Neil Marshall’s new genre-spliced Compulsion is the perfect example of how a giallo intersects with an erotic thriller. Giallos – stylish Italian slashers that permeated the exploitation film market for decades from the ’60 on into the ’90s and even beyond – are such a huge subgenre that lasted a long time and after decades of being fairly obscure to most movie fans, they’re finally starting to penetrate the timeline for people who never knew they were there all along. Marshall’s homage to both the Italian slasher and the erotic thriller is a sexy slice of diabolical and delectable noir with all the elements fans of both genres would crave with graphic kills and sexuality, all set to a gorgeous location in Malta. (Interview conducted in 2024)
Talk about your interest in giallos a little bit.
Well, yeah, my interest in giallo started when the doorway was opened by Dario Argento. I got to know and study his work. I really liked his style. When I first discovered him, I didn’t really know it was necessarily giallo at first. I came to him from his horror background. Then, I realized that there was a little more to it than that. I studied his work more carefully. I can’t claim to be an authority on giallo at all. I’ve seen a few of them for sure, but I did a lot of research for this. It’s just really the overly stylistic touches and staples that they have that everyone understands that falls into this giallo category, like the razor blades, the gloves and stuff like that. These are the accessible points. If I’m going to pay homage, I need to have that. Secondly, the intention for making this film, I wanted to make an erotic thriller in the vein of the ’80s and ’90s movies like Body Double, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct. In the process of writing it, it evolved into this giallo thing. I became more interested in that kind of a story. It became a slasher movie. I wanted to go with this Argento / giallo vibe.
By the end of the film it’s very much got a classic Euro film feel. You have a beautiful Maltese backdrop and gorgeous cinematography. The final shot with the speedboat, it just felt very much like an Italian film. The whole thing. This was the first time I watched one of your movies and I couldn’t tell you directed it. If I’d seen this without knowing who made it, I would assume it was from an Italian filmmaker. It’s very much an homage to a whole stable of Italian filmmakers.
Thank you. I take that as a compliment. I did want to try something new with it. I wanted to try different styles of directing. Malta was new to me, and I wanted to use an Italian cast. I wanted to make a very European film. That was on my mind. I poured all of that stuff into it, sure.
Erotic thrillers have never really gone extinct; they’ve sort of hung on by a thread, like westerns, or various other genres that sort of vanish, but every once in awhile there will be a new one here or there, but its heyday was in the ’80s and ’90s. They thrived for a few decades. They created a new hybrid of noir, but with more explicit sex and violence. Why do you think erotic thrillers kind of disappeared?
First of all, I totally agree with you that they’re noir. Look at The Postman Always Rings Twice. That’s an early concept of an erotic thriller, and it’s certainly noir. At the end of the day, it’s all Hollywood. They became successful, and they wanted to duplicate the success. Fatal Attraction, or whatever, became a huge hit, so they want to make more erotic thrillers now. The reason why they stopped being made is because audiences became turned off by them. They became conservative again and the sexuality just disappeared from movies and moved into television instead. Television was able to push boundaries where movies couldn’t. In terms of depictions of sex, TV was doing stuff way more erotic than movies were able to do. The industry was killed that way. When the erotic thriller first started, they were pushing boundaries. But then it shifted. Where do you go from that point when TV is pushing the boundaries? It always happens in cycles.
Do you have certain memories of watching certain erotic thrillers for the first time that made a strong impression? Which ones were touchstones for you other than the ones you already mentioned?
De Palma’s stuff. Body Double, which is a tribute to Hitchcock. Other films like The Last Seduction. Bound. Single White Female, although I’m not sure I’d consider it an erotic thriller.
It totally is.
I remember Poison Ivy. The main ones are the ones that stick in my mind. Adrian Lyne’s movies. 9 1/2 Weeks, things like that.
When I talked to Charlotte Kirk, she had mentioned a movie called 365 Days, which was where you discovered Anna-Maria Sieklucka, the co-star in Compulsion. I’d never seen her before in anything. Talk about finding her and the process of casting her.
