Arcane Sorcerer

Italy in the eighteenth century. A young seminarian falls out of favour with the church and has nowhere left to go. He takes refuge with an excommunicated priest. The priest lives in an isolated house, sees nobody, and takes the young man on as a copyist. But what the man is working on is not theology: it is sorcery, contact with the dead, and knowledge the church has forbidden. The further the young man goes, the more he suspects the two of them are not alone in the house. Pupi Avati directs, in the gothic horror vein. Little light, long silences, almost no violence; the fear comes from the knowledge itself. It is among the best remembered of Avati's horror films.