Demonia (film)

Demonia
Directed by	Lucio Fulci
Written by	Lucio Fulci
Starring	Brett Halsey Meg Register Al Cliver
Music by	Giovanni Cristiani
Cinematography	Luigi Ciccarese
Edited by	Otello Colangeli
Release date	1990
Running time	85 minutes
Country	Italy
Language	Italian

Demonia is a 1990 Italian horror film co-written and directed by Lucio Fulci.

Sicily, 1486. A mob of villagers drag five screaming and struggling nuns into a cavern beneath their convent, built atop a steep hillside. They are tortured and nailed to five of the many wooden crosses in the underground chamber.

Toronto, Canada, present day 1990. A séance is in progress. A young woman named Liza (Meg Register), has a vision of the crucified nuns and falls screaming onto the floor. She is taken home where her boyfriend Professor Paul Evans (Brett Halsey), a noted archaeologist and her former college professor, comforts her.

Several months later. Liza and Professor Evans are surveying Ancient Greek ruins on a site near the small town of Santa Rosalia, Sicily. With them is a team of assistants who are meant to be helping, but spend most of their time drinking. Liza is distracted by the beautiful, but ominous ruin of a monastery which overlooks the dig. Professor Evans chides her for exhibiting a morbid interest in the rumors surrounding the ruins history. The include tales of unspeakable practices conducted there in medieval times. He reminds her that she is supposed to be avoiding any involvement with the supernatural since her mental breakdown back in Canada months earlier.

At the quayside, the professor talks to a colleague on his sailboat named Porter (Al Cliver), about the ruin's history. Porter implores him to avoid the monastery and stay with the Greek ruins. Also hanging around the dig is Turi De Simone (Lino Salemme), the hot-tempered local butcher, who voices the town's hostility to the strangers. He follows Liza into the ruined building and warns her not to go any further, but she continues after he leaves. In the monastery crypt, Liza becomes convinced that there is another chamber behind a wall and attacks it with a pick-axe. Sure enough, she discovers a cavern containing the charred remains of the five nuns hanging on wooden crosses.

Liza runs outside in horror and bumps into Professor Evans. He seems intent on browbeating her into suppressing all mention of what she found. But the opening of the crypt has apparently freed the spirits of the five nuns, putting into motion a series of supernatural events. That evening, Porter is killed on his boat when he is shot with a harpoon gun by a ghostly nun, who then disappears.

The next day, the people in the village are feeling so irate against the outsiders near their community that the young butcher, Turi, can openly discuss murdering the visitors. Meanwhile, Liza pursues her investigation into the monastery by checking the local church records at the local library, but discovers a huge sheaf of pages missing. A strange-looking woman (Carla Cassola) appears in the dusty corridors and invites Liza to meet her the following day at her apartment to hear the whole story.

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