REVIEW: CONTRANATURA (1969) - SCHREIE IN DER NACHT a supernatural Italian Krimi

 SCHREIE IN DER NACHT

UNNATURAL

CONTRANATURA

 

When Antonio Margheriti’s Contronatura, released in German territories as SCHREIE IN DER NACHT (SHRIEKS IN THE NIGHT) world-premiered on May 30th,1969, it emerged at the twilight of two cinematic traditions: the German Krimi inspired by Edgar Wallace adaptations and the Italian Gothic horror cycle of the early 1960s. Made as a German-Italian coproduction between Rome’s Edo Cinematographica and Artur Brauner’s CCC-Filmkunst, it reflects, in miniature, the shifting collaborations and aesthetic ambitions that defined that moment in European genre cinema.

Although Margheriti himself was a productive craftsman-over fifty films ranging from peplum to science fiction, Gothic horror, and action-he referred to The Unnaturals as his personal favorite. The reason becomes clear upon closer inspection: the film consolidates his abiding interest in atmosphere, optical illusion, and the moral decay of modern man within a surprisingly intricate structure of flashbacks and psychological revelation.

Margheriti’s blend of Gothic artifice and moral fatalism aligns the picture not so much with Italian giallo thrillers, as later catalogues sometimes have it, but with the elegiac Gothic mystery found in British or West German cinema-particularly the Krimi adaptations of the 1960s. If anything, The Unnaturals stands as one of the last truly Gothic entries in that tradition, replacing the detective’s rational logic with supernatural causality and collective guilt.

By the late 1960s, Artur Brauner’s CCC-Filmkunst had entered a phase of diversification. Having reaped profits from popular Krimis and adventure films, Brauner increasingly sought coproductions with Italy and Spain, where costs remained low and Rome’s Cinecittà offered experienced crews. The Italian side, in this case represented by Daunia 70-a company that often handled Margheriti’s productions-secured the bulk of the creative and technical staff.

Despite German production affiliation, the film was entirely shot in Italy, primarily in Lazio, with interiors at De Paolis Studios. The only German traces within the creative credits appear through the co-writer Hannes Dahlberg (a pseudonym, likely created for bureaucratic reasons) and the inclusion of German leads Joachim Fuchsberger and Marianne Koch. Dahlberg’s name pops up as writer-director of one episode of the highly influential “EROTIK AUF DER SCHULBANK” movie 1968 (that “inspired” the SCHULMÄDCHENREPORT – series) but otherwise remins an enigma.

Brauner and contemporaries like Wolf C. Hartwig frequently funded Italo-German projects to meet German subsidy requirements. As the guidelines demanded partial authorship by a “German creative,” Dahlberg’s name conveniently fulfilled the criteria, though his actual contribution seems minimal. Margheriti, as so often, handled writing and direction in continuity, crafting a film where script, set, and camerawork function as a tightly interconnected whole. Actually, the story was lifted from a short-story by Dino Buzzati entitled "And Yet They Keep Knocking At Your Door.

The story: A wealthy British industrialist, Sir Edward  and his entourage-consisting of his wife, personal lawyer, secretary, and mistress -travel through the countryside to finalize inheritance documents related to Edward’s deceased brother. Caught in a storm, the party seeks refuge in a nearby mansion, seemingly deserted but inhabited by an aged servant and his enigmatic mother.

Inside the mansion’s candlelit corridors, their hosts begin to probe their visitors’ pasts-with uncanny accuracy. Through a series of non-linear flashbacks, each character recalls how they first entered Edward’s service. The flashbacks reveal moral corruption, betrayals, and crimes. It becomes increasingly apparent that each member of the group has transgressed against nature or conscience in some fundamental way-hence the central motif of “unnatural” acts.

At first, the film maintains the illusion of psychological retrospect, suggesting mere guilt and suppressed memory. As the night deepens, however, the atmosphere thickens with supernatural overtones, ultimately implying that the mansion itself serves as a metaphysical tribunal-a halfway house between life and death. Margheriti’s final twist reveals that retribution thus stems not from the law or detective reasoning but from nature’s own insistence on restoring equilibrium.

