By ROB FREESE
You may recall my conversation with legendary screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti in the pages of RUE MORGUE #196. We discussed the slasher films he had written over the decades at length, including Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood.
Producer Giuseppe Zaccariello contacted Sacchetti to write the screenplay. Sacchetti met with Bava to discuss the script, but their time was limited and mostly spent constructing the outlandish scenes of murder and mayhem for which the film is famous today.
Of the experience, Sacchetti stated, “Mario [Bava] never said he liked my work or not. He was not a sentimental guy. If he liked something, he worked on it; Otherwise, he looked for another story or another screenwriter. Mario did not take part in the script in any way, but he was attentive and wanted to read it. When there was something he didn’t like, he didn’t say anything, but when there was something he liked, it turned on the light bulbs, and then he changed completely. From being taciturn, he became a companion of adventures. We spent hours discussing a single scene. Each of the thirteen murders was all devised by me, except the double murder with the harpoon and the couple in bed. That was Mario’s.” Their collaboration resulted in a wildly entertaining proto-slasher that further defined the template for the burgeoning slasher genre.
Following A Bay of Blood, Bava was excited to work with the young scriptwriter again. Interested in a haunted house-type film (but different), Sacchetti wrote Al 33 di via dell’orologio fa sempre freddo (It’s Always Cold at 33 via Orologio). Unfortunately, Bava’s producer was unable to raise the funds needed to bring the project to life, so the script was shelved.
Years later, after the Al 33 di via dell’orologio fa sempre freddo script was rewritten by Lamberto Bava and produced as Shock (aka Beyond the Door II), Sacchetti was called by producer Fulvio Lucisano to write a sci-fi/horror script that was part of a deal Lucisano was working on to bring Bava to America to work with producer Roger Corman.
The young writer penned ANOMALIA (Anomaly), a science-fiction/horror story set on an uncharted planet that proves to be the actual origin point of the universe’s creation. A rescue team is assigned to retrieve a lost ship, only to discover an imbalance of positive and negative energies, a gigantic wall separating the energies, monsters drawn upon a wall that come to deadly life, a mirror ghost ship, and a nightmare landscape of living vegetation and creatures waiting to strike.
This collaboration promised incredible potential: Sacchetti’s script, Bava’s inventive camera tricks, Corman’s penny-pinching practicality – all made in the early 1980s, when genre movies were pushing boundaries and home video was about to blow up. The implications are staggering. (Imagine the poster artwork, no doubt influenced by such popular crowd pleasers of the time as Alien and Dawn of the Dead. Honestly, it designs itself. I see a masterpiece of exploitation artwork, nightmare creatures, heroes, and spaceships, all combined in a pleasing swirl of colors, hypnotically daring your eyeballs to look away.)
Over the years, I’ve been lucky to talk to Sacchetti at length about his amazing career. Because he has consistently spoken highly of Bava, citing their collaboration on A Bay of Blood as one of the most substantial of his career, he agreed to talk to me about the Bava projects that either weren’t what they were initially intended to be or didn’t happen at all.
How did you become involved in the script for Shock?
Screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti
I rarely get involved in scripts except when they call me to work on other people’s scripts [as a script doctor]. I usually create original stories, which is my great quality. I can write ten subjects a day, all with winning characteristics.
Mario, after A Bay of Blood, had a contact with a producer. They didn’t have a story. He called me and asked me if I had a story. I asked him, because my specialty is to turn even commas into stories, what kind of story he wanted. Mario told me that he didn’t want stories about actors; He would like to make a movie where the protagonist was a house. I added, “And all the objects inside the house?” He said, “Yes!” The next day I brought him Al 33 di via dell’orologio fa sempre freddo.
He liked it, and I received an advance and script commission from the producer. I wrote the screenplay, but in the meantime, the producer, an Italian who fled from Libya at the time of Gaddafi’s rebellion, failed to raise the money because he had wasted his wealth on beautiful women and the nightlife of via Veneto, a famous street in Rome near the American embassy. There were the most beautiful and luxurious hotels of Italy, where American actors used to go when there was the famous “Hollywood on the Tiber,” as it was called. I didn’t receive my money, and it all ended there. This happened, more or less, two years after A Bay of Blood.
Four or five years later, I learned from a friend that Bava was going to make a film with a script of mine. A producer had bought back the rights to my script and was making it without my knowledge. I didn’t receive my money. Then I discovered that Lamberto Bava, whom I had not met years before, not only signed the script, taking sole credit, but also went around saying that he had created the story. It’s one of the memories that I don’t like to recall, and it still makes me angry.
