Arrow Video straddles arthouse and exploitation with the criminally-underseen and underrated proto-giallo THE POSSESSED on Blu-ray.

Facing an uncertain romantic future, novelist Bernard (Peter Baldwin, THE WEEKEND MURDERS) breaks up with his current girlfriend and travels to a village where he spent vacations as a youth, and more recently the year before when he became enamored of Tilde (Virna Lisi, HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE), a maid working at the hotel of Enrico (Salvo Randone, MY DEAR KILLER) which overlooks a lake that submerged an entire ancient Etruscan city. Upon arrival, however, he learns that Tilde is dead, having been pulled out of the lake not so long ago. The ruling was a case of suicide, but Francesco (Pier Giovanni Anchisi, AUTOPSY), a small-town journalist who also runs a photography studio, tells him that she was murdered and that Enrico paid to have it covered up. Bernard is skeptical even when Francesco shows him a photograph that suggests Tilde was pregnant until he also reveals that the post-mortem said she was a virgin; which Bernard knows to be a lie, not because he made love to her himself but because he once spied her in bed with a man he could not identify. Bernard starts to suspect that Tilde's mystery lover and father of her child was either Enrico himself or his ill-tempered butcher son Mario (Philippe Leroy, CASTLE OF THE LIVING DEAD) who has recently married wealthy Adriana (Pia Lindström) who has come back from the honeymoon sickly and taken to walking along the lake at night. Enrico's spinster daughter Emma (Valentina Cortese, THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH) is seemingly on the verge of a nervous breakdown from the gossip surrounding Tilde's death and rumors of Mario's failed marriage. Under the strain of deductions which point to a Tilde he never knew, Bernard's own physical and mental health starts to break down, but then another murder occurs…

Based on a true crime that happened in the village of Alleghe in the thirties as documented by journalist Giovanni Camisso in his novel "La Donna del Lago" (the film's Italian title) – as scripted by co-directors Luigi Bazzoni and Franco Rossellini along with future DEATH LAID AN EGG director Giulio Questi – THE POSSESSED could be described as a giallo – reflected in the glassy monochrome photography of Leonida Barboni (AFTER THE FOX) – but the film has one foot in neorealism and another in the Italian art film movement of the sixties. Whereas Elio Petri's L'ASSASSINO indicted a society and the police in bed with a sensationalistic media, THE POSSESSED focuses on its investigating protagonists and the distortions of both his romantic obsession and his creative mind. At first he may be seeking mystery where there is none, and then the melodramatic nature of the visualizations of his intuition suggest he may be trying to make disparate puzzle pieces fit together; indeed, Francesco calls him out on his frustration with the difference between plotting a novel and the complexities of real life and the impossibility of knowing the full truth (even the police after the killer has been exposed tell Bernard they may never really know the whole story beyond his own written statement). The killer's confession is not all that coherent beyond "I killed them all," so Bernard's account of the events is just as much an interpretation as the image he had built of up of Tilde and tried so hard to maintain in the face of unsavory truths. American-born Baldwin, a veteran director of American sitcom television, but perhaps best known to Eurocult viewers for his co-starring turn with Barbara Steele in THE GHOST, is able to convey volumes non-verbally, suffering less than more recognizable English and American actors robbed of their voice either by dubbing or by having to loop their performances later while Lisi – who Brigitte Bardot herself considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world – Lindstrom (daughter of Ingrid Bergman from an earlier marriage before Roberto Rossellini), and Leroy are window-dressing with the film favoring its "character actors" in Randone, Anchisi, and Cortese. THE POSSESSED was the only directorial effort of Rossellini – nephew of Roberto Rossellini (ROME, OPEN CITY) – who would go on to produce THE DRIVER'S SEAT and CALIGULA while co-director Bazzoni would helm four more features including the exemplary giallo THE FIFTH CORD and the surreal, giallo-tinged mystery FOOTPRINTS ON THE MOON. Bazzoni's brother Camillo served as camera operator, with future Fulci cinematographer Sergio Salvati as focus puller, while the Rossellini's father Renzo (PAISAN) scored the film.

