 Welcome to today's edition of Frightfully Forgotten Horror Movies. But to start things off, what are we drinking today? We're drinking a nice Italian red. Fitting for the movie we're about to cover. You betcha. Today, we're going to be covering 1976's The House with Laughing Windows. This was a Patreon request. It was requested to us by Alex Calogoropoulos. I hope I said that right. It was written and directed by Pupi Avadi. It stars Lino Cappelluccio along with Francesca Marciano. Woo! Those names! The opening credits of this movie is really cool. It shows this guy kind of strung up and he's getting stabbed. You hear this guy talking and he's talking about, oh my colors, my colors, my colors in my veins. We get introduced to the main character Stefano and he arrives in a small village to restore this painting in this old church. The painting is thought to be of the murder of Saint Sebastian. Him strung up and these two women on either side that are stabbing him. The priest also goes on to describe the painter and he was kind of known as the painter of agony. Paint people at the moment of dying, at the moment of death. While Stefano is in town, he meets up with his buddy Dr. Mazza. He tells him that the village has this weird history to it. And there's also the house with laughing windows. He gets a phone call from Dr. Mazza. I have to tell you more about this house. And he sees him actually get thrown or he throws himself out of a window. And he looks up and he sees like this shadow kind of walk across the window. And everybody's coming out all frantic. Oh, he killed himself. So he gets back to his hotel room, tells him that there's this important client that's coming by tomorrow and oh, we gave him your room. You understand. What the fuck? You have to go now. The altar boy comes up to him and he's all weird and always laughing. But he has a house that Stefano can stay in. He brings him to this house and it's empty except for one room which is occupied by the owner of the house, this old woman who's bedridden. But she's happy to have the company. He stumbles upon this old, old looking tape recorder in the attic. He plays it and it's the same kind of raving madman that we heard in the opening credits talking, oh my colors, starts to figure that this is the madman painter who painted the same painting I'm restoring. He also finds a love interest in the substitute school teacher. Only known each other maybe a couple of days or something. Is that? You can move in with me. Well, first of all, it's not even your fucking house. Stefano actually stumbles upon this house that his buddy was telling him about, the house with the laughing windows. In this house he finds his trunk and in the trunk is this diary which is the madman painter's diary. He finds out through this diary that the madman had these two sisters and they would help him capturing people and murdering the captive so he has like a subject to paint while they're dying. He finds out through the archives that the painter went mad one night and doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire and just ran into the woods but nobody was ever discovered. Yeah. He's like presumed. Presumed dead. The guy in the archives keeps saying presumed dead. Presumed dead. Do you want me to keep repeating it? So Stefano is finally pretty much done restoring this painting and he comes back to the church one day and it is destroyed. Explains this to Francesca and they're both kind of scared like something is wrong and something is kind of out to get us here. Fuck it, we're gonna leave. Drops off his bicycle, he was renting it right there. He gets back home, Francesca's missing. It looks throughout the whole house, goes up in the attic and she's strung up very similar to the painting that he was restoring and she's been murdered. It's all stabbed and covered in blood. The police come and everything is missing, there's no body, there's no blood, it's all clean. Then he takes the police to the house of the laughing windows so they used to bring their victims here and they're digging all these holes to try to find where the victims are buried. Look at those super tiny shovels, they're gonna go nowhere pretty quick. So Stefano is back at the police station, he's exhausted, he's just mentally exhausted and he gets a phone call and it's Francesca saying meet me back at the house and that's where we're gonna end the plot. If you wanna find out how the house with laughing windows ends, well make sure to watch the movie. So one of the best things about this movie is the setting, right? The town where this takes place. It's all kind of decayed, old, presumably left over from the war, right? Which would explain the decay. Feeling that this story of the madman painter is kind of hovering over the town, it's almost stopping it from developing and rebuilding itself, it's kind of always at the state of decay. The time period is also interesting because they never really come out and say this is when it takes place. They give you hints, the painter killed himself 20 years ago, okay, well when was 20 years ago? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then later on they say the painter killed himself in 1931, like okay, so this takes place I guess in the early 50s, but they don't shove it in your throat like some movies do. Which I really liked, I found that refreshing. The cinematography is also very nice, especially a lot of the outdoor shots on the river and in the fields and stuff like that and you see the house with laughing windows in the field. It's very nice looking, it's beautiful looking, but it's also scary at the same time. That's right and it actually does make you believe that it's in Italy. It has its own color scheme, but it's not as in your face as some of these other Italian films where it's always super bright and vivid and like. Yeah, it's a little more drab, kind of drawn out. Which is nice because you're going to get that deathly decaying vibe of the town with those kind of softer colors. The music is great in this too. It's dreamy, works perfectly for every scene I find. The movie does do a very good job of sucking you in and making you feel like you're in this weird town. Yeah, this weird world. The pacing is great for this movie too. You're never bored. For me personally, I always find foreign films, I find that they start to drag after a while and this one for me it didn't. No, and it's actually slow. It is a slow paced movie, but it still keeps you interested with there's always enough clues being revealed. They're like, oh, OK, yeah, what's next, you know? Yeah, yeah, and there's always like weird characters popping up too, right? Which always have, they always have another clue to lead you forward. The paintings too in this movie are actually pretty creepy. Like it adds to the whole atmosphere and the general creepy or scariness of the movie, right? Painting of a woman naked, but the painter had put his own face on the body. It's all really creepy and weird looking. Lots of twists and turns in this movie too, especially near the end, it starts to get really twisty and dirty. And there's of course going to be a big reveal at the end because it is a mystery and it's great. You kind of don't see it coming. And right till the end too, like even at the very end, there's like the final thing that happens right at the end of the movie for a split second. You're like, oh, who's that now? Yeah, what's that all about? OK, oh, that's it. Yeah, this is the credits. And he's like, oh, so they do answer some questions, but they also keep enough things kind of open for interpretation to keep you thinking about it after you watch the movie. That's right. There's only three deaths in this whole movie, which again is kind of refreshing. It's not a slasher. It's not a heavy kill count. The deaths sort of mean something in this movie. People who are getting killed in this movie are being killed for a reason. They did something to piss somebody off, right? Yeah, moves the story forward. It's not just gore for the sake of gore. And again, like you said, it's refreshing because around this time period, 76, that's when Argento started kind of making all these gory bloodbath movies, you know, Suspiria. This is nothing like that. It's more of a like the original Giala movies where it's more of a murder mystery rather than just murder. Yeah, murder for the sake of showing murder. Fulci and Argento used to, you know, they kind of took that and ran with it. This is a nice kind of like dials things back a bit. But the story makes up for all that lack of the big visuals and like the eye candy. Drawback that the both of us agreed on right away was the cutting of the scenes. Him and Coppola are sitting on the dock and he's explaining the history of the house and the family and stuff. And then they're all in the house with the girls. Suddenly, like, yeah, drinking. And it's like, wow, where was the transition in between? Yeah, or when he finds the trunk with the diary in it, he's just somewhere else and it cuts to him opening this trunk and taking out his diary. He's like, well, where is he? Like, I assumed he's in that house with the laughing windows, but I'm not positive he was. And where else would this trunk be? I don't know. Yeah, it's almost like he's teleporting to like each part of the movie, right, with no transition. And that's really the only downfall of the movie. And that might just be the style, you know, the Italian style of cutting a movie back in the day. So if you want a good murder mystery with lots of atmosphere and twists and turns and lots to think about after the movie's over, definitely watch The House with Laughing Windows. It's a great giallo movie that I think is very underrated. That's right, yeah. You never really hear about this movie when you hear about Italian movies. And until next time, keep drinking and painting.