Review of the film “Pantafa – Eater of Souls” by Emanuele Scaringi

Emanuele Scaringi’s horror film Pantafa the Soul Eater was released. This is another variation on the old horror story about an evil witch who kidnaps naughty children, this time based on northern Italian folklore. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

It is not known how often in real life single mothers with excitable children move from a big city to abandoned houses in the wilderness, where they are waiting for closed neighbors who are clearly not telling something, frightening night sounds, power outages and, of course, a terrible local legend about some ancient curse. But if they stopped doing it in movies, it’s scary to imagine how many screenwriters and directors would be left without work. But for now, Emanuele Scaringi, whose feature debut Armadillo Prediction (2018) even once took part in one of the programs of the Venice Film Festival, shot his second feature film, inviting the beautiful Kasia Smutnyak, known to Russian viewers from the comedy Perfect Strangers, to the main role. (2015) and Silvio Berlusconi’s biopic Loro (2018).

She plays the same single mother, Martha, who, along with her daughter Nina (Greta Santi), arrives in a small town with an unforeseeable name Malanotte (translated from Italian as “bad night”). The first oddity: there are no children on the streets, but the grocery store saleswoman explains that they are not allowed to go outside until the Pantafa holiday. This name, which is pronounced in a whistling whisper, refers to the heroine of local legends – either an evil spirit, or a witch who comes at night and takes the breath away from children.

Not attaching any importance to this story, Marta and Nina move into a house that stands on the outskirts and screams with all its appearance that it is not necessary to live in it: this is a gloomy building, where sounds of unknown origin are constantly heard, something rustles in the chimney, in the attic a dead cat is discovered, and for complete happiness there is also an ominous basement. Of course, on the very first night, Nina is shackled in a dream by an incomprehensible paralysis, she wakes up screaming, but her mother stubbornly continues to ignore all the oddities that are happening with the house and with the girl. Nina is taken care of by an elderly neighbor (Betty Pedrazzi), who speaks corners and teaches the girl how to scare Pantafa away. Spectators can only look at the clock and wait for the latter to show itself in all its glory.

Recently, in Italian genre cinema, which is mainly based on comedies of low analysis and melodramas, there has been a cautious trend towards the revival of horror. However, Scaringi, despite the ethnographic elements in his film (folk songs and sayings, a costume festival in the finale), refers not so much to national samples as to English ones, like Anthony Muschietti’s “Mama” (2013), Jennifer Kent’s “Babadook” (2014 ) or even “The Ring” by Gore Verbinski (2002): when Pantafa finally appears, for some reason she reminds of Samara of bad memory. His picture, however, does not reach these examples either in originality, or in the depth of the theme behind the simple story (fear of motherhood, loneliness, attitude towards a woman in society), or, most offensively, the ability to scare the audience. We have already seen everything that happens in “Pantafé” somewhere, and any plot twist, including the final “twist”, can be guessed in advance. But what is familiar and predictable is no longer scary at all.