Richard Lafargue is an eminent plastic surgeon haunted by dirty secrets. He has an operating theatre in the basement of his chateau and keeps his partner Eve imprisoned in her bedroom, a room he has equipped with an intercom and 300-watt speakers through which he bellows orders. Eve is only allowed out to be paraded at cocktail parties and on the last Sunday of each month, when the couple visit a young woman in a mental asylum. Following these outings, Lafargue humiliates Eve by forcing her to perform lewd sexual acts with strangers while he watches through a one-way mirror. In alternating chapters, Jonquet introduces seemingly unrelated characters ? a criminal on the run after murdering a policeman, and an abducted young man who finds himself chained naked in a dark chamber, forced to endure all manner of physical torture at the hands of a mysterious stranger, whom he calls ?Mygale?, after a type of tropical spider. All of these characters are caught in a deceitful web, doomed to meet their fate.
Watching the film first may have been a mistake. The emotional punch and surprise were lost because I already knew the twist. Despite this however, 'Tarantula' was well written and translated and developed slowly, keeping it's sense of mystery for a final showdown at the end. If you haven't seen the film, it's absolutely brilliant. A perfect rendering of this dark tale, in which no one is the hero.
