- Year
- 1972
- Country
- Italy
- Runtime
- 97 min
- Director
- Sergio Martino
- Updated
- 9 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- cult (37/100)
- Also known as
- Excite Me · Eye of the Black Cat · Gently Before She Dies
Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key
Best title in the genre. Poe adaptation with Edwige Fenech and a black cat.
Best title in the genre, and a film that earns it. A drunken failed writer terrorises his wife in a decaying villa, a black cat named Satan prowls, and Edwige Fenech arrives to complicate an already poisonous household. Sergio Martino loosely adapts Poe's The Black Cat into a study of a rotten marriage.
It is nastier and more claustrophobic than the globe-trotting gialli, trading glamour for domestic cruelty, and it is better for it. Fenech and Anita Strindberg are both excellent.
A chamber-piece giallo, and one of Martino's sharpest.
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Written about
- The giallo, 1963 to 1976
A line of yellow paperbacks, a killer in black gloves, and Mario Bava building the American slasher a decade before Hollywood cashed the cheque.
Filed alongside
▶ watchcultDeath Walks at Midnight
Ercoli's brighter, faster Death Walks. Nieves Navarro sees a murder and nobody buys it.
▶ watchcultThe Perfume of the Lady in Black
Barely a murder mystery. A slow psychological collapse, and superb.
▶ watchcultDeath Walks on High Heels
Ercoli's best. Structurally cleverer than most of the cycle.
▶ watchcultShort Night of Glass Dolls
Narrated by a paralysed man presumed dead. Unusual and very good.
cultThe Case of the Scorpion's Tail
Martino at his most efficient. Nobody wastes a frame.
▶ watchcultThe College Girl Murders
The point where the black-and-white krimi tips over into full-colour giallo delirium.