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I don't want to hurt you, I want your blood!
~ Tony/Linda to Julia.
I'm not a female child.
~ Tony's last words.

Tony Rendina, also known as Linda, is the main antagonist of the 1983 giallo film A Blade in the Dark. He is a serial killer who suffered a traumatic experience in childhood that caused him to develop a female alter-ego.

As an adult, he was portrayed by Michele Soavi, while as a child, he was portrayed by Giovanni Frezza.

Biography[]

Presumably born somewhere in Italy, Tony's childhood is shrouded in mostly mystery. What's known of it, is that as a kid, he was dared by two other boys to walk down into the dark cellar of an abandoned house to get a ball they threw down their. Reluctant at first, he was egged on when they started calling him a female. A shrill scream is heard, followed by the ball being thrown back out while covered in blood, causing the other two boys to flee. Tony calmly left the basement wearing a wig with pigtails. What happened in the basement is left to interpretation, but apparently it was enough to permanently warp Tony. Afterwards, he apparently developed a female alter-ego named Linda. Despite always wanting to get rid od Linda, Tony retained her an alter ego out of his own insecurities.

As an adult, Tony lived as Linda in a villa, often letting models who lived nearby go for swims in the pool. For unspecified reasons (possibly as a result of Tony reawakening), Linda withdrew from society, moving out of the villa and disappearing. Tony later emerged as himself, renting out her old villa. In 1983, one of Linda's former friends, Sandra, began working on a horror film that took liberties with details from her life story. Tony rents out the villa to Bruno, the musician who's tasked with composing the score for the horror film. One of the models, Katia, also figured out Tony's secret and wrote about it in her journal. Both stressors come to set a severely psychotic break in Tony, where Linda resurges and is desperate to keep from being found out.

Tony speaks with Bruno and asks to hear him play one time due to his love for music, so Bruno compromises with offering to try and record a piece on a cassette tape. Tony leaves the villa, pretending to do business at his father's oil rig in Kuwait. Knowing Katia likes to slip into the house uninvited from time to time, Tony stays behind to kill her while dressed as Linda so she'll be silenced. While prowling the villa, Linda finds an extendable box cutter for a murder weapon. Flipping through a magazine on Bruno's desk, Tony sees a naked woman's torso and discreetly leaves shreds over her breasts out of rage. After Katia arrives to surprise and flirt with Bruno, Linda waits outside to strike at his opportune moment. Katia leaves quietly after using the bathroom, where Linda appears and cuts her face and hand while chasing her outside the house. As Bruno practices music and the doors are locked, she can't get in, so she runs to the unfinished basement. Hiding behind exposed metal mesh sticking out of drywall, she assumes Linda doesn't see her, but Linda appears and keeps jamming the box cutter through the mesh until she slashes Katia. Katia dies from wounds to her abdomen and throat.

As Linda slowly pulls Katia up the stairs and around the yard to leave her corpse someplace, Bruno hears her rustling in the bushes and goes outside to investigate. Linda stays still and readies the blade in case she needs to kill Bruno, but despite Bruno standing right over Katia, he doesn't notice a thing and walks back inside. After dragging Katia off, Linda hides her body and leaves Bruno to see her blood in his leans, then on the bushes later. She also places an anonymous silent call on the landline so she buys time. Bruno tries to tell his girlfriend, actress Giulia, when she arrives, but she worries he's lying to cover up that he's cheating on her. Katia's friend Angela arrives for her latest dip in the pool, which Bruno allows, where she finds the blade at the bottom. She takes it inside, redresses herself while Linda watches, and goes up to the bathroom to wash off. Linda's already picked a long kitchen knife to kill Angela with, creeping up the stairs to surprise her. When Angela reaches over the counter, Linda impales her hand with the knife. She then smothers Angela with plastic while slamming her head on the counter, before moving her to the bathtub and slitting her throat while she's either nearly or already dead. Linda then cleans the scene and moves Angela's body to the same place where Katia's is, in the basement tank.

Bruno knows the knife, which is at the sink after being washed, was used, matching it to the gouge in the vanity where Angela was killed. By then, he's gone looking for answers in Linda's storage unit, where Sandra recognizes her things. Sandra calls her while she's stalking Bruno at the villa, insisting she didn't mean to totally rip off her life for the movie, but Linda just cries and hangs up the phone after a short while of silence. Linda then breaks into Sandra's studio and finds the revealing film about Tony's childhood, cutting it up with a pair of scissors. Giovanni is doing maintenance work in the basement, and when he opens the tank, a bloody hand falls through. he pulls the lid off and sees Angela and Katia dead inside. Linda then comes up behind Giovanni and bludgeons him in the head with a wrench several times. Sandra arrives through the garage, coming to reconcile with Linda. Seeing the bloody wrench on the floor, she goes to a hole above the basement, where Giovanni grabs her to try and be saved, before he falls through and dies. As Sandra creeps away, Linda jumps her from behind and garrotes her to death with film reel. Linda then laughs maniacally before dragging Sandra's corpse around by the reel around her throat. She then drops her and then buries her under more reel as an added mockery.

Giulia arrives through the garage and finds Sandra under the reel. Linda closes the garage from outside and giggles at Giulia, cooping "I'm fond of you too". As Linda messes with the lighting, Giulia cautiously lives through the lower floor halls. When she sees Linda behind her in a window, Giulia runs and hides in a cabinet. Linda finds her and tries to get her to come out, then wedges her kitchen knife in the doorway while Giulia keeps it closed. When Bruno arrives shouting after Giulia, Giulia sees her chance, pushes the door into Linda, and runs. She can't flee far, and despite calling out Bruno's name, Giulia is killed by Linda, stabbed through her heart from behind and the knife left in her body. Bruno comes upon this, and after Linda charges him, he hits her with a brick to knock her unconscious. After briefly grieving over Giulia's murder, Bruno approaches where he left Linda, but there's only a wig. Tony appears with another knife, maniacally charging Bruno, but Bruno forces the knife into Tony's abdomen. As Tony bleeds to death, he mumbles out his last words, "I'm not a female child" several times. Bruno sees on the repieced footage Tony in his first wig. He theorizes Tony hated Linda, but Linda killed women because Tony couldn't get rid of Linda. Tony figured murder would show he wasn't scared, to tell himself he was a man.

Victims[]

  • Katia - Slashed and stabbed with utility knife.
  • Angela - Bag placed over head, head beaten against the counter, and throat slit with knife.
  • Giovanni - Beaten with a wrench.
  • Sandra - Strangled with film reel.
  • Giulia Rubini - Stabbed through the chest with knife.

Gallery[]

Trivia[]

  • It's never clear if Linda is an alternate personality or not. Dialogue in the film and the bloody ball leave it safe to assume a few possibilities:
    • Linda is the name of a girl or woman Tony attacked or killed to prove his masculinity. Tony possibly retained Linda as an alternate personality because he was haunted to punish himself, but he still had to suppress his guilt.
    • Linda is the name of a girl or woman who attacked Tony in that basement, Tony taking her on as an alter ego out of identifying with the aggressor out of never getting over his trauma.
  • The film was originally supposed to be a four-part TV special, with Tony killing someone at the end of each chapter. As Italian censorship standards led to the film's rejection for TV, the cuts were spliced together to make a full film with a continuous storyline.
  • Michele Soavi, the actor who portrayed Tony, also worked on the crew as an assistant director.
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