 By Denis Winston Brum A man is framed through the noose of the gallows attached to his living room ceiling while the soundtrack accompanies the fast beating of his heart. This unexpected shot opens “Excitação”, director Jean Garret's second film, a rare horror title at a time when Brazilian cinema suffered under the military dictatorship's political censorship. Born in Açores, Portugal, José Antônio Nunes Gomes e Silva arrived in Brazil to work as a photographer. He soon found himself under the tutelage of José Mojica Marins, better known internationally as Brazilian horror titan Coffin Joe, and performed several singular jobs in the master’s productions. Adopting the alias Jean Garret, he got involved in a film genre known as “pornochanchada”, a mix of popular comedy seasoned with some light nudity and completely avoiding any political content. His first film in this genre was the dramatic, romantic, erotic, and full of surrealist touches, A Ilha dos Desejos. Just a couple of years later, in 1976, making a full turn into the horror genre, he chose Excitação for his second directorial effort, sharing script duties with Ody Fraga, a well-known name in Brazilian exploitation cinema.  Renato, an engineer responsible for programming computers more passionate about machines than people, isolates his beautiful wife Helena from the big city pressure in order for her to recover from a nervous breakdown. The chosen mansion of solitude is located next to a beautiful natural landscape at the end of a sunny beach, without Helena knowing that a suicide was committed in this same house. Roberto leaves his unstable wife by herself most of the time and, to complicate matters, Helena has Arlete, the suicide’s widow, as her only neighbor.  When she tries to relax in a bath, the shower pours increasingly hot steam over her. She finds herself locked in the bathroom and barely escapes with a local fisherman’s help. Renato dismisses the incident, attributing it to a hallucination resulting from her nervous breakdown. The scale of inexplicable events grows as the television set turns on by itself and displays a late-night horror movie. Soon, every electronic device seems to take on a life of its own. Helena is also disturbed by apparitions of the man who hanged himself in her living room. Renato receives all this with skepticism. Unaware that she is having an affair with her husband, Helena finds little solace in Arlete’s company.  Under this tense atmosphere, the arrival of Arlete’s cousin Lu, who has fun teasing each one of them with her hedonist life philosophy, messes up the situation. In a faith paradox typical of Brazilian society, after Lu reveals that the suicide of her visions took place in her own home, Helena goes to a Catholic Church and also brings a group of Umbanda, an African-based religion, to perform a spiritual cleansing in the house’s living room, in an attempt to help the dead man’s soul to find rest. Things go quiet for a little while and Helena feels strong enough to try to seduce Renato, and rescue the romance in her life, but she suffers a cold rejection from him.  The attacks return more aggressively than ever, and Helena strongly believes that she is in contact with the dead man’s vengeful spirit. The ending reserves a couple of twists, none of which are so easy to guess. Unlike many exploitation films of this period, which seems to lengthen scenes to ensure enough time and find distribution as a feature, the lean script was written in a way that delves into situations and characters without repeating itself.  For the main roles, Jean Garret casts Kate Hansen (Helena), Flávio Galvão (Renato) and Bety Saddy (Arlete), well-known faces from the TV soap operas, and added Zilda Mayo (Lu), protagonist of countless pornochanchada productions as a support player. As the dialogs were dubbed later, this often affects the spontaneity of the cast’s performance. Even so, Kate Hansen stands out as the tormented and neglected wife, especially when Helena accelerates her descent into madness. Flávio Galvão projects all of Renato’s unbalanced human coldness and technological passion. Bety Saddy composes Arlete with an ambiguous sweetness, making her convincing when she loves, helps or betrays others. The underrated Zilda Mayo portrays Lu with an extra layer of sassy, having fun delivering her dialogs that challenges prevailing morals. The São Paulo coast serves as the main location elevating the production values with its natural beauty.  Brazilian exploitation productions used to rely on stock music in their soundtracks. In “Excitação”, Beto Strada’s original score flirts with the electronic music that would dominate world cinema in the following decade. Almost entirely electronic, the theme that accompanies the attacks by machines against Helena proves to be very efficient. The film is also far ahead of its time in employing abrupt changes in soundtrack volume as scare tactics. “Excitação” resorts to ingenious, very well-edited, practical effects to simulate machine attacks and supernatural events. These scenes contributed to the suspense and shock in the darkness of a 1970s movie theater; however, it is undeniable that those effects have suffered with the passage of time and, it will not be surprising, become laughable to current audiences.  Jean Garret avoids using the handheld camera as much as possible, opting for smooth pans and tracking shots. Always framing the house in a long shot, the director illustrates Helena’s isolation. To achieve a claustrophobic feeling, most of the time he frames Helena through windows, door frames and in the background of ceiling lamps. Wide shots are only used when she is in other character’s company. Jean Garret aesthetic refinement even helps to disguise the production’s limited budget. Realized through pornochanchada's cheap production values, this unexpected blending of technological and supernatural horror seasoned with a giallo pinch is Jean Garret's unique, fascinating contribution to the Brazilian horror genre.  In the mid-1980s, Brazilian cinema faced one of its many crises, and, at the end of his short career (he only lived to be 50 years old), the need to survive led Jean Garret to get involved with pornography, as did a considerable number of Brazilian filmmakers. “Excitação” was never released on home video, and, as it were a ghost from cinema eras past, can be rarely seen haunting Brazilian late-night cable TV.
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