Masters of Horror: Pelts

In keeping with our asserted goal of maintaining not critical distance, but distance from anything resembling quality critical prose, I have not read the short story by F. Paul Wilson that is the inspiration for Argento’s Pelts. Rather, I will cozily accept Wikipedia’s assertion that such a story exists, that it is in any way related to the film, and that the two works can be read as comments on the “harsh nature of the fur industry,” selected for “director Dario Argento’s said-love of animals.” Facts are hard to come by when you’re in the business of glutting the internet with text, and we, the viewers of Pelts, are all desperately scrambling to find some explanation for a film that devotes so much of its screen time to an idolatrous love of a raccoon-fur coat. Argento’s second contribution to the Masters of Horror series lovingly bestows every possible sexualizing gimmick on the raccoon skins, from the inexplicable presence of softly wafting breezes tousling the dead hair to heavenly lighting blurring the characters as they gently caress the pelts to the point of their own demise. My experience with Argento is not vast, but is enough to know how he favors bizarre sexualization of inappropriate objects, and though I would never begrudge a director fascinating meat against which to gyrate, I am a bit saddened to see his daughter replaced with the gore spattered skins of so mundane a creature. We can understand how minks might stretch one’s budget, as would a Chinchilla or two, but this film appears to contain no real animals. There is some ill-developed reference to spirits, and Wikipedia calmly assures me that the raccoon is a beloved creature of Native American mythology, but this sentence has already exceeded the film’s own explanation of its fetishes. The result is a campy love affair with bestiality that combines strippers and Meat Loaf (so aptly named an actor in a movie about butchery) in an environment that’s Badda-Bing meets Davy Crockett. As is always the case with Argento, the movie is all flesh and no sense, but finally in an overt, goofy way that could pass for a Tales From The Crypt Episode were it not for the excess in the death scenes. Watch with a pet and a Goblin CD on hand for that moment in the credits when you realize exactly how much the music dictated to your enjoyment of Susperia.