Known in Italy as Non si sevizia un paperino (Don’t Torture Paperino, because Paperino is what they call Donald Duck) and La Longue Nuit de L’Exorcisme (The Long Night of Exorcism) in France,  this was what Fulci considered his best work, despite it being controversial for its day because it criticized the Catholic Church. This led to a limited run in Europe and its unreleased release in the US until 2000.

In the south of Italy, specifically the tiny village of Accendura, Bruno, Michele, and Tonino are engaged in mischief and other activities. They do all the things you expect little Italian boys to do — smoke cigarettes, watch prostitutes have sex, abuse a pepping tom — earning the ire of La Magiara (Florinda Bolkan, also the star of Fulci’s giallo A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin), a witch who digs up the bones of an infant before conducting a ritual where she creates voodoo style dolls of the three boys, stabbing them with needles and chanting over them.

Bruno is the first to go missing, inciting a media frenzy as reporters from all over Italy make it the story of the week. Andrea Martelli (Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, Fulci’s The Four of the Apocalypse) is one of them, yet more intelligent than the rest. Sneaking into the police investigation, he wonders aloud why the kidnappers, who have called in a ransom, have asked for a small sum. The peeping tom is arrested once it comes out that he buried the boy’s body- but he claims that he only did so to try and get the ransom. While he is held for questioning, the second boy, Tonino, is found dead, proving the innocence of the pervert.

Meanwhile, the final boy, Michele, meets a rich girl gone bad, Patrizia (Barbara Bouchet from The Red Queen Kills Seven Times), who sunbathes in the nude and has no problem letting the kid watch. Someone calls Michele during a rainstorm the following evening, and he becomes the third victim.

This gives the reporter the chance to meet and get close to Patrizia. Turns out she’s hiding out in her wealthy father’s modern house after a drug scandal- MARIJUANA!!! — and the villages have already condemned her as a slut due to how she dresses. The reporter also meets the young village priest, Don Alberto Avallone, who lives with his strange mother and deaf, dumb and mentally deficient little sister.

Don Alberto is deeply affected by the boys’ deaths, as they were all pupils at his school, and he attempted to keep them off the streets and playing soccer. He’s so well connected — both in town and with the Catholic Church — that he censors even the magazines on the newsstand. He remarks that he wishes that he could censor Patrizia.

One thing you’ll notice about Giallo is that the more you watch them, the more you realize that they introduce you to character after character after character just to have characters, unlike the traditional British or American detective story, where everything happens for a reason.

That means it’s time to meet someone new. Francesco, an old man who lives in a cave, practices black magic and considers Magiara his student. He refuses to cooperate with the police, so they hunt Magiara down and interrogate her. She begins to convulse, scream and froth at the mouth, happily admitting that she killed the boys because they disturbed her son’s grave. And oh yeah — that child was the son of the devil.

Even though she was nowhere near the murder scene, the villagers are convinced that she’s the killer. The police can do nothing but release her, a release that leads to her doom, as a walk through a cemetery leads to her being beaten with chains by a gang of men (several of the grieving fathers are in their number). This is where Fulci lets loose with the gore, with each hit bringing shards of flesh and bone and blood to the fore, ending with Magiara crawling up a cliff, begging for help as cars just pass her by.

To the shock of the villagers, the murders don’t stop. But at the latest one, Martelli has found a Donald Duck head. This makes Patrizia realize that she bought that doll for Don Albeto’s sister after she saw her walking with another headless doll.

Their theory — that the little girl is imitating her mother by pulling the heads off the dolls — is decent. But they’re wrong. The killer is revealed spectacularly, with a dummy drop that, today in 2025, is astounding for just how little it resembles a living human being and is just as shocking as it was in 1972, as it falls into several rocks, emitting showers of blood.

While filled with blood and horror, this is one of Fulci’s finest movies, one that puts a lie to the idea that all he could do was make movies filled with gore. It moves away from Rome, the expected Giallo location, to the hills outside of civilization, to a place tied to the old ways and ancient beliefs that doom nearly everyone.

The Arrow Video 4K UHD release of this film has a brand new 4K restoration from the original 2-perf Techniscope camera negative by Arrow Films; audio commentary by Troy Howarth, author of So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years of Italian Giallo Films; Giallo a la Campagna, a video discussion with Mikel J. Koven, author of La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film; Hell is Already in Us, a video essay by critic Kat Ellinger; Lucio Fulci Remembers, a rare 1988 audio interview with the filmmaker; interviews with actresses Barbara Bouchet and Florinda Bolkan, cinematographer Sergio D’Offizi, editor Bruno Micheli and makeup artist Maurizio Trani; a trailer; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Ilan Sheady and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring writing on the film by Barry Forshaw and Howard Hughes. You can get it from MVD.