic dreams about her bombshell next-door neighbor, Julia (Anita Strindberg). Adding another layer of complications to our protagonist’s psychosexual frustrations is the counterculture movement that had ruptured the West by the time the film was released. It’s a lifestyle Julia has fully embraced, regularly hosting extravagant, LSD-saturated orgies in her apartment, and one that Carol is denied by virtue of marriage and upper-class expectations. (Her father, Edmund Brighton, is a wealthy lawyer and politician, and her husband, Frank Hammond, works at his law firm.)
After one of her dreams culminates in murder, Carol wakes up to discover that Julia has been killed in real life—and she’s the main suspect. As the evidence against her piles upwards, she’s arrested and charged with murder, then placed in a maximum security sanitorium where she awaits trial. Following her unreliable POV, it’s at first unclear if Carol really did do it—but of course, Fulci introduces several more suspects through various twists over the course of the film’s runtime, prompting her husband and father to do some investigating of their own.
From Ingrid Pitt’s turn as a sapphic vampire in Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) to Vicente Aranda’s predatory take on Carmilla in The Blood Spattered Bride (1972), sexually transgressive media from the 1970s was no stranger to the psycho lesbian trope. However, by making the ostensible killer the protagonist of his film and having her straddle the line between victim and perpetrator, Fulci makes Carol ring true to the experience of anyone who’s ever been in the closet. In a culture that threatens shame upon those with deviant sexualities and forces people to suppress their desires often to the point of self-denial, this can result in a heavy psychological toll.
On the surface, Fulci’s pathologizing of his female protagonist is nothing groundbreaking; gialli remain notorious for putting women through the ringer, fetishizing the female form along with the violence so often perpetrated against it. However, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is notable in how it subverts these themes while also indulging in them; it’s self-aware of men’s fear of autonomous female desire and imbues the male characters’ limited perspectives of Carol with irony. Maybe it’s because of this that Fulci’s film still holds up so well over 50 years after its release, operating under the genre’s twisty whodunnit structure to reflect different levels of queer shame and angst.
Nowadays, creators will bend over backwards in an effort to rationalize a lack of sapphic visibility in a popular culture that demands it, often arguing that depicting women as single is somehow more or equally progressive than portraying them in same-sex relationships. This, of course, is a fallacy; it goes without saying that romance is not an extension of the patriarchy and lesbian relationships are, by definition, even less so. As such, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is also notable in how it ties Carol’s relationship with Julia to her freedom—sexual and otherwise. A first-time viewer may empathize with Carol in the film’s early scenes, especially since she seems consciously wary of her own domestic lifestyle.
“Even a husband can be good-mannered,” she tells her stepdaughter, Joan, after the latter questions why Frank should have to ask permission to enter Carol’s bedroom.
In a later scene, Carol sits with her family around the dinner table, quietly tapping her foot to the loud music playing from Julia’s apartment next door, as if yearning for a freedom that seems within grasp. Trapped in the confines of this passionless existence, Julia’s loud and extravagant lifestyle almost translates as gasconade.
“Your conscience forces you to disapprove of that woman’s way of life. But at the same time, her freedom excites your curiosity—you feel attracted,” Carol’s psychoanalyst, Dr. Kerr (George Rigaud), tells her early on. “This conflict, which is responsible for your actual state of anxiety, explains the recurrence of your dream.”