Any idea why IMDb credits Hillary Waugh’s novel “The Shadow Guest” as an “uncredited” source for your original script?
I do not know anything about this book, but IMDb often makes big mistakes on such topics. It’s not reliable because it does not go back to the true sources to confirm information.
How did your original script differ from the final film?
It was more horror, not a haunted house but a living house, with its own soul. There was no cocaine. (Author’s note: In the film, the character of Dora is forcibly injected with drugs and then possibly commits murder. This was not an aspect of Sacchetti’s original screenplay.)
It doesn’t sound like the same creative experience you had with Bava on A Bay of Blood.
In that period, we didn’t work together; We quarreled. Mario held his son in high regard, loved him as a father, and always defended him.
I know that you generally don’t watch movies adapted from your work, but did you watch Shock to see what Bava did with your material?
I didn’t watch it. I didn’t give a damn, just like I didn’t give a damn about Fulci’s films or about Argento’s [films] based on my work.
How did you come to write the script for ANOMALY? I’ve read it was a chance meeting with Bava, who asked if you had any ideas for a science fiction story.
No, I was called by the producer, Fulvio Lucisano, a great friend of Bava and Roger Corman. I proposed a science fiction film. I wrote the scenario, which was approved, hence the script. I conceived and wrote the script all by myself. Mario was excited by the wall with monsters.
How did Roger Corman become involved with the film?
Roger Corman
Corman was a part of it from the very beginning. It was Corman who wanted a Mario Bava film. He solicited Lucisano, who was otherwise a comedy producer. Corman wanted to bring Bava to America, but Mario didn’t want to go.
When you were hired to complete the script, did you get an opportunity to talk to Bava about any specific effects he wanted to create for the film?
I do not generally speak with the directors before I complete the scripts. I write first and then eventually talk to them.
Do you think the combination of Bava and Corman would have been successful?
We were on the eve of a big change. Hollywood had suddenly discovered, after the success of The Exorcist, that horror cinema could be very successful and was investing a lot of money [into horror films]. Low-cost cinema was about to be swept away and become very successful.
The script is a perfect blend of science fiction with creatures similar to those that H.P. Lovecraft wrote about. Were you at all inspired by Lovecraft when you wrote ANOMALY?
I do not get inspiration from anyone or anything in particular. I read everything, especially quantum physics and psychology. Of course, I know Lovecraft, but he’s not one of my favorites. I prefer Ambrose Bierce.
How would you sum up Mario Bava’s work in adapting your scripts?
Mario Bava
Bava was a true director, an artist. The others were only tradesmen. Working with Bava was different. I delivered the scripts and he made them. I knew he made them better than other directors because he did not allow – as opposed to Fulci – the meddling of producers. He did not cut scenes, and he did not hire actors who were wrong for the parts.
I believe the last film both you and Mario Bava worked on, in different capacities, was Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980). Were you aware you were both working on that film?
No, no, I had nothing to do with Inferno. I didn’t know Mario had anything to do with it. Normally, between the writing phase and Dario’s realization of the script, several months go by. I didn’t write a single script line. I read his script early, and I told Dario what I thought. He had some doubts, so I gave an opinion, which he took. My participation was more moral support rather than supplying material. It is true that Mario had read my scenario, The Master of Death, to Dario. It is the story of a sinister man who lived in a mysterious house that perhaps inspired Dario, perhaps not. Dario may have been influenced in some way, but his story for Inferno was very different from my scenario.
THE ANOMALY SCRIPT
Although the script was completed and plans were underway for Bava’s collaboration with Corman, the project stopped cold on April 27, 1980, when Bava suddenly passed away.
Much supposition surrounds this legendary, unproduced film. Sacchetti was gracious enough to allow me the privilege of reading the complete Italian language script, which I translated to the best of my ability. Here is a look at the movie that never was, a twisty, pulpy sci-fi/horror tale. I imagine it would have hit screens in late 1980 or early 1981 via Corman’s New World Pictures.
See Roger Corman’s original ANOMALY notes in the gallery below:
SCENARIO:
The small crew of the Liberty II consists of Commander Ben Curtiss, Pilot Tessie “Tess” Hawk, co-pilot Jason Fink, astronomer Kay Dos Santos, computer tech Walter Hill, engine tech Carson and weapons expert Eddie Norton.
They have been tasked with locating Commander Fisher’s Liberty I, which recently went missing. The computer follows Liberty I’s tracer into uncharted space, deep beyond any previous exploration.
