Little dog killed during the rites, true or fake???

legnadibrom: "who are you to judge! "

Eh, and who are you to judge then?

The scene is not real. The effect is done by them filming the 'stabbing' part of the scene with the sect leader hiding the dog of screen, and by adding sound effects of the stabbing noise and sounds of a dog making noises of discontent(the film is dubbed both in English and Italian, so all audio is re enacted and added after the facts, the dog sounds are most probably from a regular compilation of dog sounds used in sound editing and audio dubbing), then he turns around showing us the dogs head and letting drops sip from behind his hand and run down the dogs neck. We never see a wound on the dog, only the blood pouring from the sect leaders hand and dwon it's neck.

The blood used is the common blood used in films up untill around 1975, when more real looking mixtures where starting to gain popularity. The variety used in this film is stage blood made for theatre use. It's lighter and more intense looking then real blood. They make it radiant like this so that it registers better to everyone in the audience, even at the far back. For film this intensity is not needed, but this kind of blood was used in almost all colour films of the time since it was easy to get from the distributors who made it for use in plays. It was available.

The make up artist for the film, Giuseppe Ferranti, is known for his effects work in several Italian films (his last film as make up artist was done in 2004) and he is known for his use of stage blood and ways and tricks to make it seem like someone is being killed on screen, often without any visible camera edits or visible effects. This time he tricked you.

His work includes Argento's Bird with a Crystal Plumage and Cat O' nine Tail's, Bruno Mattei's Hell of the Living Dead and Lucio Fulci's Touch of Death. The reason I mention all these films is because his effects in these films all use this bright red, almost orange looking stage blood, and many of them have similar staged scenes of animals being sacrificed like in this film. He was quite good at staging such scenes with little means and on a very low budget.


One should judge a man mainly from his depravities.Virtues can be faked.Depravities are real.Kinski

legnadibrom: "who are you to judge! "

I doubt my explanation could come close to touching Norse-Vikings "blowhard" synopsis of all the reasons you are wrong, but I think anyone who's seen more than three horror movies that came out of Italy in the 70's could see how fake it is.

Since I've seen several dozen (to answer your question) I really can't even begin to wonder how anyone could think it is anything other than the typical special effects used at the time.

Nothing in the scene looks realistic at all.

Nothing even happens onscreen.

Real blood on film looks totally different. The blood on the screen looks just like the blood in every other 70's Italian horror movie. Check out the several Norse-Viking listed and you'll see (check them out anyway, some are quite good)