Taglines: An apocalyptic Alice in Wonderland!
Black Moon movie storyline. Lily (Cathryn Harrison) is attempting to seek refuge amidst an apparent gender-based civil war in which men and women are systematically killing one another. On a rural road, she encounters men executing women by firing squad, and flees with her car into the woods, following an overgrown road. There, she encounters a flock of sheep gathered around their shepherd, who has hanged himself from a tree.
She later comes across a group of women donning military gear and torturing a young man. She abandons her car, fleeing on foot, and falls asleep in a meadow, where she hears the flowers beneath her crying in pain. Moments later, she witnesses a black unicorn pass by, followed by a man on a horse, and a number of naked children who begin herding the sheep.
Lily trails the man to an apparently abandoned château located beyond overgrowth on a hill. While exploring the house, she finds it fully furnished, but inhabited by numerous animals. Upstairs, she finds an elderly bedridden woman (Therese Giehse) chastising her pet rat, Humphrey. The woman proceeds to attack Lily before contacting an unknown person on a transistor radio, making cruel observations of Lily’s appearance and revealing details of how Lily arrived there that she should have no way of knowing. A number of alarm clocks inexplicably go off, and the old woman tries to strangle Lily. When Lily slaps her, the woman dies.
Outside, Lily’s attention is diverted by a man (Joe Dallesandro) singing in the garden. Through telepathy, he communicates to her that his name is also Lily. His sister, too named Lily (Alexandra Stewart)—whom Lily had mistaken for a man earlier—arrives on horseback. Lily attempts to explain to Brother and Sister Lily that their mother is dead, but they are impervious and refuse to speak to her. When she follows them upstairs, she witnesses the old woman return to life before Sister Lily breastfeeds her.
Brother and Sister lock Lily in the room with the old woman, sending Lily into a rage. While exploring the room, she eats a piece of cheese and looks through a photo album containing pictures of the old woman, whilst the old woman continues to make observations about her to the unknown person the radio. To the old woman’s anger, Lily looks out the window and again sees the black unicorn.
Lily climbs out the window and down the wall, and chases the unicorn around the sprawling property as it continuously eludes her. She is horrified when she stumbles upon the corpse of a soldier. Brother picks the corpse up and buries it in a grave. The unicorn appears again, and Lily chases it until she is attacked by the band of nude children. The unicorn once again appears to Lily, and tells her she is mean. The unicorn also tells Lily the old woman upstairs is not real.
Black Moon is a 1975 fantasy horror film directed by Louis Malle and starring Cathryn Harrison, Joe Dallesandro, Therese Giehse, and Alexandra Stewart. Its plot follows a young woman who seeks refuge from a civil war between the genders in a rural château, where she is taken in by a bizarre family and encounters numerous dreamlike scenarios.
Shown at the 1975 New York Film Festival, it was distributed in the United States by 20th Century Fox. Despite the film’s location in France, the film’s dialogue is in English. The film is dedicated to Therese Giehse, who plays the character of The Old Lady, who died shortly after the end of the film. Malle himself has said about this film: “Opaque, sometimes clumsy, it is the most intimate of my films. I see it as a strange voyage to the limits of the medium, or maybe my own limits.”
Black Moon (1975)
Directed by: Louis Malle
Starring: Cathryn Harrison, Therese Giehse, Joe Dallesandro, Alexandra Stewart
Screenplay by: Louis Malle, Joyce Buñuel, Ghislain Uhry
Production Design by: Paul Maigret, Roland Thénot
Cinematography by: Sven Nykvist
Film Editing by: Suzanne Baron
Art Direction by: Ghislain Uhry
Makeup Department: Rino Carboni
Music by: Diego Masson
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Cinema International Corporation (France), Filmverlag der Autoren (West Germany)
Release Date: September 24, 1975 (France), September 30, 1975 (New York Film Festival)
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