Émile (Jacques Perrin) and Monique (Jacqueline Danno) in Paul Vecchiali’s The Strangler (Courtesy of Altered Innocence)

The most shocking part of late French filmmaker Paul Vecchiali’s 1970 giallo The Strangler (L’Étrangleur), newly restored and given its first ever US theatrical release by Altered Innocence, isn’t baby-faced serial killer Émile (Jacques Perrin) pulling an endearingly quaint homemade-looking white knit scarf around the necks of lonely-hearted Parisian women and yanking. It’s his faithful German Shepherd’s bright red doggie boner—a glaring red rocket, if you will—featuring prominently in the film’s bloody denouement. After finally being discovered by an obsessively off-kilter redhead named Anna (played by Perrin’s actual sister Eva Simonet, which lends an eerie incestual quality to their interactions), who is fixated on finding the man behind the choking crimes (in order to perhaps be killed by him), Émile leaves Anna alone with his dog who turns to Anna with his throbbing puppy member fully unsheathed. It was so startling that I had to stop my screener copy and immediately rewind. Yes, that’s a dog dick.

This surely wasn’t an oversight on Vecchiali’s part. Not because the pup’s penis continues to appear throughout the scene. And not because so much of the film is marked by cinematic precision. It’s because The Strangler is so horned-up that the movie’s plot derives mostly from the overwhelming sexual tension coursing between each character, regardless of gender. Even the dog is turned on.

The canine lipstick aside, The Strangler isn’t a normal who-done-it or police procedural. There’s not much mystery here—viewers not only immediately know the identity of the killer but also his motivations and superhero-like origin story. The first scene in the film features a young Émile as he smashes his piggy bank in order to escape his house to buy comics at a train station. There, he meets a lurking stranger who leads him away—not to diddle him—but to strangle a tear-stained solo woman right in front of the tow-headed child. Rather than being traumatized, Émile is inspired. Years later, as a beautiful thirty-something, Émile spends his days selling fruits and veggies at a produce stand, often circled by a newspaper seller announcing his most recent kills. By night, he is murdering—who else?—all those pathetic women who live alone! Everyone knows that single women living in apartments by themselves are destined for a life of misery and inevitable suicide so Émile does the humane thing and puts them down with a scarf to save them. Isn’t that kind?

Wee Émile in The Strangler (Courtesy of Altered Innocence)

While the timeline of the film is quite vague, Émile seems to be at it almost every night—the compulsive nature of his homicidal urges is represented by repeated shaky imagery of streets at night. And why not? So many lonely ladies, so little time! As we learn from an unhinged dream sequence, which presents his victims dressed in white, frolicking and picnicking with him on a glorious day, Émile sees himself as an angel of mercy. In Émile’s defense, almost all of his female victims don’t seem to mind their own deaths. In fact, they seem to desire it! They willingly let him in their apartments such as the has-been actress (Hélène Surgère) who falls for his scam as a scarf salesman (even though everyone knows there is a scarf serial killer around!). They barely react when he appears in their late-night drunken ballet rehearsals. And they all tend to dramatically lean into his murder scarf, exposing their necks in fatal anticipation.

Émile is followed on his sociopathic spree by three people—the aforementioned Anna, grizzled undercover detective Simon Dangret (Julien Guiomar), and a thief only credited as ‘Le Chacal’ (Paul Barge) who stalks Émile’s trail of corpses to pick their pockets and steal their expensive jewelry. Throughout the film, all of these four characters have numerous run-ins—the sexual chemistry crackling each time. Even detective Simon confronts Émile early in the film, after a series of ransom note-like magazine-cut-out letters and a coy scavenger hunt, but doesn’t turn him in. Instead, Simon seems too fascinated by Émile to end their strange courtship. In some ways, this love quartet reminds me of the titillated, overtly incestual murder triangle in John McNaughton’s Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer with, of course, much less emphasis on greasily repulsive poor white trash and more romantically melancholic French aesthetics.