Like detectives investigating murders, gialli operate as whodunnits, forming lists of suspects and sifting through them over the course of 90 minutes or so. This lets them operate on different levels of truth: The same way that the protagonist’s consciousness is often in flux, each reveal speaks to different parts of the viewer’s own sentience. In A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’s case, all of the characters make compelling suspects because, for all of the film’s artifice, their motives all align with the real-life consequences of sexual repression and shame in a heteronormative society. This is especially true for Frank (Jean Sorel) and Edmund (Leo Genn) who, after finding out about Carol’s erotic dreams through Dr. Kerr, become the police’s most compelling suspects even after they’ve questioned a number of hippies and drug addicts who formed part of Julia’s circle. Frank’s affair with his personal secretary and his financial tie to the Brightons are solid motivations for him to frame his wife, but the average 21st-century viewer would likely also consider the possibility of him killing the woman she desires in a display of masculine insecurity. Likewise, Fulci turns our suspicions to Carol’s father when it’s revealed that Julia at one point attempted to blackmail him—presumably with information about his daughter. The possibility that Mr. Brighton killed Julia to protect his family and law firm’s reputation would, once again, play into the shame that comes not only with queerness but also queer association.
While it’s not directly implied that Edmund feels shame when he finds out Carol desires another woman, the reality we live in, and the knowledge that characters in these films hide their true motives until the end, are factors we can’t help but project onto the text.
Still, there doesn’t seem to be much indignation on either man’s part after they find out about Carol’s dreams, with both of them approaching the matter as clinically as Dr. Kerr. The matter-of-fact way that the men in this film react to Carol’s infatuation with Julia is telling; it’s as though they can’t fathom women having sexual desires—much less for each other—unless it’s the result of some mental disorder (“sick” women are a primary fixation in this genre). It’s why Dr. Kerr initially recommends that they plead insanity once Carol is placed in the sanitorium, and why only Joan seems to understand the full implications of Carol’s nightmares.
“Did you know she went to bed with Julia Duras in her dreams?” she snidely asks Frank at one point.
“Stop it now!” he responds, seemingly in shock. Clearly, the thought that his wife may be a lesbian had never before crossed his mind. His ignorance would be funny if it wasn’t so prophetic.
All of this changes in the film’s third act, which subverts sapphic victimhood in a way that’s oddly affirming. Here, we discover that Carol did, in fact, kill Julia, and that their sexual relationship wasn’t restricted to Carol’s imagination. The discovery that Julia attempted to blackmail Carol’s family and that Carol killed her consciously, makes them both unsympathetic in hindsight, but it also makes Carol’s recklessness strangely empowering. If gialli were typically informed by the Freudian notion that sexual repression puts one under neurosis, then our protagonist’s deliberate and purely pleasurable engagement in an extramarital relationship makes her rational and sane. In a genre that regularly grants its antagonists perverse psychosexual fixations, Carol’s selfish sanity and refusal to be victimized make her empowering—at least in comparison to the genre’s other tragic women. (It should be noted that although Carol isn’t killed, she’s punished for this when the case’s lead detective arrests her after finding out in the film’s final minutes.)
It’s no secret that in the 2020s, increased visibility of the LGBTQ+ community coupled with widespread right-wing radicalization and partisan wedge issues have yielded rampant re-stigmatization of queer and trans people in both the U.S. and U.K. Maybe it’s because of this that the first two acts of Fulci’s film still feel so fresh. Oddly enough however, the film’s late invalidation of her victimhood doesn’t negate these truths so much as it shines light on other, simultaneous ones. The men’s patronizing view of Carol as a delicate damsel is its own issue, but it also speaks to a greater social tendency to automatically and insidiously grant white women the illusion of innocence—something the script (from Fulci, Josè Luis Martinez Molla, Andrè Tranchè and Roberto Gianviti) deviously subverts.
Half a century after it was released, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’s depiction of same-sex relationships as a liberating ideal remains as radical as Fulci’s framing of his protagonist as a villain in a world she could easily have fallen victim to. This is reason enough to reclaim the film. No matter who it catered to at the time it was made, it remains a sapphic treasure sure to surprise anyone who’ll give it half a chance.
Ursula Muñoz S. is a critic, journalist and MFA candidate at Boston University who has previously written for news and entertainment outlets in Canada and the United States. Her work has appeared at Xtra, Cineaste, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more. For further reading, feel free to follow her on Substack and X, where she muses about Taylor Swift and Pedro Almodóvar (among other things).