Lucio Fulci is remembered today as the “Godfather of Gore,” the man who gave us zombies gnawing eyeballs and maggots raining down like biblical plagues. But before Zombie Flesh Eaters and The Beyond, he crafted Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972), perhaps his finest film: a giallo where the horror doesn’t come from stylish masked killers, but from an insular village rotting under superstition, hypocrisy, and Catholic repression. It’s both mystery and indictment, a slasher and a sermon. And it has Barbara Bouchet, in all her devastating glory, weaponizing beauty like a razor concealed in lace.
Small Town, Big Secrets
The setting is Accendura, a fictional backwater village in Basilicata, where life is divided between the devout, the corrupt, and the desperate. Boys disappear and die—murdered, strangled, drowned. Whispers spread faster than the police. A journalist, Andrea Martelli (Tomas Milian), arrives from Rome to cover the crimes and quickly learns that the villagers are far more interested in blaming outsiders than in finding the truth.
Suspects abound: Giuseppe, the simpleton accused because he’s poor and odd; Maciara (Florinda Bolkan), the local witch who believes her voodoo dolls killed the boys; and Patrizia (Barbara Bouchet), the scandal-ridden socialite who teases village children while lounging around nude, as though Franco Zeffirelli had invaded Playboy. Each suspect reveals more about the village’s sickness: superstition, violence, and sexual hysteria.
The killer’s revelation is shocking and deeply political: Don Alberto (Marc Porel), the handsome local priest, has been murdering boys not to punish sin, but to prevent it. In his mind, he is saving their souls by cutting off temptation before it begins. It’s Catholic repression taken to its most perverse extreme—virtue wielded as murder weapon.
Fulci’s Knife Cuts Both Ways
Fulci, never shy of controversy, slices open the underbelly of Italian Catholic culture. Priests, parents, police—all fail the children they’re supposed to protect. Faith offers no salvation; it provides the justification for murder. The village itself is complicit, happier to brutalize a scapegoat than confront uncomfortable truths.
This isn’t the operatic giallo of Dario Argento with its neon colors and leather gloves. Fulci shoots Accendura in natural light—harsh, sun-bleached, dusty. The horror here isn’t glamorous. It’s mundane. Chickens cluck while boys die. Old women mutter prayers while beating a woman to death. Life and death coexist in suffocating banality.
Barbara Bouchet: Temptress, Tragic, Gorgeous
Let’s pause for Barbara Bouchet, because good Lord. As Patrizia, she embodies everything the villagers loathe and secretly crave: beauty, freedom, sexuality unchained by their suffocating morality. She struts through Accendura like a goddess dropped into a swamp, her platinum hair and flawless figure mocking the drab earth tones around her.
Her most infamous scene—lounging naked, teasing young Michele with a wicked smile before pulling back in rejection—is a grenade lobbed into Catholic repression. It’s uncomfortable, provocative, and deliberate: Fulci forces the audience to see how innocence and desire clash, how sexuality becomes weaponized, how Patrizia is both sinner and scapegoat. Bouchet plays it with sly intelligence, never reducing Patrizia to a simple temptress. She is modernity incarnate, misunderstood and vilified, as radiant as she is damned.
And yes, she’s gorgeous. Distractingly, devastatingly gorgeous. But beneath the surface she’s the mirror that reflects every man’s hypocrisy in Accendura.
Florinda Bolkan’s Brutal Poetry
If Bouchet is the film’s glittering surface, Florinda Bolkan is its raw wound. As Maciara, the witch, she delivers one of the most devastating performances in any giallo. Wrongly accused of witchcraft and child murder, she is beaten to death by villagers in a scene that feels ripped from medieval history. Fulci films it unflinchingly: fists, stones, boots, blood. It’s ugly, animalistic, sickening—and it remains one of the most powerful indictments of mob violence ever filmed.
Bolkan plays Maciara not as a caricature but as a broken woman whose only crime is poverty and superstition. When she dies, the audience’s horror isn’t at the gore, but at the cruelty of ordinary people convinced they are righteous.
The Priest and the Cliff
The climax belongs to Marc Porel’s Don Alberto. His confession—that he murdered boys not for vengeance but to “save” them from sin—lands like a thunderclap. He is the perfect Fulci villain: handsome, devout, utterly sincere, and utterly deranged. His attempt to kill his own sister to “protect” her innocence seals the point.
When he falls from the cliff, the camera lingers on his body breaking against the rocks, a long, excruciating sequence that makes his death feel both punishment and release. The priest’s fall is the Church’s fall, a metaphor as subtle as a brick but no less effective for it.
The Sound of Sin
Riz Ortolani’s score is one of the film’s hidden daggers. His music sways between pastoral sweetness and eerie dissonance, with Ornella Vanoni’s vocals floating like prayers whispered in a confessional. The juxtaposition of beauty and brutality—lilting music over child murders—deepens the film’s unease. It’s the sound of a culture whistling past its own graveyard.
Why It Works
Don’t Torture a Duckling succeeds because it refuses to play nice. Fulci doesn’t give us escapist thrills; he rubs our faces in the rot of small-town morality. The killings are brutal, but the true horror lies in repression, superstition, and the hypocrisy of institutions meant to protect innocence.
Unlike many gialli, the film doesn’t luxuriate in style over substance. It’s shot with gritty realism, grounding its mystery in social critique. That’s why it still resonates today. Behind every lurid title and every Barbara Bouchet striptease lies a question: what is more dangerous, sin itself, or the fear of it?
Dark Humor in the Darkness
And yet, for all its bleakness, there’s Fulci’s sly humor. The title itself is absurd: Don’t Torture a Duckling—as if Donald Duck wandered into a murder mystery. And indeed, a Donald Duck doll becomes a crucial clue, its beheaded head a symbol of childhood corrupted. The juxtaposition is grotesque and absurd, and Fulci relishes the irony.
There’s even something bitterly funny in how the villagers, so eager to appear pious, descend into savagery at the first whisper of witchcraft. Religion and barbarism walk hand in hand, and Fulci, the eternal cynic, laughs bitterly in the background.
Final Verdict: Fulci’s True Masterpiece
Before Fulci drowned the screen in entrails and eyeball trauma, he gave us Don’t Torture a Duckling—a film that proves he was not merely a shock merchant, but a sharp social critic. It is brutal, tragic, political, and, in its own perverse way, beautiful.
Barbara Bouchet smolders as the embodiment of modernity, Florinda Bolkan devastates with raw humanity, and Marc Porel delivers a priest as chilling as any masked killer. Together they form a portrait of a society strangled by its own fear of sin.
Yes, the title misleads. No ducks are tortured, though childhood itself is. What Fulci tortures instead is the conscience of the audience, forcing us to confront the hypocrisy that breeds monsters.
And in the middle of it all stands Bouchet: gorgeous, untouchable, damned.
If Fulci had never filmed another frame, Don’t Torture a Duckling would still stand as proof that horror can be more than cheap thrills—it can be a scalpel cutting into the soul of a nation.