Although unreleased in the United States, the film was released in English as THE POSSESSED in the United Kingdom in 1966 by Butcher's Film Service – the same company also released Antonio Margheriti's THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH the same year – but had been hard to see subsequently until Italian genre magazine company Nocturno put it out as part of a line of VHS cassettes (in a line that also featured such rarities like Antonio Margheriti's THE UNNATURALS and Romano Scavolini's A WHITE DRESS FOR MARIALE). The film first appeared on DVD in Spain from Filmax in an anamorphic widescreen transfer with Italian and Spanish tracks. The same master popped up in Italy in 2013 from Sinister Film. When an HD master was created in 2015, the film appeared on Blu-ray in Italy from Sinister Film, had an authored DVD reissue from Regia Films in Spain and an unauthorized Blu-ray from an unknown company in that country, followed by a Blu-ray from Koch Media as part of a five-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo set with Bazzoni's FOOTPRINTS ON THE MOON (FOOTPRINTS had English audio and subtitles but THE POSSESSED only had Italian audio and German subtitles).

Arrow Video's dual-territory Blu-ray boasts of being a brand new 2K restoration from the original camera negative. We have not seen the German or Italian Blu-rays but Arrow's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray is a thing of incredible monochrome beauty. Detail is sensuous – apart from shots that are deliberately high contrast – and the chilly setting is palpably felt not only in the environments but in the very skin of the performers and the textures of their clothing. Audio options include the Italian track in LPCM 1.0 mono and, for the first time since the British theatrical release, the English dub in LPCM 1.0 mono as well, with optional English subtitles for the Italian track and SDH subtitles for the English. The film can be played with English or Italian credits via seamless branching. The English credits have THE POSSESSED title card and a few major credits in English while the rest are in Italian. Whether the English version dropped several credits and Arrow filled them back in with cards from the Italian version or it was always like this is a mystery.

Extras start off with an audio commentary by Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas who provides some background on the true crime and the novel – noting that the autobiographical equivalent of the Francesco character was future filmmaker Pasquale Festa Campanile (HITCH-HIKE) – and discusses the film's themes of disconnection and the recurring motif of glass and other barriers while likening the style and theme of an artistic visitor to a small town uncovering secret madness to Pupi Avati's THE HOUSE WITH THE LAUGHING WINDOWS; indeed, THE POSSESSED seems like something Antonioni might have done with Avati's script. The video appreciation "Richard Dyer on The Possessed" (25:12) also provides background on the case but mainly focuses on the ways in which it is more art film than giallo, discussing the arthouse credentials of its cast and in the context of Bazzoni's other atypical examples of the genre.

The disc also features three featurettes from Cinema Bis, two of which are unfortunately not up to the quality one expects of Arrow for their Italian titles. "Lipstick Marks" (11:52), an interview with make-up artist Giannetto de Rossi (ZOMBIE), and "Youth Memories" (16:20), an interview with assistant art director Dante Ferretti (THE AGE OF INNOCENCE), use clips from THE POSSESSED to pad out interviews in which the film itself barely rates a mention (not unlike a few of the extras on Arrow's recent release of TORSO). Based on the clips, one would seem to think De Rossi was discussing THE POSSESSED as his first job as make-up supervisor; however, he is actually discussing Lucio Fulci's I MANIACI, which he covers at length along with THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK – the one starring Leonardo Di Caprio from the late nineties – with a few brief anecdotes about his other genre work. This featurette almost seems like an extract from a larger interview repurposed for the disc or that the interviewer wanted to salvage the footage after learning that De Rossi remembered little to nothing about the Bazzoni film. Ferretti's recollections only encompass the film in that he started working uncredited on two back-to-back Domenico Paolella films where production manager Paolo Giovanardi introduced him to production designer Luigi Scaccianoce under whom he worked on Pier Paolo Pasolini's THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW, and through Pasolini they met producer Bolognini leading to their work on THE POSSESSED.