A Lizard in a Woman's Skin

A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (Italian: Una lucertola con la pelle di donna) is a 1971 Italian giallo (Italian genre of stylish murder-mystery thrillers) film directed by Lucio Fulci, in which Carol Hammond, the daughter of a British politician, tells her psychiatrist she dreamed of murdering her neighbor, who is then found dead in exactly the circumstances of the dream.^{1 • 2} It is an Italo-Franco-Spanish co-production set in London, starring Florinda Bolkan, Stanley Baker, and Jean Sorel, with a score by Ennio Morricone.²

Production

The film was shot on 35 mm in Technicolor, with locations in London and at Woburn Abbey in England.² Luigi Kuveiller was the director of photography, Maurizio Chiari designed the sets and costumes, and the special effects were by Carlo Rambaldi's company with Eugenio Ascani.² The score by Ennio Morricone combines Edda Dell'Orso's wordless vocals with harp, harpsichord, electric guitar, and brass in what the Museum of Modern Art describes as one of his most appropriately schizoid scores.⁹

It opened in Italy on 17 February 1971, in direct competition with Dario Argento's Il gatto a nove code (1971) and Sergio Martino's Lo strano vizio della signora Wardh (1970), which were in theaters in the same period.³ Italian marketing billed it as "Il più agghiacciante film di tutti i tempi" ("The most chilling film of all time"), while the American campaign used the tagline "An erotic nightmare that keeps you on the edge of an abyss of terror!".^{10 • 4}

Censorship and the animal-cruelty trial

The film's most notorious sequence shows Carol fleeing into a clinic room where dogs appear to have been cut open and kept alive for experiments, connected to tubes.¹¹ The effects were realistic enough that Fulci and his producer Edmondo Amati were taken to Italian court on animal-cruelty charges.^{9 • 2} The charges were dismissed after Rambaldi appeared before the judges with his fake, mechanically vivisected dog props and demonstrated that the scene was done with special effects.^{9 • 8}

Censorship cuts followed the film through its release history. The uncut Italian version runs 98 minutes, while versions released in Spain, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom ran from 89 to 101 minutes, and a shorter US cut carried the title Schizoid.⁴ The excised material included nudity between Bolkan and Strindberg, a phone conversation, and the eviscerated-dogs scene; later home-video releases such as Media Blasters' 2007 DVD restored roughly a reel's worth of this footage, some of it sourced from prints and presented in Italian with subtitles because it had never been dubbed into English.^{4 • 8} For decades, cult audiences seeking the uncut version had to rely on bootleg copies.⁹

Style and critical standing

Commentators place the film close to the giallo model of Dario Argento, combining a detective story with proto-slasher elements, rather than the nightmare logic of Fulci's later horror films such as Zombi 2 and The Beyond.¹² Reviewers single out the dream sequences and the disorienting camerawork that echoes Carol's inner turmoil; Screen Slate calls the visuals Fulci's most impressive, and a Bloody Disgusting review ranks Kuveiller's cinematography among his best work.^{12 • 13} Fulci's visual techniques include split screen, slow motion, snap zooms, and deep focus.¹⁴

The film also carries themes of sexual repression and class conflict: Carol's respectable bourgeois family is set against Julia's hippie lifestyle, and scholarly accounts read Carol's professed heterosexual repression as masking a destructive lesbian relationship with Julia.^{15 • 16} A Variety review in April 1971 called it "an unusually well-mounted suspense thriller" while noting that Fulci was most imaginative in staging the surrealist fantasy of dreams and mental derangement.² On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 100% Tomatometer from five critics and a 70% audience score, and the Museum of Modern Art screened a restored DCP in December 2023.^{6 • 9}

References

1. A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, Internet Movie Firearms Database
2. Una lucertola con la pelle di donna (1971), EOFFTV
3. Colletti, Tesi di dottorato, sezione 6.1: Una lucertola con la pelle di donna, Università Cattolica
4. A Lizard In A Woman's Skin, Grindhouse Cinema Database
5. A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971), IMDb
6. Lizard in a Woman's Skin, Rotten Tomatoes
7. A Lizard in a Woman's Skin – Full Cast & Crew, TV Guide
8. Lizard in a Woman's Skin DVD review by Glenn Erickson, DVD Talk
9. Una lucertola con la pelle di donna (A Lizard in a Woman's Skin), MoMA
10. Fisher, Cross-Cultural Reception, Bournemouth University
11. A Lizard in a Woman's Skin: Collector's Edition Blu-ray Review, The Digital Bits
12. A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, Screen Slate
13. Blu-ray Review: A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, Bloody Disgusting
14. A Lizard In A Woman's Skin/Review, Grindhouse Cinema Database
15. Sapphic Sunday: A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971), Morbidly Beautiful
16. Bodies of Desire and Bodies in Distress, Birmingham City University

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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