After the death of her ten-year-old son, Claudia can no longer tolerate her husband’s presence. She leaves the city and, to be closer to Marc’s burial place, takes refuge in his mountain villa. During one of her daily visits to the cemetery, she encounters a child who appears out of nowhere. Through a strange coincidence and a series of unlikely events, she becomes morbidly attached to this teenager, whom only she can see and whom no one in the village knows.

A French-Italian co-production released just two years after Richard Donner’s blockbuster The Omen, Enfantasme showcases lead actress Agostina Belli’s knack for anchoring notable horror knock-offs. Belli had previously shared top billing with Kirk Douglas in The Chosen (also known as Holocaust 2000), a film financed primarily to cash in on The Omen’s success. Just one year later, Enfantasme saw her returning to familiar ground, offering yet another variation on the classic “devil child” theme.

Sergio Gobbi himself noted that Enfantasme—adapted from a novel by Georges-Jean Arnaud—was a deeply deliberate creative shift. Gobbi stated that the story could have easily been “turned into a product of the Exorcist thread, or a paranormal film, Audrey Rose-style”. However, he explicitly chose to avoid horror tropes and formulaic scripts to make something more intimate, psychological, and ambiguous. The title itself was a linguistic choice by Gobbi, serving as a play on words combining the French words for child (enfant), ghost (fantasme), and the verb meaning to conceive a child (enfanter).

Also notable for being popular Euro starlet Brigitte Skay’s last film.

[a subtle blend of me, imdb and wikipedia]

There’s a detailed breakdown of the locations then/now over on Davinotti (LINK) – It appears it was all shot in Bormio in the province of Sondrio, a mountain town in northern Italy, located in the Lombardy region.

Career interview with director Sergio Gobbi produced by the Paris Cinémathèque – recorded on the 27th September 2024 (French audio only for now)