We’d already been watching a lot of these films, and we talked to a couple of sales agents and asked if there was a market for an erotic thriller these days, and at the time they said yes, there is, but that no one was making them anymore. So we decided if we could come up with something like that. Not long after that, 365 Days was a huge hit on Netflix, globally. It was a massive thing and caused quite a stir. People were talking about it. So, obviously we realized there was an appetite for this. There’s an audience for that. Let’s write our own. When we were casting it, I think it was Charlotte who said, “Why don’t we actually try to get Anna-Maria in our film?” I thought it would surely be the last thing that she’d want to do. We sent it to her agent, and she read it and she came aboard. She was absolutely fabulous.
It was an interesting choice to shoot the entire film in English. I thought it was strange that all the Italian cops were speaking English. What was the reason behind that choice?
It never occurred to me not to film it in anything other than English. Everybody speaks English in Malta. Everyone there is Maltese, but everyone also speaks English. I thought it would be weird to have the Italian cops speaking in Italian, and Anna-Maria is Polish, and it didn’t make sense to me that she would be speaking anything other than English as well. I like the fact that everybody came with their accents. It was always the intention to speak English.
In the first five minutes, you immediately set the tone. I was like, “Oh, crap!” I did not expect the movie to open like it does. You go full-on giallo / slasher right away. Hardcore. The first slashing is so vivid and looked so real, and not only that but you establish a kink vibe as well, which goes with the erotic thriller genre so perfectly. Say something about how you establish all that in a way that there’s no going back from that. It’s all-in.
I like to open with a bang and get people’s attention. It was very much a case of if I’m going to make this, I need to very much embrace it. The POV shot, the heavy breathing killer, and again, this is a razor blade and black gloves, latex outfit thing, and it’s fun to go to town with all that. I needed to fully embrace it all the way. I wanted it to get people’s attention at the start of the film to say that this is where we’re going. It’s also got to have the eroticism to it, and if I’m going to have the slasher killer, I need to show the violence of it. Even though in comparison to something like Tenebrae, which was considered incredibly violent for its time, I wanted to take it to the next level.
The performer who is in the full outfit, is that the person who we realize is the killer later on, or was it a stunt person?
It’s a stunt person. The two leads are built very differently, I didn’t want to give anything away about who might be in the cat suit at the start. So, the stunt person, physically, is somewhere between the two. That helped. We wanted to leave it open for the audience to figure out. We also shot it in such a way that you can’t really tell the scale of the person. Which helps. In order to keep the mystery going, we had to cheat.
Was that outfit designed to look like that, or did you find it like that?
Designed. Part of it was bought, but part of it was designed. It needed to look sexual to fit that.
I wanted to ask you specifically about directing the sex scenes. Since I saw Duchess and Compulsion so close together, I was kind of able to process how you’ve come to a place with these two movies where it seems like you’ve become comfortable directing sex scenes. I liked how in Duchess, the sex scenes weren’t that explicit. It was sexy without showing overt nudity. The editing is so tight that it made the sex scenes sexier. In Compulsion, there’s much more overt sexuality and nudity. The sex scenes are in slow motion. It’s a new side of your style that no one has seen before. You’re going with this. I wanted to be sensitive about this because it’s a sensitive topic.
If you see my TV work, there’s some significant sex scenes I’ve done them on Game of Thrones and Black Sails. Black Sails, in particular, because there’s a lot of graphic sex scenes there. Lesbian sex scenes and things like that.
Okay, that’s fair.
It’s not 100% new to me, but it’s new to my films. To be honest, this might be the last time I do that kind of thing because it’s okay to try to achieve an effect for an erotic thriller or whatever, but filming one of these scenes is incredibly boring. I’d much rather be doing action or horror because they’re way more fun. There is decorum on set for sex scenes, there are rules to be followed. We have to make sure everyone is comfortable, 100%, with everything we were doing. We never went too far. The scenes are very restrained, there’s no full frontal nudity in the film. We didn’t go that far. If you’re going to make an erotic thriller, then let’s go down that road.
Not every actress would want to star in a film such as Compulsion, but Charlotte seemed very game to do it.
