To begin our third annual October Horror series, we venture deep into the heart of American horror’s most surreal amusement park

The majority of cash-strapped horror films aim to hide the fact that they were made with no money. The goal is often to make the movie pass for something produced by a professional studio, leaving as little evidence as possible of the human hands who created it. In most cases, the strive for professionalism is what leads to the ultimate failure of these films. They can usually pass as proficiently made movies for long enough that audiences will buy in to the story for a while, but once the strings start to show or the goofy rubber monster fails to live up to the buildup, the laughter and mockery are sure to begin. When these films try to wipe away all the fingerprints, the ones left behind are twice as damning.

Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (1973) feels almost defiantly handmade. You can sense the extreme efforts its makers went to in designing the film in every frame. Its trippy, candy-colored sets are constructed out of little more than bubble wrap, styrofoam cups, and an assortment of glittery and doomed recycled objects. The production’s lack of resources became its greatest asset. The film owns its artifice. The atmosphere created on screen feels like a junky craft store was willed to life solely to fuel your nightmares. The world of Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood is all fingerprints, which makes it all the more worthy of exploration.

Directed by Christopher Speeth with location filming taking place at Pennsylvania’s famous Willow Grove amusement park, Malatesta begins with the Norris family’s arrival at the seedy fairground of its title. Mr. and Mrs. Norris (Paul Hostetler and Betsy Henn), with their daughter, Vena (Janine Carazo), have taken on jobs as a cover while they search the park for their missing son, who they have reason to believe is somewhere on the premises and in danger. On their first day, Mr. and Mrs. Norris are given the tour by Mr. Blood (Jerome Dempsey), the park’s pasty business manager, while Vena meets a young ride attendant named Kit (Chris Thomas) who suspects something terrible is going on in the park after hours. His suspicions are supported by the zombie-like custodial staff, a hook-handed maintenance man, and the nocturnal eccentricities of the park’s reclusive leader, Malatesta (Daniel Dietrich). It doesn’t take long for Vena and her parents to discover that below the dilapidated roller coasters and attractions dwells an underground mob of cannibals controlled by Malatesta.

The above plot synopsis sounds rather neat and tidy, perhaps even standard issue in a ’70s regional horror kind of way. But what appears on screen is far from the usual. By a mix of circumstance and design, Malatesta is beholden to no genre guidelines or story conventions. There is very little focus on plot and it can even be a little challenging to catch what the family is doing at the park in the first place. Of course, this is far from a complaint or critique. Much like its contemporary Messiah of Evil (1973), Malatesta is a film that benefits from its lack of coherency. The production was definitely short on funds. The filmmakers opted to shoot on 35mm, which aided in giving the film its incredible look, but left little room in the budget for anything else. This forced a tight production schedule and limited hours with crucial crew members, including director of photography Norman Gaines. Further challenges arose during the editing process. Though the filmmakers were able to shoot on their desired film stock, they couldn’t afford to buy enough of it to shoot alternate takes or improvise due to the cost, leaving them with missing pieces and a lack of options in post-production. 

But these setbacks opened more room for imagination to take the reins. With a crew of art filmmakers and experimental theater vets at the helm, imagination was not in short supply. Speeth cut his teeth making non-narrative shorts and documentaries. The film’s writer, Werner Liepolt, was an off-Broadway playwright. Speeth brought him onto the project after witnessing his production in which a character recites a soliloquy to a tapeworm in his stomach. Leipolt’s script for Malatesta was apparently crafted with the aim of recapturing humanity’s ancient fears and anxieties, the kinds of things acted out in shadow plays upon cave walls. Leipolt also claims that his screenplay intended for the film to be “subversive,” attacking bourgeois culture and modern American ideals. What materialized onscreen came out nothing like he had scripted. According to the film’s art directors, Speeth ditched Leipolt’s script halfway through the shoot, opting instead for an almost entirely visual approach and abandoned any attempts by Leipolt to subvert anything other than the current trend of “subversive,” “of-the-times” counterculture filmmaking.

