Breaking Down One of the Scariest Scenes in Horror

Torso had quite a lot of titles, and the English language title is perhaps the most appropriate. It starts by following the typical giallo formula, with a killer murdering people in a swank European town—here the idyllic Italian college town of Perugia—and an amateur detective tries to figure out who it is. However, Martino shakes things up almost immediately. The murder weapon is a red and black striped ascot rather than a knife or a straight razor, and the killer wears a distinctive white balaclava, presupposing the likes of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. The main characters are all beautiful college students, and the amateur detective is one of the women rather than a guy. For most of the runtime, it’s a whodunit mixed with scenes of violence. But about two-thirds of the way through the movie, the coeds all decide to leave campus and spend a week in a villa to get away from the danger of the city, only for the killer to follow them. One of the girls, Jane (British actress Suzy Kendall), falls and hurts her leg when the girls arrive and goes up to her room to rest. When she wakes up, she discovers to her horror the killer has broken in and has already murdered all the other girls, and is sawing up their bodies with a hacksaw.This begins a protracted, Hitchcockian game of cat and mouse, in which the wounded Jane attempts first to leave the villa and then get the attention of locals down the hill, all without the killer knowing she’s there. To make the tension last as agonizingly long as possible, Martino cuts back to town where a doctor (Luc Merenda) is investigating. All Jane has to do is somehow get the doctor’s attention. And this then begins what I consider to be one of the best scenes in all of horror cinema, which is just as influential on the slasher movie as Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood or Bob Clark’s Black Christmas.

Jane is unable to leave the villa because the killer has locked the door while he goes outside to dispose of the first batch of the bodies. So she attempts to get the doctor’s attention via a tiny hand mirror reflecting sunlight. This proves fairly ineffective, and time is of the essence. She quickly begins cleaning up her mess, making it seem like no one had been staying in there, throwing everything in a bureau, but as she’s just about finished, she notices she’s not wearing her shoes. They’d fallen off her feet when she ran back up to her room after seeing her dead friends. The killer will know she’s somewhere in the house, and so she goes to get them.

Jane knocks over a chair trying to get someone’s attention, and the killer walks up to investigate. Jane hides in the bureau, and luckily, the window bangs in the wind. She’s seemingly off the hook. The killer walks slowly out, shuts the door to the room, and locks it behind him. This is one of those old houses where every door has a key lock, and the key can go in from either side.So she’s stuck. But the killer has left the key in the door facing the other way. Jane thinks quickly and comes up with an ingenious plan: she’ll slide a page of newspaper under the door, then using a hairpin, she’ll push the key out of the hole onto the paper and pull it back to her side of the door. She carefully slides the paper and begins pushing the key. She needs to be quiet, but she also needs to push hard enough for it to fall out. And what will happen when the key falls on the wood floor? She’ll have to worry about that later. She pushes some more, until finally the key falls out the door.The camera then cuts to a shot of the newspaper from the outside of the door…and the key on the floor a couple of inches away from the paper. Jane doesn’t realize she’s failed and begins slowly inching the paper back toward her and just when we think all hope is lost…we know it definitely is.