Don't Torture a Duckling

Children are being murdered in a southern Italian village. Suspicion falls on the local outsiders: a woman rumoured to be a witch, a mentally disabled man, a woman from the city.

Fulci moves the giallo out of the fashionable city and into rural Catholic poverty, and the result is a film about superstition and mob violence rather than about a killer.

The scene in which a woman is beaten to death with chains in a cemetery while cars pass on the motorway above, scored to a pop song on a car radio, is the best thing he ever directed.

It was attacked by the Church on release and Fulci had trouble working for a period afterwards.

The identity of the killer is the sharpest thing in any giallo and the reason the film was so unwelcome in Italy in 1972.