In postwar Krimi films based on Edgar Wallace novels, guilt also functions as moral contagion. The environments-fog-strewn estates, corrupt financiers, vengeful heirs-constitute microcosms of bourgeois hypocrisy. Yet those films resolve with rational closure: the detective unmasks the killer. Margheriti departs from this rationalism. His detective figure, Fuchsberger’s loyal lawyer, becomes paralyzed by knowledge; he is more complicit than heroic. The film offers no redemption through intellect-only the purgation of conscience through death.

This conceptual shift situates The Unnaturals closer to Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)  than to The Dead Eyes of London (1961). Its Krimi roots supply the frame (English nobility, inheritance intrigue, fog) but its spiritual grammar derives from Gothic and supernatural cinema. This hybridization explains why critics struggle to categorize it.

Lighting follows moral rhythm: warm tones in flashbacks, sculpted silvers and greens during the storm scenes, culminating in an otherworldly white glow during the revelation. The constant contrast between theatricality and decay aligns with the film’s theme-appearances disintegrating under truth.

Even the storm, a recurrent trope in Margheriti’s cinema, acts as moral agent. As thunder shatters windows, moral boundaries collapse. It’s not mere weather; it’s the world correcting imbalance. In this sense, nature substitutes for divine justice.

Marianne Koch’s participation deserves special mention. Known from A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and numerous German Krimis, she had seldom ventured into explicitly transgressive material. Her role here as the tycoon’s untrustworthy mistress brings rare sensual complexity: both victim and manipulator, she oscillates between defiance and remorse . In an interview decades later, Koch reportedly admitted discomfort with the film’s suggestive scenes but praised Margheriti’s sensitivity on set. Her professionalism anchors the Italianized melodrama with psychological credibility. She never overplays. In sequences hinting at sexual coercion or moral degradation, her restraint gives weight to what might otherwise appear exploitative.

The tension between her “unnatural” sensuality and the actress’s own moral gravitas reinforces the film’s thesis. Even within artifice, genuine integrity persists. Hence, as critics have noted, Koch emerges “intact”-a paradoxical human center amid the film’s ritual condemnation.

Joachim Fuchsberger, the face of postwar Krimi heroes-serene inspectors, upright lawyers, avatars of Ordnung-performs against type in The Unnaturals. His character initially projects the familiar authority, guiding the party and commenting wryly on their predicament. Yet as revelations mount, his ethical role crumbles. He becomes the most self-deceiving of all-a man who cloaked expediency as loyalty.

This inversion undermines audience expectation drawn from dozens of Wallace films produced by RIALTO, likely aware of this meta-text, employs Fuchsberger’s public image as moral compass to accentuate disorientation. The “trusted lawyer” turns accomplice in spiritual crimes. Thus, the film subverts Krimi morality from within, replacing the detective’s clarity with metaphysical fog.

This stylistic decision, akin to what Bob Fosse would later achieve in Cabaret (1972), transforms period pastiche into psychological commentary. We’re not watching the 1920s per se, but an imagined Europe filtered through postwar decadence. The “1970s vision of the 1920s,” produces estrangement-perfect for a narrative where memory itself deceives.

Film historians often mislabel The Unnaturals as a giallo, likely because of its Italian origin and murder-focused intrigue. Yet by the standards of giallo-optic violence, fetishized killing, urban paranoia-the film fits awkwardly. The murders occur off-screen, their emotional charge derived from moral implication, not spectacle.

Upon release, Contronatura suffered from uncertain marketing. In Italy, United Artists distributed it sporadically under the horror label, pairing it with lesser Gothic features. In Germany, it was promoted as a Krimi with supernatural overtones. That did not help, actually, locating it at the very bottom of the German ticket-sales charts for 1969.

Nevertheless, the film found admirers among cinephiles and later scholars revisiting transnational co-productions. Contemporary reappraisals, notably in Marco Giusti’s Dizionario dei film horror italiani and Tim Lucas’ retrospective essays, hail it as one of Margheriti’s most mature works.

If Contronatura appears “old-fashioned,” that is precisely its power: it reminds us that beyond modern cynicism, there still exists a moral dimension to the supernatural. Against the bright chaos of 1969’s cinematic revolution, Margheriti offered a quiet requiem-not for humanity’s sins, but for its forgotten sense of mystery.