Seddok and the Satanic Postwar Jew

Audiences tend to associate the cinema of Hebraic caricature – films such as Jud Süss, Der Ewige Jude, and Die Rothschilds, all from 1940 – with the official propaganda of the Third Reich. As F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Fritz Lang’s films Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) demonstrate, however, anti-Semitic stereotypes in German cinema predate the establishment of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Moreover, as David Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948) illustrates, such characterizations also found currency outside the Axis countries and well after the Allied victory in the Second World War. As at least one less-well-known Italian movie shows, even more than a decade of American military occupation and coerced cultural liberalization failed to fully reconstruct postwar Italians’ attitudes toward Jews.

Seddok: l’erede di Satana (“Seddok: The Heir of Satan”), known in its truncated, English-dubbed version as Atom Age Vampire, is an underachieving yet thematically interesting 1960 science-fiction-horror film written by Piero Monviso, Gino De Santis (or Sanctis), Alberto Bevilacqua, and its director, Anton Giulio Majano. Little information is available on Monviso, who has only one other film to his credit, while Bevilacqua (1934-2013) would go on to contribute to the scripts for Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963) and Planet of the Vampires (1965) as well as the mondo film Witchcraft ’70 (1969). Gino De Santis (1912-2001) was a prolific writer of adventure movies who had previously worked as a journalist and served in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and in the Second World War on the Greek and Albanian fronts before defecting to a partisan group in 1944 [1].

Anton Giulio Majano

Seddok’s director, Anton Giulio Majano (1909-1994), studied political science and attended the Military Academy of Modena, graduating as a cavalry officer. He eventually became known for literary adaptations for Italian television like Jane Eyre (1957), Treasure Island (1959), and Crime and Punishment (1963), but during the Fascist years Majano wrote for state broadcast agency EIAR (Ente Italiano per le Audizione Radiofoniche), the precursor to today’s RAI – Radiotelevisione Italiana, and one of his early film credits was as assistant director to Luis Trenker on Condottieri (1937), which presents Giovanni de Medici and his Black Bands as precursors of Benito Mussolini and the Blackshirts [2]. At some point he also wrote a screenplay based on Ayn Rand’s 1936 novel We the Living, which was filmed by Goffredo Alessandrini in 1942. “Ironically, this anti-totalitarian film was made in fascist Italy without Rand’s consent or knowledge,” writes Christina Wiser:

Even more ironically, it was supported by Vittorio Mussolini, the dictator’s son, who believed its message was merely anti-Soviet.

Banished by the Italian government after a brief run, We the Living was rediscovered in the late 1960s by Rand’s lawyers. The restored [sic] work was partially edited by Rand […] [3]

At the time of Italy’s entry into the Second World War, Majano was a commander of indigenous light cavalry troops in Libya. “I thought of going to command the Spahis in Africa who were Libyan horsemen who were real mercenaries but who were very, very sincerely attached to us,” he recalled for a 1984 television documentary, further claiming that he was personally decorated with an Iron Cross by Erwin Rommel for rescuing a group of Spahis who had been left without a commander [4]. After being repatriated in 1943, however, Majano like De Santis would join a partisan group, and he also participated in anti-Fascist radio broadcasts using the name Zollo [5]. Actor Nando Gazzolo suggests that Majano, while good-natured, “knew how to maintain a certain discipline” on a set owing to his military experience [6].

Seddok: l’erede di Satana announces its bio-spiritual anti-Semitic theme in its title. The reference is to Zadok (alternately rendered “Sadok”), a Levite priest who, the Old Testament relates, officiated at Solomon’s coronation and served as High Priest of the First Temple in Jerusalem [7]. The subtitle alludes to Christ’s condemnation of the Jews in John 8:44, “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.” [8] Confirming the Levite association of the title, the protagonist is given the name Dr. Albert Levin, his status as a scientist (and “also a psychiatrist” as is later revealed) transposing the heritage of Israelite sorcery into the modern world of technological marvels, mass destruction, and head-shrinking.

“I’m not being immodest when I speak of a whole new era in the field of biology and therapy,” boasts Dr. Levin (Alberto Lupo). “The destructive and degenerative effect of atomic explosions has driven scientists more than ever before into research involving processes of regeneration,” he explains. The age of atomic weapons ushered into existence through Jewish political machinations, global conflict, and emancipated mad science, therefore, furnishes a pretext for further manipulation under the guise of tikkun olam, the repair or healing of the world. Levin’s experimentation, which he characterizes as a “ritual”, centers around the creation of Derma 28, a serum that reverses the degenerative cellular effects of his previous invention, Derma 25. Levin’s doting assistant, Monique (Franca Parisi), is so passionately committed to the doctor’s work that she injects herself with Derma 25, obliging him to immediately experiment on her with Derma 28, proving its “miraculous” efficacy.