When the signal locates Liberty I on a desolate planet, the Liberty II crew follows the tracking signal. The planet is a swampy wasteland. There is vegetation and wildlife. They trod through the swamps towards Liberty I, encountering deadly vines that whip around like eels and attack from under the water.
Once they locate Liberty I, the rescuers begin seeing ghostly visions of a very dead Commander Fisher, who leaves them cryptic warnings about the planet they are on. They also locate a nearby cathedral and a massive wall of monoliths. On the surface of the monoliths are etched giant, grotesque nightmare creatures.
Exploring the cathedral, they enter chambers that mirror the interior of sections and rooms on the Liberty II. Kay Dos Santos, with the help of the computer in the mirror image of the Liberty II computer room, determines that they are not so much on an uncharted planet as they are at the very center of creation, where the Big Bang happened, sparking life eons ago.
Commander Fisher appears and warns of an evil entity known as The Great Corruptor that has thrown off the universe’s balance of positive and negative energies. The giant beasts etched into the mammoth wall suddenly come to horrific life and descend upon the survivors of the Liberty II crew, giving way to the fate of the universe and ending with a genuinely surprising finale.
Although Sacchetti assured me he never tailored a script to a director’s strengths, the descriptions in his screenplay would have been a playground for Bava to visually realize. The mind reels to imagine the images Bava would have put on screen, especially in 1980/1981, when the modern era of science fiction had been ushered in a year earlier with Alien. (I doubt his crew would have worn matching leather jumpsuits like the crew in his Planet of the Vampires.) I think Liberty II would have had a more lived-in, modern look than the science fiction pictures of earlier decades.
While the story certainly begins like a familiar Alien story (especially more than 40 years later), it quickly takes a surprising left turn into H.P. Lovecraft territory with ancient evils and an imbalance of negative forces, placing this story as much in the horror genre as science fiction.
The following snippets of scenes, translated directly from Sacchetti’s Italian language first-draft script, give fans their first real look at what this epic sci-fi/horror outing might have been:
SCENES:
From Scene 65, when the Liberty II crew enters the Liberty I’s crew chambers and finds a corpse in a bunk:
Those thin threads … hair … very long, floating in the air as if they were alive, still attached to the remains of a horribly rotting body, lying in one of the bunks built into the wall.
An incredible, terrifying image. That unrecognizable, rotten body and that long, very long, floating hair.
From Scene 75, in the interior corridor of the Liberty I, computer whiz Hill runs in with tentacle-like vines swarming inside his head within his space suit. Curtiss and Tess are unable to help him:
Hill runs and stumbles, slamming here and there against the walls.
He stops for a moment, then, suddenly, launches himself against the wall, violently slamming his helmet against the metal structures. Once, twice.
CURTISS
“He went crazy …”
TESS
“We gotta stop him … if he breaks his helmet, he’s fucked!”
Carson and Curtiss run towards him. They try to hold him back, but Hill wriggles out like a fury, uttering a piercing scream, then throws himself back against the wall.
The helmet cracks. The air hisses away. Curtiss looks at him with dismay, while Hill violently hits the wall again with his head, completely splitting the plexiglass of the helmet’s faceplate.
His face has an expression of blind, insane terror. Hill brings his hands to his face and, in anger and violence, tries to tear his skin off, then opens his mouth wide, ejects his tongue, and tries ripping it free with his hands.
Hill’s final fate at the end of the scene is grim:
The stalk of a plant comes out of Hill’s mouth, in a monstrous retching of vomit.
NORTON
“What the hell is going on?!”
The plant growing inside him bursts out of his mouth and is feeding on his body. Hill’s face is reduced to a grotesque, bloody mush, on which other smaller plants are germinating, emerging from the nostrils, ears, eyes.
From Scene 79, when the crew finds the Temple and its giant wall in the swamp:
In front of them, for an immense altitude and infinite width, stands a majestic cathedral of massive stone and light. A marvel without equal, made of monstrosity and beauty. A gothic facade worked in its incredible expression in a thousand crazy sculptures, representing terrifying stone monsters born from the darkest nightmares. All the mysteries of the universe are represented in those titanic stones.
In Scene 83, the crew enters the portal into the temple:
The door of the temple. A black cavern, like an evil mouth, wide open, ready to swallow, hungry. A stone mouth.
The presence of evil becomes a more tangible thing, growing and expanding in Scene 88:
TEMPLE – Exterior
The facade of the cathedral.
On the facade of the cathedral, suddenly, a black, monstrous, gigantic shadow is drawn, then, from the swamp, a feverish growl is heard on the winds, the scream of a hungry beast, a supernatural beast. A terrifying, incredible scream.
