TORSO

After Università per Stranieri di Perugia art professor Franz's lecture on Perugino's painting of St Sebastian, Jane approaches him for further discussion, accompanied by her friend Dani. Another student, Stefano, who has an unrequited love for Dani, joins in. Franz leaves, and Dani rejects Stefano's offer to drive her home and rejoins Jane and their friends Carol, Katia, and Ursula. That night, a peeping tom strangles Carol's friend Flo with a black-and-red patterned scarf after killing Flo's lover.

The next day, Carol sees young doctor Roberto buying a black-and-red scarf from a street vendor. Carol meets with Dani and is distraught to learn of the murders. Jane and Franz agree to attend a concert together. Jane witnesses Dani's wealthy uncle trying to end a secret romantic affair with Carol. That night, Stefano pays for a prostitute, whom he assaults for implying that he is homosexual or impotent. Carol attends a party with two men, Peter and George, who are infuriated when she rejects their sexual advances and leaves. Carol wanders through a nearby swamp, where she is murdered by Flo's killer.

Police inform the students about the killer's scarves and implore them to report any information. The killer telephones Dani and threatens to kill her if she reports who she saw with a black-on-red scarf. After escaping another encounter with Stefano, who grabs and kisses Dani against her will, she remembers that Stefano wore a black-and-red scarf the day after Flo's murder. Dani's uncle suggests that she spend time away at the family villa in Tagliacozzo. Dani invites Jane, Katia, and Ursula to accompany her. The killer runs over the street vendor for blackmailing him.

Dani encounters Roberto on the train to Tagliacozzo. After learning that Stefano left his apartment without explanation, Jane drives to Tagliacozzo and leaves her car to be washed overnight at a service station before joining the group at the villa. Dani realizes that the pattern on Stefano's scarf did not match the one shown by the police, but she insists that she saw someone wearing a matching scarf. The killer spies on Katia and Ursula having sex at the villa. Upon discovering that a local peeping tom is also spying on them, the killer kills him. The next day, Stefano watches the women at the villa from afar. When Jane sprains her ankle, Roberto is summoned and gives her a sedative to help her sleep. After Roberto leaves, Dani responds to a knock on the door, and Stefano's corpse falls to the floor in front of her, revealing the killer, who then murders Dani, Katia, and Ursula.

Jane wakes to the aftermath of the massacre and hides while the killer dismembers and removes her friends' bodies. She tries to attract attention from townsfolk by signalling with a mirror from the window. The killer locks up the villa and departs, trapping Jane in her room. That night, the killer returns and reveals himself to be Franz, who became a psychopathic misogynist after the childhood trauma of witnessing his brother fall to his death while fetching a girl's doll. He killed Flo and Carol for blackmailing him after seducing him into a threesome, then killed any possible witnesses, including Dani, who briefly saw him wearing a black-and-red scarf on the day he followed Carol. Franz tries to strangle Jane but is suddenly attacked by Roberto, who deduced that Jane was in trouble after seeing the flashes from the villa window and discovering that Jane had not collected her car from the service station. Roberto pursues Franz to a barn and then to the cliffside, where the two fight until Franz falls to his death.

The killer is revealed to be Franz, the art professor, whose misogynistic psychosis drives him to murder. After a massacre at the villa, Jane survives by hiding as Franz disposes of the bodies.

The climax exposes Franz’s twisted motivations, rooted in childhood trauma and sexual obsession, tying the film’s themes of voyeurism and repression to a bloody conclusion. Survival comes not through confrontation but through evasion and wit, leaving the final moments as a testament to the film’s bleak vision of predator and prey. The ending lands by bringing the psychological underpinnings of the killer’s violence into the open, while delivering the requisite shock and dread expected from giallo cinema.