Chi sei ?

Digitmovies is glad to issue on CD the complete edition of the OST by Franco Micalizzi for the movie “Chi sei?” (aka “Beyond the Door”) which was directed by four hands in 1974 by producer Ovidio Assonitiis (Piranha paura, Stridulum, Tentacoli) under the pseudonym of Oliver Hellman, and by Roberto D’Ettore Piazzolli under the pseudonym of R. Barrett. It was the first of a long series of movies produced in Italy in the wake of the huge success of the Friedkin movie “The Exorcist”; the list includes titles like “L’anticristo” by Alberto De Martino, “Nero veneziano” by Ugo Liberatore, “Un’ombra nell’ombra” by Pier Carpi etc. The movie begins with the off-screen voice of the devil who warns the audience that they are going to attend a kind of dark fable. A mysterious man called Dimitri (magistrally played by Richard Johnson: “Il medaglione insanguinato”, Zombi 2”) is going to fall from a cliff with his car, the time stops, and the devil gives him another chance: In an indefinite span of time he must bring to life the son of devil. The demon’s future mother is a young family mother (played by Juliet Mills) who begins to behave violently against her family members. The husband Robert (Gabriele Lavia “Profondo rosso”), worried about his wife’s health, confides in a doctor who discovers that the woman’s pregnancy is proceeding in an unnatural way. The family life is upset by several supernatural events, the children of the couple, a male and a female, are terrorized and are sent to a girl friend’s house. The meeting of Robert and Dimitri will become a crucial turning point to the plot… the son will be born dead and the fate of Dimitri will be marked forever. For many years the Assonitis’ movie was unrightly labelled as a clone of “The Exorcist”. The only point in common with the Friedkin movie is the woman’s possession. In “Chi sei?” religious elements are totally missing, there are no priests nor crosses nor exorcisms…all is told in an almost realistic way. The big protagonist of the movie is time itself which is fragmented by so many bright movie director’s ideas. Noteworthy are the scenes with the meetings between Robert and Dimitri, in one scene we see the subjective viewpoint of Dimitri who is going down in the external lift of a building (the movie takes place in San Francisco) and sees Robert approaching. The sequence is repeated three times till the meeting itself where the two men look at themselves, and here the brilliant touch happens: for a few seconds the flashing writing “Chi sei?” appears on a black background; that writing is missing in some copies of the movie for foreign countries. Another sequence in which a pregnant woman kept bound up in her straightjacket is flailing in the bed is repeatedly stopped by freeze-frames. At the end the director leads to narrative conclusion of “Chi sei?” with the final scene of the couple’s little son who on a ferry throws a little model of a car into the sea and at the same time DImitri’s car is falling into the sea marking his end. “Chi sei?” is known in foreign countries under the title “Beyond the Door”, in 1977 the Mario Bava movie “Schock” was distributed in foreign countries with the title “Beyond the Door 2”, but the only common point between the two movies is the presence of the actor who plays the role of the child in the finale of “Chi sei?”. Last curiosity: in the back inlay we have included the still of an original advertising paper which in those days was distributed in front of the theatre’s entrance where “Chi sei?” was screened. Franco Micalizzi has written one of the best soundtracks of his long career and we are really glad that to make all his fans happy by releasing on CD this OST with extra music approved by the composer. C.A.M. never issued a CD with this score in their series “Soundtrack Encyclopedia”, and a very hard to find Japanese CD did appear only in Japan (Volcano Records CPC8-1208) in autumn 2002. Till now the album material was only available in digital download format. Franco Micalizzi has created magic pop atmospheres, always in unstable balance between sacred and profane like the song “Bargain to the devil”. To realize this CD we could use the first generation stereo master tape of the original 33rpm album and we also could have access to the master with the complete session mixed in mono which gave us the chance to discover about 19 minutes of unreleased material: the alternate versions of the album tracks and the electronic prelude which can be heard at the beginning of the movie (Tr.11), all properly restored and remastered in digital for the joy of this genre’s fans.