Monique (Jacqueline Danno) in The Strangler (Courtesy of Altered Innocence)

In fact, much of The Strangler feels as if filmed like an extended dream sequence, from the repeated imagery to the reappearance of Émile as a child to the artful cinematography, so typical of Dario Argento’s films, that makes every woman look like a living doll. Because of this, it’s impossible to tell what is real and what is Émile’s perspective. For instance, all these female victims cannot be just going gleefully to their graves. The strangling scenes are anything but gore. Instead, they’re nearly choreographed and dancerly. There are no choking sounds, bulging eyeballs, throbbing veins, or neck discoloration here. The women just simply faint to the ground—extinguished.

Sometimes this dreamy quality turns toward pure camp, particularly in two memorable scenes. The strangest just might be a musical number droned out by Jacqueline Danno playing future-victim Monique as a chanteuse performing on a floating nightclub with a bizarre nautical theme. Women in Breton shirts lounge seductively, draping themselves in rope hammocks and around sweaty male patrons, while Monique slinks around the room and yowls out a depressing tune. “I’ll make myself a sailor to sail where you are. I’ll make myself a sailor and get right on board,” she sings. It’s an anthem of pure desperation as if Nico was a lounge singer on a cruise.

Creepy masks in my favorite montage in The Strangler (Courtesy of Altered Innocence)

Music also factors heavily in perhaps my favorite moment in the film. After a solo dinner, Émile wanders through a darkened park that doubles as a cruising zone (I am convinced William Friedkin watched The Strangler before making Cruising). Repetitive close-up shots of Émile’s face strolling along, observing his surroundings, are interspersed with a montage of everything horrible that could possibly happen in the city—stabbings, rapes, group beatings, gun fights, robberies, bloodied naked men writhing on the ground, love triangle fights, strangers in frightening masks—all set to a notably jaunty and deeply French little ditty. Is this Émile’s imagination? Is this memory? Is this what he’s really seeing? It’s hard to say. Émile responds to his visions of the horrors of the world with saintly tears rolling down his face, but I couldn’t stop laughing.

It is here that Émile turns from women to men—as victims anyway—stabbing a hustler who tries to shake him down. I’ve watched enough Criminal Minds to know that stabbing can sometimes be a desire for penetration. Calling, Dr. Freud! Just do it already, Émile! And perhaps more of the characters should—all this overwhelming erotic tension and there’s not much sex except for Simon and Anna, though, for Anna, it’s a way to get closer to Émile. “Do you sleep with them?” Simon asks Émile at their first meeting about his victims. “No,” he says quickly. Of course not, because that would shatter the film’s peculiar pent-up energy.

Saintly Émile in The Strangler (Courtesy of Altered Innocence)

The Strangler is ultimately a film about existential loneliness. Early in the film, blue blaring text appears, announcing an oblique poem: “O Night, conceal my pain, caused by being nothing and being alive.” Moody, angsty, a perfect representation of the state of longing inhabited by almost every character in the film. From sad female victims to Émile and his acolytes, these figures are all studies of loneliness. Even the batty old woman flitting through the park at night is a symbol of isolation.

Notably, the only woman who survives Émile’s wrathful scarf is a female sex worker who exists in a gaggle of other sex workers who all protect one another. Going off into the woods alone with Émile, she refuses to get throttled quietly. Her loud hollers and visible struggle are utterly jarring, if not absolutely viscerally wrenching, in contrast to all the other women who allowed themselves to be silently snuffed. She also has help. Once the other sex workers hear her cries, while being fed by a matron of a local café who is also an ally, they race to her aid and try to find (and beat up) her would-be killer (mistakenly grabbing up Le Chacal).

Though this scene seems to indicate the power of even a sleazy community, the end of The Strangler left me wondering just whose side exactly Vecchiali was on. Was he yearning after Émile like everyone else? It seems so. With a declaration of love and the camera lingering on a Christ-like death, Émile emerges as some sort of erotic asphyxiation angel after all.