IN SUBJECT OF [POV] the one who screamed, the [camera] is perceived towards the temple door…
From Scene 92, the crew encounters the Monoliths inside the Temple:
TEMPLE – THE MONOLITHS – Interior
The shapes of huge monoliths are reflected on the plexiglass of Kay’s faceplate.
The expression on the woman’s face betrays the sense of amazement.
Little by little, with a movement of the [camera], we discover the environment: huge, circular, made of light that proves compact from the sides and from the ceiling. In the center, in a circle, huge, titanic irregular monoliths, a kind of natural colonnade, remotely reminiscent of Stonehenge. Colossal, breath-taking stones that arise on a flat, smooth floor.
The six astronauts are still close to the door through which they entered. They don’t move. Fink murmurs:
FINK
“My God! What is it?”
The astronauts find some of the remains of the Liberty I crew in a cell in the temple, peering through a portal in Scene 98:
TEMPLE – CELL – Interior
SUBJECTIVELY, [POV] through the porthole, we see the interior of the second cell, in all respects similar to the first, only that the niches are occupied here. Occupied by bodies. That of Fisher, that of another man, then by a being with almost human features, then by two decidedly alien beings and with strange, frightening, horrible shapes. They are all clearly dead, some fossilized. Of some, there is only the skeleton, of others, the body in decomposition.
Kay tries to explain to the other crew members where they are in this snippet of dialogue from Scene 111:
KAY
“It is difficult to explain … theoretically this is the point where, twenty-billion years ago, there was the Big-Bang … the explosion that created the Universe … an almost perfect balance between forces opposed … at this point, however, there is an anomaly … negative charges are beyond the control of positive ones and there is a risk.”
In Scene 112, Kay’s curiosity gets the best of her as the crew moves through a temple corridor:
CURTISS
“Hurry! … Let’s not waste time …”
Kay, however, lingers. Stays behind. She approaches one of the portholes to look inside and …
The glass of the porthole breaks and a kind of tentacle bursts out to seize Kay around the throat. The tentacle tightens around the helmet, while the woman tries to free herself and moves her hands to tear herself away from that tentacle, which squeezes…squeezes …
Carson sees Kay in danger and calls the others.
CARSON
“Tess…Fink…!”
The others, after a moment of bewilderment, run towards Kay, who is struggling, while the tentacle tries to suck her inside the porthole. A dull noise and, between the coils of the tentacle, blood appears, dripping densely along the now inert space suit. The tentacle has crushed Kay’s head.
The rest of them stop in horror.
TESS
“Oh, no…”
The tentacle squeezes. The bones crack. Everything inside the suit is shattered. The tentacle, therefore, manages to tear the fabric of the suit itself and a bloody mush appears. At the end of the tentacle, a sort of fleshy sucker opens with a number of small and thin teeth.
The sucker searches for blood and flesh. It finds it, faces it, and sucks it in with a disgusting gurgling.
Tess, gagging, bends her head to the other side.
By Scene 130, the very fabric of the universe is being torn asunder by the creatures who live within the monoliths as Curtiss and Tess try to escape:
Behind them, another thrill shakes the facade of the temple. One of the monsters suddenly comes alive with a mighty roar. It detaches itself from the temple wall, moves, terrifying, horrible, the three jaws wide open in search of food …
The script ends with a unique final revelation that is not one that, if filmed as written, the audience would have anticipated.
It is exciting to imagine these scenes in the cinema of the mind. In his comments regarding the synopsis, Corman stresses how important the look of the film will be to its success. He suggests the film would need the art direction of “a master of the caliber of H.R. Geiger…” Corman recognized the potential this script had, and the collaboration of Bava and Geiger is almost too outrageous to imagine.
Sacchetti’s script delivers the “sense of wonder” required by all good science-fiction stories as well as pulse-pounding horror in a modern mix of Lovecraftian thrills and the type of classic sci-fi written by master storytellers like Richard Matheson and Jack Finney.
Although the project never was to be, it is safe to say it made the rounds at Corman’s studio. More than a little bit of ANOMALY’s influence can be detected in Bruce Clark’s later Corman-produced sci-fi/horror classic, Galaxy of Terror. (The monolithic wall changed to a pyramid, the tentacles with suckers squeezing a crew member to death, alternate realities, and the imbalance of negative and positive energies are present in Galaxy of Terror.)
While Sacchetti has said he will not likely make his script available for fans to read, he is interested in adapting it into a novel.
