Making an album, part 9: Giorno del Cacciatore

One of the benefits of being a Time Lord (I can't remember if I've mentioned this before) is that you occasionally get to travel in time and, within reason, take advantage of certain situations. I tend to use my time-travelling abilities for leisure and recreational purposes. Others have grander schemes, but I've found that trying to influence history is fraught with complication and difficulty; you just never know what the consequences of your actions will be. A 'friend-of-a-friend' went back to the 1980s with the intention of cornering the mobile phone market, but ended up causing Milli Vanilli. On a recent temporal jaunt to 1982, I managed to pick up some soundtrack work on a cult Italian sci-fi film. Giorno del Cacciatore (Day of the Hunter) is directed by Alessandro Fuccili and stars Tomasso Pascal, Nicoletta Salvati and Flavio Benedetti. It is set in a post-apocalyptic European city some ten years after a virus has wiped out 99% of the world’s population. Society has broken down and, save for a few hardy or insane individuals (pazzi), the survivors live in tribes who are fiercely territorial and go to war over food, fuel, materials and women.

The story centres on the mysterious figure of Corvo (raven) who is searching for a nomadic tribe known as L’Armeria. As he follows their trail across the country, he has a number of violent encounters with pazzi and with other tribes – some of them benign, some of them murderous, cruel and insane (or a combination of all three). As he finally manages to locate and infiltrate L’Armeria’s camp, we discover the reason for Corvo’s quest: he is trying to rescue his abducted daughter. At the bloody climax of the film, Corvo executes the tribe's leader Barba Rossa (Red Beard), only to discover that his daughter has been impregnated by him. Father and daughter escape the camp and head for the mountains in the north, with the intention of finding the peaceful tribe known as the Pellegrino Fratellanza (Pilgrim Brotherhood).

The film achieved cult status and was belatedly nominated for a ‘Golden Lion’ award at the Venice Film Festival in 1985. This prompted rumours of a follow-up and, in an article in ‘Bianco e Nero’ film magazine in 1987, it was claimed that the famously reclusive Mr Fuccili had drafted a script for Clima del Cacciatore (Climate of Hunter) but, sadly, nothing ever materialised.

I did enjoy working with him, though. Here's a link to the main theme:

Giorno del Cacciatore