SETTE NOTE IN NERO (1977)
aka Seven Notes in Black, The Psychic
Article 2383 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-4-2007
Posting Date: 2-20-2008
Directed by Lucio Fulci
Featuring Jennifer O’Neill, Gabriele Ferzetti, Marc Porel

A woman with psychic powers has a vision of a murder that took place in a room in a house owned by her husband. She breaks open a section of the wall where she believes the body was hidden, and discovers a skeleton. When the police arrest her husband for the crime, she uses the memory of her vision to help find evidence to clear his name and get him released. However, she begins to notice strange inconsistencies in the details about the murder and her vision…

Lucio Fulci is one of the more familiar names in Italian horror cinema, and I usually find him mentioned in conjunction with Mario Bava and Dario Argento. I’m quite unfamiliar with his oeuvre at this point, but this is supposed to be one of his better movies, and if it is, then I don’t quite put him up to the level of the other two. Still, this one is quite good; the story is interesting, and there are some very strong moments here, especially when our heroine is having her psychic visions near the beginning of the movie. I also like the way that she uses her visions to find harder evidence to get her husband freed, as she knows that merely having a vision doesn’t constitute proof. The midsection of the movie get a bit slow, and Fulci overuses certain techniques (we get too many close-ups of Jennifer O’Neill’s eyes), but the story and its details are strong enough to help you through these problems. It should prove interesting to see more of his movies.