“Macabre” is a word of uncertain etymological origin. One of the most convincing arguments that I’ve read is that it derives from Hebrew qbr, a root associated with graves. The “m” prefix would be the preposition “from,” making the phrase miqqeber, or “from the grave.” It has been decades so I don’t remember where I read that, but it made sense to me. In any case, this is a fairly common word for titles, it would seem. I recalled Stephen King noting Macabre among the scariest films up to 1980, so I thought I’d try to find it. A simple IMDb search showed it streaming for free on a couple of platforms, so I clicked on one of them. At about halfway through, I paused the movie to see if maybe I’d got the wrong one (I had). But I decided to finish it out in any case. There will be spoilers below.
What I’d found was the 1980 Lamberto Bava movie. Bava’s name was familiar to me from his famous father, Mario Bava, an Italian horror movie innovator. There was a family resemblance. So, what’s it about? A woman with two children is having an affair. Her somewhat unstable daughter decides to drown her brother to get her mother to come home. On the way, her paramour, who is driving, runs into a guardrail and is decapitated. After being released from the mental hospital, the woman moves into the apartment where the affair had been taking place. The house is owned by a blind man who knew about the affair. It sounds like, however, the affair is still continuing although said man is dead.
When the daughter, who is trying to get her parents back together, confesses that she drowned her brother, the woman drowns her—echoes of Medea here—but the blind man kills the woman when he tries to save the daughter. What makes this even more macabre, is that both the blind man and the daughter had learned that the woman was keeping the head of her lover in the freezer—echoes of Alice Cooper as well—to stimulate her as she continues the affair without her former lover. It’s not a horror classic. Titles can’t be copyrighted, so some repetition is bound to occur. The Macabre I should’ve watched was the one from either 1958 or 1969. Apparently this is a popular film title, as there was another released in 2009. I can rule out the last one, but to find out what I should be looking out for, I’ll need to dig out my copy of, well, Danse Macabre.
