Sukkubus (1989)

Georg Tressler’s Sukkubus (1989) is supposedly inspired by a genuine legend from the Alpine regions of Europe, concerning three herdsmen who invoke the powers of evil and find out there’s a price to pay.

The herdsmen live in an isolated hut. There are two men, Senn (Peter Simonischek) and Hirt (Giovanni Früh), and a boy, Handrbub (Andy Voss).

The big problem is that there are no women. No women anywhere for miles. They haven’t seen a woman for a long long time. And it gets lonesome up there in the Alps without female company. Hirt is so frustrated he’s starting to look at the boy with perhaps a bit too much interest.

Hirt gets the idea of making a doll. A woman doll. He gets the idea when the boy finds a tree root that reminds the herdsmen of a woman’s face. Of course after so long up in the mountains by now just about everything makes them think of women. Hirt obviously has it in mind to make a kind of crude sex doll.

Senn and Hirt get drunk, Hirt makes the doll, they baptise the doll with schnapps. The doll is just a few blankets and some straw and that tree root but that doesn’t stop Hirt from having sex with it.

The herdsmen then discover that the doll has become a woman and she’s alive. She’s obviously some kind of demon. She might not have been a very friendly demon anyway but having just been raped she’s a tad annoyed.

The herdsmen are still not quite sure if she’s real. They’ve all seen her, but she seems to kind of disappear and reappear.

Being ignorant peasants they naturally assume she’s evil and demonic (and of course they might be right). They get a bright idea. A way of destroying her. They’ll tie her up, cover her with a cow skin and let the bull rape her. That should surely be the end of her.

It just makes her really really angry. Now they have a beautiful naked female demon shadowing them everywhere they go and she seems intent on revenge. Her ideas on revenge are rather extreme.

This is an odd sort of movie. It has some slight arty tendencies combined with lots of exploitation elements and some genuine reasonably shocking outright horror content. Pamela Prati, who plays the succubus (which is what we assume the doll-come-to-life is), spends all of her screen time naked. There is a lot of frontal nudity. But those arty tendencies are there.

When Peter Simonischek (a very serious actor) signed to do the movie he assumed it was going to be a pure art film shot in black-and-white. Sort of like a Bergman film. He quickly discovered that it was going to be in colour and it was definitely not going to be anything like a Bergman movie.

The performances from the three male actors are intense and fairly effective. They certainly convey the sense of mounting horror and superstitious fear. Pamela Prati isn’t called on to do anything other than to get naked and look like a beautiful but evil demon-woman but she does this quite successfully.

This is a film with a claustrophobic atmosphere of sexual frustration, ignorance and superstition. The story unfolds in a leisurely manner but the horror builds inexorably.

And at the end the viewer is left wondering just what has really taken place. Did these men really create a female demon? Or had they simply gone stir-crazy? And if this was no more than just the product of overheated imaginations that would leave certain things requiring explanation.

Mondo Macabro’s Blu-Ray release offers a lovely 16:9 enhanced transfer and that’s important because the location shooting in this movie really is stunning. The only extra is a reasonably lengthy interview with Peter Simonischek.

This is a more complex movie than it appears to be, and a more interesting one. A weird kind of erotic horror movie that is not quite like any other such movie.

It all comes together rather effectively. Highly recommended.