About the ending. "It must have been the magies."
Spoilers.
My general view at this point is one that's already been expressed on the board: Gilderoy has a psychic break in the last 20 minutes of the film. But I want to spell out in some detail how I see the particulars of how this psychic break plays out -- which is what makes this theory the most compelling to me.
Gilderoy is under various forms of psychological distress from the very beginning. The first thing we see here is his worry about being reimbursed for his flight. Then Francesco introduces Gilderoy to the film, showing him the scene where “Signora Collatina's sacrificial attack is thwarted…” (Later, dialogue from the giallo film tells us that a human sacrifice is needed to break the curse of murderous witches.)
Over the course of the film Gilderoy is bullied into a place of submissiveness and of not being able to leave. He's homesick, though that is one of the only things that keeps him going. And the psychological strain of sounding out the violence of the giallo film intensifies. The latter is nicely symbolized by the boiling up of the vegetables used for sound. This psychological strain intersects with the main psychological schism of Gilderoy's homesickness, a schism between a bucolic England and the gory giallo studio.
After Silvia tells Gilderoy that Santini raped her -- the epitome of the parallel between the violence against witches and violence against the actresses -- Silvia gets back at Santini by destroying her audio reels. Santini is detrmined to start over with a new actress for Teresa. As Santini and Francesco are screening new actresses for the role of Teresa, Gilderoy is sitting there dreading having to start over.
In the next scene, Gilderoy is woken by rattling at the door, sees himself on screen in the film in Italian, and has a psychic break: fast cuts of jumbled, blurred, altered images coupled with the sound of static, distorted sounds, voices speaking backwards. The psychic break sequence melts down (with the celluloid film melting) with a fade to a film (the sort Gilderoy used to work on) about the English countryside with a pleasant English voiceover. But the English film becomes frenetic at the end, and we then see Gilderoy is in bed reading the letter about the chiffchaff chicks:
"The chicks didn't make it… it was just awful. Torn to bloody pieces. Not even eaten. It must've been the magpies. All this blood by your shed. One by one, heads ripped off, all feathers gone. The parents are literally screaming. They were just a day or two away from leaving… It's horrible here... It must have been the magpies.”In the next two scenes, one in the studio and one in Gilderoy’s room, we see a follow-up letter that also says "It must have been the magpies." Bucolic England is gone for Gilderoy at this point, and Gilderoy’s psychic world merges with the world the giallo film:
A woman attempts to kill Gilderoy as if it were the thwarted sacrificial attack in the giallo film, and this scene is then viewed by Gilderoy and Francesco as it was at the start of the film, with Gilderoy’s English replaced by Italian. Then Elisa is rehearsing her lines as Gilderoy listens, and the lines are the letter about the chiffchaff chicks and the magpies. The giallo film audio that we hear immediately after this also references the chiffchaffs: "Here comes the Sabbath, there goes the cross. Drunk on serpents' semen and bloated with bile. A whore's menstrual syrup with a black widow's venom. A chiffchaffs plumage infested with lice. Our vile, thick elixir runs through your veins." Next we have a scene where Gilderoy uses sound to torture Elisa into character for an appropriately tortured scream, partially of his own accord and partially taking his orders from Francesco. (Earlier when Gilderoy can't bring himself to stab lettuce heads for a torture scene, Francesco tells him to just take orders and leave his personal opinions out of it.) When Gilderoy is turning up the sound on Elisa, Francesco tells him to turn it up more, and Gilderoy says it's already too much. Then Francesco cajoles him to turn it up more, and Gilderoy follows orders.
Elisa storms out, telling Francesco to find a new actress to play Teresa. They're going to have to start over, again. Francesco is looking at Gilderoy when he yanks a heavy long chain off the table and exits, and we see many more chains on the table. Gilderoy is chained to the film. He can't escape. (Even financially, to refer back to Gilderoy's reimbursement worries: They never gave him the reimbursement he needed, and they even "erased" the flight he came in on.) In the final scene, Gilderoy is burned / merged into the film in a final white out. share