ABCs of Horror 3: “Q” Is for A Quiet Place to Kill (1970)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

There are certain letters of the alphabet that provide a natural bottleneck for this sort of exercise in horror cinema history, making it more and more difficult on a yearly basis to do another full run through the ABCs of Horror. “J” is more limited than one might expect. “X” is predictably on the barren side, though it is saved by some quirky naming conventions in the vein of (the unforgettably batshit crazy) Xtro. Zombie cinema is kind enough to often provide for the letter “Z.” But “Q” is another that is particularly tough, at least partially because of my own obstinance–I don’t like picking the lowest-hanging fruit for these things. Is there a certain recent, blockbuster horror series I could easily evaluate beginning with “Q”? Certainly, but that would be taking the easy way out, wouldn’t it? Besides, who needs alien monsters who can hear a pin drop at 100 yards, when you’ve got sleazy Italians bumping off their wives and copulating with anything that moves? Let’s talk about a film with what I’m sure you’ll agree is a much cooler title than anything John Krasinski would dare to dream: A Quiet Place to Kill.

Yes, that’s A Quiet Place to Kill, or alternate title Paranoia. This is a 1970 giallo from prolific Italian shlock maestro Umberto Lenzi, a man who from the period of 1960-1980 was never far from the director’s chair, helming a steady flow of crime, action and swashbuckler flicks, while coming to embrace giallo during the genre’s commercial height in the ‘70s. Perhaps unfairly, these dozens of films are rarely remembered or associated with Lenzi’s name today–instead, his posthumous reputation still tends to revolve around the smaller number of horror films he made from the 1980s onward, thanks to their relative infamy. These included the likes of Cannibal Ferox and Eaten Alive!, entries in the so-called Italian cannibal boom of the 1980s that would most famously include Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. Lenzi had kicked off the genre himself eight years earlier with 1972’s Man From the Deep River, establishing many of its more regrettable hallmarks. As for the infamy, Lenzi didn’t care; he just wanted to give audiences whatever he thought it was they might want in any period of his career.

And in 1970, the same year that Dario Argento would make his debut with The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, that was apparently giallo of the sleaziest mold imaginable. A Quiet Place to Kill is a grounded story, a grimy and sexually charged detailing of some of the least likable viewpoint characters you’re likely to come across any time soon, as they scheme and plot, cheat on each other and imbibe heroic amounts of J&B scotch. The further it goes, the more despicable they all become. As a guest starring John Waters once put it on The Simpsons, “it makes me sick, in a wonderful, wonderful way.”

Because let’s face it: Umberto Lenzi did not exactly possess the artistic spark or visual iconoclasm of the likes of Argento, or Bava, or Fulci. What he had was a solid intuition for what would goad a reaction from his audience, whether that’s absurdly dramatic facial zooms or gratuitous nudity. Both are peppered through A Quiet Place to Kill, lending it an odd blend of lurid exploitation and affluent euro hipsterism.

The film follows Helen (Carroll Baker), a free-wheeling American race car driver who falls back into the orbit of her ex-husband Maurice (Jean Sorel), a domineering womanizer who switches effortlessly between flattery and intimidation within the course of a single sentence. Maurice divorced Helen without a care in the world two years earlier, but now seems oddly intent on exerting his will over her again … or perhaps he just wants to rub his ability to do so in the face of his new, wealthy wife Constance (Anna Proclemer). Those petty displays of personal power seem to be the handsome and manipulative Maurice’s only joy as he lazes about the couple’s beautiful villa, but what will happen when his casual cruelty pushes not just one wife, but the duo too far? Shades of Les Diaboliques, that’s what, except, you know … with more shots of women undressing and showering.

That’s a fine setup for a typical, pulpy giallo murder mystery, but A Quiet Place to Kill refuses to follow its own carefully laid, conventional murder plot. A killing goes awry, resulting in a change of cast, and a sudden, new alliance forged out of desperation and the shared desire to stay one step ahead of the probing eyes of the law. Murder weapons are creatively disposed; footage of the incident is carefully tracked down and earmarked for destruction as the bloody-handed lovers cover their tracks. The killers loathe each other, but they’re also all they have, and they each cling to the other all the tighter as a result, even as the late-arriving daughter of our murder victim threatens to suddenly give the audience an entirely different rooting interest more than halfway through the story. The conspiracy morphs into something even more unexpectedly sordid.

Of course, we needn’t have worried, as Lenzi’s filthy little parable soon drags that other potential protagonist right down to our level. No one gets out of A Quiet Place to Kill unscathed or with any kind of moral high ground, Lenzi seeming to suggest that no one can truly resist the cheery insincerity of affluent society or the decay of the soul that inevitably results. Once you get a taste of the “easy” life that wealth offers, there’s no way you can rationalize returning to a life before the casual power and privilege you’re now afforded. The characters here see themselves as exceptional, but can’t conceive that each other person believes the same of themselves: Everyone else is just a collection of qualities they desire to possess or control. Each of these glamorous, terrible folks believes they’re the only real person in the story.

All of this makes A Quiet Place to Kill a both nasty and quirky piece of work, a giallo focused less on the operatic, over-the-top deaths of Argento and more on the all-too-real rationalizations that lead normal people to convince themselves they’re above the inherent laws of society. It’s a film where arrogance itself stands in as our villain, handing you a double belt of scotch and an invitation–a ready excuse–to let your inhibitions and clothes drop to the floor, surrendering to the primal template.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.