The film opens as a French seaman, Pierre Mornet (Sergio Fantoni), sits at a bar, smoking and drinking in fuming disgust as his girlfriend, Jeanette Moreneau (Susanne Loret), performs a striptease for a mixed-race audience (including a particularly happy Negro) and a band plays seedy American jazz – a scene that is itself arguably illustrative of “a whole new era in the field of biology”. El Hoggar, the name of the nightclub, further suggests a disconcertingly Africanizing postwar France. (The region of Algeria’s Hoggar mountains, tentatively part of the crumbling French Empire, was the site of nuclear weapons testing in 1960, the year of Seddok’s release [9].) Meeting her afterward in her dressing room, Pierre rebuffs Jeanette’s affection: “Go put some clothes on!” “It’s all over. You had your choice,” he reminds her: “Either me or this so-called profession you’re working at … You’re still working, so that means I’m through!” Distraught after Pierre leaves, Jeanette finally quits her stripper gig but then has an automobile accident that leaves her face horribly disfigured. As the stuffed animals in her dressing room indicate, there is a childishness to Jeanette that, in combination with her morally unmoored lifestyle, liberty, and estrangement from family connections, leaves her susceptible to the designs of the postwar satanic Jew. Perilously modern, she has also “forgotten how to pray.” “She has no family here, not even friends close enough to worry about her,” observes Dr. Levin with satisfaction: “The newspapers made that clear.” He promptly dispatches Monique to the clinic where Jeanette is being treated, intending to lure her into his clutches with the promise of his experimental regenerative treatment.

Levin succeeds in restoring Jeanette’s beauty – only to then try to cajole her into becoming his lover. “You are nothing if not mine. You belong to me,” he insists with Jewish entitlement, ignoring Monique, who has been in love with him all along. Unfortunately, the results of the Derma 28 treatment are only temporary, with Jeanette’s facial disfiguration returning. Realizing his patient now requires a series of gland transplants, and faced with his assistant’s refusal to be implicated in murderous organ harvesting, he kills Monique to take her gland and prevent her from interfering with his plans. When Levin reports his assistant’s death to the authorities and ascribes it to “paralysis of the heart”, the police and coroner see no reason to perform an autopsy, deferring to Levin’s status as a celebrity physician familiar from television appearances.

"More terrifying than Frankenstein himself!" reads the striking Spanish-language poster for Seddok

True to the mixed Fascist and anti-Fascist biographical pedigree of its creators, Seddok mingles vilification and pathos in its characterization of Dr. Levin, who impresses a police inspector with his professions of sympathy for Japanese victims of nuclear warfare. Levin previously worked at the Japanese Institute for Radiological Research and has on his shelf a grotesque mass of fused bottles, a souvenir from Hiroshima. Morbidly, he even keeps a photo album of Japanese sufferers of radiation burns. Levin has resolved to “exploit the horror by extracting its advantages”, devoting himself to researching the prospect that “mutations could be made permanent or not, as we please”. The scene at once creates a morally ambiguous association between Jewry and the catastrophe that befell the Japanese and suggests that, at least in his own warped mind, Levin is committed to bettering humanity’s lot. Despite exploiting Jeanette’s plight for scientific study and manipulating her into becoming his companion, he is also – at least in his own assessment of his motivations – devoted to rescuing her from a miserable existence. “I must save her at any cost,” he decides: “I’d give my life to save her!”

For most of the remainder of its run time, Seddok devolves into a rather preposterous monster programmer, with Levin taking inspiration from a radio report of an escaped gorilla’s rampage and turning himself into a “monster who doesn’t fear killing. Who doesn’t suffer if it kills.” This he accomplishes with a self-administered injection of Derma 25 that instantly mutates him into a hideous creature, allowing him to stalk the night and murder prostitutes for their glands, return to his lab, and miraculously restore himself to comparative normalcy. The police attribute the series of murders to the fugitive gorilla, but an eccentric old woman (Rina Franchetti) claims the killings are the work of “Seddok”, a monster that appeared to her in a dream as a child. When newspapers ridicule her fantastical account, Levin in an unexpected development finds the woman’s address and strangles her to death – the implication being that he curiously identifies with the strange denunciation of “Seddok”, perhaps perceiving in it a dangerously apt characterization of the ethnic dimension of his crimes.

Meanwhile, Pierre has a change of heart, realizes the depth of his feeling for Jeanette, and joins forces with the police to track her down, the trail inevitably leading to Levin. The scientist’s glandular transplants finally succeed in stabilizing Jeanette’s regenerated facial tissue, even as his own transformations into a monster escape his control and become involuntary. When Jeanette draws a pistol on him to defend herself, he tells her, “Pull the trigger and murder the man who condemned himself for you! Have that much courage at least, because in a moment or two you will go mad! Mad with horror you don’t know!” In subtext, Levin is arguably describing the eternal torment of the Jews who rejected Christ. Ironically, however, Seddok’s specimen of the postwar satanic Jew has from a certain perspective embraced the example of Jesus in sacrificing his life for the redemption of another.

Seddok was to some extent designed to emulate the recent success of Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face (1960), which also concerns a scientist’s efforts to restore a young woman’s features; but careful viewing reveals Majano’s admittedly silly movie to have a degree of social depth and to be more than a mere B-movie ripoff. The director would have at least one more brush with fascistic resonance several years after Seddok when his 1968 television miniseries adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow became a hit. “Someone came from Spain and said to me, but you know that in one year they broadcast The Black Arrow in Spain three times,” Majano remembered, smiling: “But the fact is that Franco was still there, evidently this story of the Arrow, the Phalanx, for them had become a bit almost propaganda.” [10]