It’s interesting. This movie requires two fearless actresses. I thought it would be really interesting to see Charlotte play this kind of an antagonist. The backstory is that there was a time before we made this where she and I were engaged, where we were a couple. But we were no longer a couple when we made Compulsion. It was a very different vibe where we were no longer the kind of team that we were before. Now it was “You’re the actor, I’m the director, and we’re going to get this made.” I originally thought about just writing it and passing it on to someone else to direct. After Duchess, I didn’t have another job coming along and we got the finance for it. Once the concept of the giallo came to me, I thought that it interested me enough to direct it. It was a very different circumstance than Duchess was. Which may have been a better thing for it. The lines were clearly drawn.
Did you use an intimacy coordinator?
No. We thought about it, but when we went to find one, the only one available was a guy, and we thought “Why do we need another guy on set for this?” Talking to the actors, we all discussed it how they felt about it, and we all agreed that we didn’t need another person on set. They said, “You’re the director. We trust you and what your job is. Why do we need more eyes here?” They all agreed that they didn’t want anyone else involved. I did what directors do and talked about what was comfortable and what wasn’t. It’s like a fight sequence. It was all very carefully staged. It was all controlled and safe for everyone.
I want to mention the incredible effects on this film. The kills – especially the first kill – and then the big centerpiece kill later on where it’s two against one – are extremely well executed. Pun intended, I guess.
(Laughing.)
That first one with the slashings looked so real that it stunned me a little bit. Later on, the two against one scene, was agonizing to watch. I had to take my glasses off to rest my eyes because it just kept going. It was painful.
What I wanted to achieve was to do as much practically as possible. What you’re seeing in the first scene was a fake chest that was pre-rigged to time the cuts. The only thing we did in post was to cover the cuts up. The blade was real as well. The only thing we did was cover the cuts up. As he gets slashed, the blood starts splashing. All the cuts are real, the blood is practical, the knife is practical. We wanted to make it look as real as possible. The shot where he falls down is 100% practical as well. The centerpiece killing is real as well. In the script, it reads something simple like, “The girls stab him to death.” When we were sitting in a production meeting at the start of the film, the stunt guys said, “So, you need us to come up with a 15 or 20 second fight sequence?” I thought about it and said, “No, I want it to be five minutes long. And we’re going to do it in one shot.” They went, “Okay!” (Laughing.) Then it became a thing where they had to design a fight sequence that lasted five minutes. They said, “What if they stop during the sequence where they think he’s dead and they have a cigarette?” I was like, “I love that.” His adrenaline kicks in again. They keep stabbing him. Again, we did it practically. Almost everything in the shot is real. We had Zach wired up. He had all these blood pipes running up his leg to various points in his wet suit. He did it in one take. We knew it was going to cause a big mess and that it would take too long to clean it all up and reset. We had to get it in one shot. We just ran the whole thing from start to finish. The guys off screen were running the number one and the number two pump, there were like five pumps, and the blood was seeping out of him all over the floor. We were warned that the ground was going to get really slippery so we had to keep the fight on the ground. There would be wrestling and falling over each other. Nobody stands up because if they did they would fall backwards onto the ground. We would track everything slowly. When we saw the effects, it was exactly what I wanted.
It was astonishing. It was so horrible. To me, that was the scene that would define this movie. It was such a well-directed scene.
Thank you.
I thought the score was really good. It was a Tangerine Dream sound. It sounded different than any of your other movies. I know you’ve worked with some cool composers like Christopher Drake before.
I used this composer named Paul Lawler, who did Duchess for me. I wanted him to do this ’70s thing for that, but for this one I put Tangerine Dream on the temp track. I wanted to get that vibe to it, and he came in and did his best Tangerine Dream impression. I had Sorcerer and Near Dark in there. That was the sound I was after.
That’s what this movie needed. Tangerine Dream could conjure sexiness with the synth sound so perfectly. You can’t do that with an orchestra.
There’s something alien about it, something sexy. A synth score has a certain vibe to it.
You’ve put your stamp on the erotic thriller now. Do you think you achieved what you’d hoped to accomplish with this film?
Yeah. I can tick that one off now. I don’t need to do any more erotic thrillers or giallos. I love genre hopping. I’d like to try my hand at something different next. It’s fun to do something different each time. You’re one of the very first people to see it, so it’s interesting to hear your reaction to it. I’m glad you liked it.
Available in Select Theaters, Digital and On Demand on September 19th
