The Killer is Not Alone Blu-ray Review

Mondo Macabro

Blu-ray Release: March 11, 2025 (following a 2024 limited edition collection)

Video: 1.85:1/1080p/Color

Audio: Spanish DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono

Subtitles: English

Run Time: 85:10

Director: Jesús García de Dueñas

Julio (Domingo Codesido Ascanio) has a pathological fear of women, due to a psychological trauma he suffered during his childhood. One night, he picks up a prostitute and responds violently when she tries to arouse him, garroting her with a length of piano wire. Julio escapes the scene, takes a train to Madrid, and checks into a boarding house, where he strikes up a relationship with the owner’s (Lola Flores) teenage daughter, Monica (Teresa Rabal). Meanwhile, Julio’s wealthy businessman father (James Philbrook) tries to find him and put an end to the carnage. (From Mondo Macabro’s official synopsis)

The concept of giallo is hard enough to define on its own without considering the larger impact of pop-thrillers made outside of Italy. Therefore, it is even more difficult to delineate the idea of Spanish-made gialli. Some films clearly fit the mold and even feature non-Spanish actors already affiliated with the genre. Others, like Vicente Aranda’s Fata Morgana (aka: Left-Handed Fate, 1965) and Eloy de la Iglesia’s Murder in a Blue World (Spanish: Una gota de sangre para morir amando, 1973), take an esoteric approach to thriller tropes and pop entertainment, while others still emerged from the same cultural miasma as the gialli without necessarily fitting any specific genre criteria.

Jesús García de Dueñas’ The Killer is Not Alone (Spanish: El asesino no está solo, 1975), not to be confused with Luigi Cozzi’s The Killer Strikes Again (Italian: L'assassino è costretto ad uccidere ancora, also released in 1975), is a particularly obscure entry in the amarillo España canon, due to a lack of release outside of Spain. Despite a reasonable bodycount and a few bloody murders, it is more in the vein of the tawdry character studies that followed Umberto Lenzi’s Orgasmo (aka: Paranoia, 1969) than an entry in the post-Dario Argento whodunnit lottery. Of course, as an examination of melancholic maniac, it has more in common with Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) than anything else. There’s even a peeping tom scene to hammer home the comparison.

There’s actually a healthy tradition of Spanish-made, giallo-adjacent, Psycho-like thrillers that focus on the crimes and compulsions of killers and their unhealthy relationships with their mothers/mother figures. Forqué’s It's Nothing, Mama, Just a Game (Spanish: No es nada, mamá, sólo un juego, 1974) chronicles a young sociopath whose mother facilitates his cruelties, Miguel Madrid’s Killer of Dolls (Spanish: El asesino de muñecas, 1975) conveys the dangers of raising a boy as a girl against his will, and Juan Piquer Simón’s Pieces (Spanish: Mil gritos tiene la noche, 1982) begins with a boy axe-murdering his mother after she scolds him for playing with a nudie puzzle. Even Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s giallo-esque Gothic schoolgirl shocker, The House That Screamed (Spanish: La residencia; aka: The Boarding School, 1969) – one of the most influential Spanish horror films ever made – is about a sexually repressed woman’s inadvertent influence on her homicidal son.

This was de Dueña’s only non-documentary theatrical feature. He also worked in television, made a number of documentaries, and was a respected film critic and author. If The Killer is Not Alone is any indication, he had a knack for combining simply staged, borderline classy drama with grotty, lurid exploitation. It isn’t as gory or flashy as its more well-known Italian counterparts, due in part to lingering Franco-era censorship laws (it was shot in 1972, but not released until 1975), but it visualizes its killer’s tortured mindset in really interesting ways, bolstered by Domingo Codesido Ascanio’s doe-eyed performance, which reminded me as much of Jean-Louis Trintignant in And God Created Woman (director: Roger Vadim, 1956) as it did Anthony Perkins in Psycho.

For instance, during an otherwise banal dinner conversation, the sound is slowly muted, everyone freezes, and, as the music swells, the lights dim, highlighting only Julio and the new object of his desire, Monica. The sexually-charged, Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (Italian: Una Lucertola con la Pelle di Donna; directed by: Lucio Fulci 1971)-esque dream sequences are another highlight, as is the film’s fetishistic fascination with fine details and the minutiae of daily life, as if we are seeing everything from the killer’s obsessive point-of-view (figuratively, there are few actual POV shots). De Dueña treats us to luscious close-up studies of busy hands, textured garments, spilled condiments, and the kitschy knick-knacks that clutter the sets, alongside endless B-roll inserts from around the Asturias and Costa del Sol locations.

Bibliography: 

• So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years of Italian Giallo Films, Volume 3 by Troy Howarth  (Midnight Marquee Press, 2019)

Video

The Killer is Not Alone has never had a North American release and I don’t see much evidence that it ever made it to DVD in any country. This 1.85:1, 1080p Blu-ray debut was created using a new 4K restoration of the original film negative, according to Mondo Macabro’s specs. This is a standard edition release version of the red box limited edition the company released last year.

Cinematographer Fernando Arribas utilizes a lot of softer focus, diffusion, and fog/smoke during the brighter sequences, so the more evenly-lit scenes (wide-angle shots in particular) tend to have a murky quality that I believe is inherent in the material. Darker sequences and close-ups tend to feature better dynamic range and element separation. Detail and texture quality mostly follow suit with brighter, wide-angle appearing soft and moodier close-ups appearing sharper. Colors are eclectic and print damage is minimal, especially considering the rarity of the film.

Audio

The Killer is Not Alone is presented in its original Spanish mono and uncompressed DTS-HD Master Audio. The dub has a sharp and crispy quality that I imagine most fans have come to expect from Spanish exploitation in particular and some of the dialogue exhibits minor muffling, probably due to age. Effects work is extremely minimalistic, again in keeping with similar films from the region, with the loudest bits usually pertaining to the noises of trains and high-heeled footsteps – some real, some only existing within the killer’s diseased mind.

Speaking of giallo-adjacent thrillers, the score is largely recycled (without credit) from Stelvio Cipriani’s The Laughing Woman (aka: Femina Ridens, directed by Piero Schivazappa, 1969) soundtrack. The exception is the placid, pretty title theme “Don’t Touch Him with Your Smile” (“No le Roces con Tu Sonrisa”), sung by Ann Collin.

Extras

• Commentary with Troy Howarth and Rodney Barnett – Haworth, the author of So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years of Italian Giallo Films, Volume 3, which was the only print source where I could find even a meager mention of The Killer is Not Alone, and critic Barnett explore the film’s production, its lack of availability, its themes, similarities to Psycho and other Spanish gialli, censorship, and the careers of the cast & crew.

• Interview with Angel Sala (23:20, HD) – Sala, the director of the Sitges Film Festival, discusses Spanish gialli and psycho-thrillers, the film’s religious and specifically Spanish iconography, and Jesús García de Dueñas’ wider career.

• Original trailer

The images on this page are taken from the Blu-ray and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.