Malatesta’s lack of interest in standard plotting and story allows its attention to stray into more memorable elements. It takes its time with various side characters, marveling in close-up at actor William Preston’s (The Exorcist III, Late Night with Conan O’Brien) glass eye as he plays the ghoulish custodian Sticker. A young Hervé Villechaize — playing Bobo the Dwarf a year before his breakout role in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) — is given ample room to wax poetic in cryptic warnings to Vena. The film’s visuals are incredibly disorientating, with its enveloping use of undefined darkness and strange manipulations of space. Shots will focus on strange props in the foreground while the actual action of a scene takes place in the peripherals, as when Speeth lingers on a goofy cowboy figurine during a zombie chase. Most scenes begin without any orienting factors. Throughout the film, it is hard to tell when one night ends and the next begins, creating the effect of near-perpetual darkness over the park.

Related: A Letter To George Barry, Creator Of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, From Shane Pfender

But mostly, Speeth and his collaborators allow viewers to lose themselves in the remarkably textured environments. Leipolt took influence from a true case of cave-dwelling cannibals in Scotland, but the carnival’s underground world is like nothing found on Earth. The film unravels into a labyrinthine series of elaborate set pieces, making the film’s narrative resemble a walk through a cursed crooked house attraction. The art directors, Richard Stange and Alan Johnson, make a lot out of a little, creating strange swinging cabs from junked cars with their hoods opened and enhanced with styrofoam cups for teeth and bubble wrap tongues. Vena, in what may be a dream sequence, is dumped into a room of billowy, grimy sheets of plastic, where she tumbles around in a state halfway between entrapment and blissed-out tossing and turning. 

Malatesta’s lair is designed like the bizarro version of the amusement park above, including a life-sized whack-a-mole with zombies as the targets and a fun house that would look right at home in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Malatesta puts on literal underground movie nights for his zombie denizens — complete with popcorn — where he screens silent classics like The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The film’s use of projected screen images transforms in later scenes, moving beyond Malatesta’s cavern movie theater and into what appear to be psychic projections of characters’ externalized nightmares or vampiric desires. Speeth gives us a shot of Mr. Blood, the token vampire among Malatesta’s cannibals, looming and giant in rear projection behind a sleeping Vena in the foreground, his canines protruding and ready to bite. Later, Malatesta poses over Vena before a screen showing Cesar the somnambulist lurking over a sleeping victim in Dr. Caligari. Malatesta consults the film before reaching for Vena. (It is worth noting that Malatesta predates independent filmmaker Mark Rappaport’s Casual Relations by a year, which features similar uses of rear-screen projections with images of Max Schreck from 1922’s Nosferatu.)

There remains something to be said about the film’s villain. A more classically trained or professionally minded filmmaker would certainly have fleshed out the character of Malatesta more. But it’s a safe bet that had Malatesta been developed further on screen, he would have struck an incredibly bland figure. Instead, we are given fragments of some strange, self-styled, and highly theatrical phantom. At first, he appears almost like a poser, running around in his cape when no one is watching and exuding the charisma of an amateur thespian with an excess of self-awareness. His persona is almost entirely referential. He sits enraptured by the films he screens for his clan of zombies. He refers to himself as a “man of a thousand faces,” making clear that his outcast subterranean lifestyle takes a Lon Chaney fascination to an extreme, and quotes the Wicked Witch of the West. But later in the film, he begins to exhibit an array of strange new abilities. He appears and disappears at will. He transforms into a bubble wrap man. He even puts on a completely normal day-walking facade for an inquiring police officer. At the end, we are left with a sense that even the filmmakers’ are unsure as to the extent of Malatesta’s powers.

It is this openness to possibility and the willingness of the filmmakers to take left turns into any strange situation or set piece they could dream up that makes this film so unique. Speeth and company created a world where these choices don’t come across as merely random or scattershot, but fully integrated into the strange fabric of their film. It is far from being the scariest movie, but Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood taps into something primitive and shadowy by breaking away from recognizable horror styles. It carves its own strange path through the darkness. Perhaps in some alternate, and better, world, Malatesta’s inventiveness is recognized as a benchmark for all no-budget horror productions to aspire to.

Find the complete October Horror 2021 series here:

Purchase Arrow Video’s Blu-ray of Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood on Blu-ray or as part of their American Horror Project Volume One box set
Find Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood on your preferred streaming service through JustWatch
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