Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2017

Typically accounts of Italian horror cinema have highlighted the production and release of Riccardo Freda’s I vampiri (Lust of the Vampire) in the late 1950s as marking the beginning of Italian engagement with the horror genre. The logic that follows is often that the nature of fascist censorship impeded any explorations of the genre in the 1920s and 1930s and that in the post war period it was only the commercial success of Hammer Horror that tempted Italian producers to venture into horror film-making. In this way Italian horror cinema is considered to have no antecedents and is frequently seen in relation to its readiness to ape production successes elsewhere. Increasingly, however, Il mostro di Frankenstein (The Monster of Frankenstein) (Testa, 1921) is being identified as Italy’s ‘first’ horror film. Yet as a lost film that has left little material trace, evidence of its generic position is, at best, ambiguous. This article will examine a heretofore underexplored and obscure film in order to interrogate the extent to which it can be seen as Italy’s earliest engagement with horror production. In so doing it allow us to see much more complex and nuanced developments of the history of both Italian and European horror cinema, challenging previous assumptions about the history of the genre as a whole.

Recent scholarship on the giallo film – and Italian horror more broadly – has emphasized the use of the Italian term filone (‘thread’ or ‘streamlet’) instead of ‘genre’ to describe the particular production contexts of Italian genre film in the post-war period. This article considers how and why the giallo problematizes film genre as it is traditionally conceived, and argues that the giallo film is uniquely positioned to pose fundamental questions about genre as a theoretical system, as well as to question the task of genre criticism itself. Through an examination of historical approaches to film genre via the giallo case study, the article shows how this group of films debunks theories of generic evolution and complicates the notion of generic hybridity. Whilst challenging the cultural hegemony of Hollywood, framing the giallo as a genre demands a radical conceptualization of genre systems that more readily accommodates their propensity to shift and change over time.

This study shines light on the general factors involved in film cycle development and non-development through a focus on Dawn of the Dead’s (Romero, 1978/79) influence in the Italian and US film markets. Four factors, commercial success, sociopolitical events and broader social currents, supporting cultural phenomena and ephemera, and industrial compatibility, are comparatively assessed with respect to the Italian zombie cycle from 1978 to 1981 and the lack of an American cycle from the same period. The comparative approach advanced in the article properly historicizes the development of zombie cinema after one of its landmark films. Moreover, while the approach is applied to late 1970s/early 1980s zombie cinema, it offers a general analytic for future film cycle scholarship.

This article examines the occult and esoteric sources of Dario Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy, comprising the films Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980) and La terza madre (The Mother of Tears) (2007). The unique mythology created for these films does not rely on traditional Christian images of evil but instead draws from the practices and history of western esotericism, primarily that of alchemy. The Three Mothers and the powers they wield are expressed through the fundamental elements of the cinematic form, such as light, colour, sound and celluloid, rather than through the surface narrative. Although the films follow Gothic conventions, wherein witchcraft and the occult become synonymous with evil, I will argue that it is within the mise-en-scéne of the films themselves that one can discover the connections to alternative occult traditions.

Dario Argento is the best-known living Italian horror director, but despite this his career is perceived to be at an all-time low. I propose that the nadir of Argento’s filmography coincides, in part, with his embrace of the gothic adaptation and that at least two of his late films, The Phantom of the Opera (1998) and Dracula 3D (2012), are born out of the tensions between his desire to achieve auteur status by choosing respectable and literary sources as his primary material and the bloody and excessive nature of the product that he has come to be known for. My contention is that to understand the role that these films play within the director’s oeuvre, as well as their negative reception among critics, it is crucial to consider how they negotiate the dichotomy between the positive critical discourse currently surrounding gothic cinema and the negative one applied to visceral horror.

This article investigates the distribution of Italian horror cinema in the age of video streaming, analysing its presence and categorization on the platform Lovefilm Instant UK, in order to investigate the importance of ‘niche’ in what is known as the long tail of online distribution and the online availability of exploitation films. I argue that looking at the streaming presence of Italian horror and comparing it to its prior distribution on home video formats (in particular VHS and DVD) we can grasp how distribution and access have shaped the understanding of the genre. In particular, I address the question of the categorization of the films made by the S-VOD services and the limits of streaming distribution, such as lack of persistency in availability and the need for enhanced curatorship.