Your Vice Is Italian Horror, and Only I Have The DVDs
It’s a dark and stormy night somewhere in Medieval Europe. A group of stern-looking robed men are surrounded by a chained-up dark-haired woman. She is impossibly beautiful, but there’s something decidedly both erotic and evil in her large eyes; her chest moves up and down nervously. The supposedly evil witch Asa is being put death for both witchcraft and adultery. A heavy iron mask, itself looking like a demon, is carried solemnly over to her and placed lightly over her face, and then a man produces a sledgehammer.
CRASH! The mask is hammered to Asa’s face, and blood spurts out. The film has begun…
Black Sunday took the world (not just Italy) by storm right off the bat in 1960. Directed by 46-year-old Mario Bava, the unassuming film ushered in the golden age of Italian horror cinema and influenced all who came after it, no mean feat considering what the director was up against: low budgets, limited resources, less-than-stellar scripts, and the realization that the original Italian dialogue would be dubbed and re-dubbed again for the international markets. Nevertheless, it became one of the most beautiful examples of how to shoot in black and white.
But then Bava switched to color, and history was altered even further. Always working on a shoestring budget, Bava nevertheless paid attention to camera placement and use of color. In fact it is his lighting and use of color which probably had the broadest appeal for filmmakers in general; a fan of the old three-strip Technicolor process, he produced scary images of a decidedly candy-colored sort throughout the rest of his career. A case in point would be the murder scenes in Blood and Black Lace, the textbook example of how to do this sort of thing in color (Hitchcock’s Psycho being the complimentary textbook example for black and white). Similar usage in The Whip and The Body propelled the psychosexual drama forward, and made some otherwise boring scenes worth watching. Fans of old school S&M—yes, there is such a thing--would certainly want to check that one out. Even camera movement in the hands of this short Italian was nothing to scoff at: in Blood and Black Lace he used a child’s wagon as a dolly! One would never know from watching the lengthy tracking shot in the ensemble scene backstage at the fashion show, or the extensive panning during the murder scene in the room with the armor. Or the shot of the child running and changing into a man in Shock—today they would use computers for it; back then, only clever camera work and perfect timing was needed. He was the master of the matte painting—putting actual paintings of castles, etc. on the camera lens to look like the real thing in the background.How he photographed is just as amazing as what he photographed. Bava had a knack for photographing female beauty. Of course, the actresses he used were usually stunning anyway (God love those Mediterranean women…) but even a rather plain looking woman like Daria Nicolodi, who to me looks a bit like Ana Gasteyer, never looked lovelier than in Shock. And let us not forget the incomparable Barbara Steele, who became a cult figure forever as the evil witch Asa in Black Sunday. In addition to the babes, Bava had a way with set pieces. Take the anthology Black Sabbath, incidentally the Maestro’s favorite of his own films: three short tales of evil. In the first, “The Telephone,” a precursor to the giallo, a cramped apartment serves as the setting for an increasingly paranoid call girl (Michele Mercier) who is convinced her ex-boyfriend, now out of jail, is calling her to say he will come kill her. She calls over her “girlfriend,” a lesbian who obviously has feelings for her (pretty shocking stuff for 1963!) and the madness continues to unfold. Then comes “The Wurdulak,” starring the legendary Boris Karloff later in life, as an old man who becomes a type of Russian vampire who can imitate the voice of a small child, with shockingly tragic results. And then “A Drop of Water,” with one of the creepiest-looking zombies ever seen on film—five years before George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and fifteen years before Fulci’s gore masterpiece Zombi 2! Also not be forgotten is the borderline-psychedelic sequence in Kill Baby Kill, where a guy runs through a series of rooms over and over again, or the opening of Black Sunday, where Barbara Steele’s character gets a spiked mask nailed to her face as punishment for being a witch. A through-the-eyes shot of the mask about to close in on her face was stolen as recently as earlier this year, by none other than George Lucas for his “birth of Vader” sequence in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.
1964’s Blood and Black Lace has been called the first “body count” movie, where people are offed one after the other, and it is also cited as the first important giallo. So what is a giallo? Giallo is Italian for yellow, referring to the most predominant color of the post-World War II pulpy novels on sale in Italy. These paperbacks were basically trashy murder mysteries with loads of sex and violence, so it only makes sense that the name was appropriated for Italy’s most lasting horror subgenre. In a giallo, the plot can be often be convoluted, but at base a series of murders is taking place, and the protagonist takes it upon himself (or herself) to get to the bottom of things and unmask the killer, usually because he or she has witnessed the murder—or else it’s their friends, relatives, or co-workers being killed, and they fear they will be next. The police are typically not too pleased with such “meddling,” although sometimes detectives are portrayed as sympathetic to outside help. The killer himself (or again, herself!) is usually kept a secret until close to the end; they are often masked and/or wearing black gloves. Hence the time-honored cliché of the “black-gloved killer.” Above all, the murders in a giallo (plural: gialli) are filmed lovingly, somewhat like what Hitchcock once said: “I want to film all my murders like love scenes and all my love scenes like murders.” In fact, Hitchcock was an influence on the giallo, Psycho having been released in 1960; other influences include the writings of Edgar Wallace and some of the film noir of the early 1950s. And of course subtle commentary on the loosening of sexual and social mores sweeping Europe at the time. Typically, gialli took place in urban settings, where beautiful young women are plentiful, not to mention a lot of night life, gambling, alcohol, sleazy mob-types, and mod fashion. And yes, American viewers never fail to notice the bad dubbing, which can sometimes lead to performances which seem more histrionic than they actually were meant to be. So a giallo is admittedly style over substance, and as so, Bava could not have made a more propitious choice for the mise en scene of Blood and Black Lace: a fashion house populated by dozens of stunning models, run by a somewhat crooked couple and where cocaine abuse—long before that white powder had become the drug of choice for the European jet-set—has infiltrated the ranks. Breakfast At Tiffany’s, this is not, but one can tell they were both of the same era of haute couture. (One half expects Holly Golightly to show up, but if she did, her neck would probably get sliced wide open in the second reel.) And of course, Bava’s delicious color palate is in full force, used most notably in a heart-stopping set piece where a beautiful model is stalked and killed in a warehouse-type building filled with suits of armor and flashing neon signs. Proponents of France’s Grand Guignol theatre will also delight at the sight of a young woman getting badly burned against an incinerator, or a drowning which ends with the camera lingering several seconds beyond the “comfort level” at the bra-clad girl’s lifeless eyes, staring up at us from the base of the water-saturated sink. It is only fair to note that apparently gialli eventually had quite a following among gay men, probably owing to the fabulous décor and makeup worn by the women.
Roger Corman’s AIP distributed Bava’s Planet of the Vampires in 1965. Considered by some to be a horror film and others to be a horror film, let’s just split the difference and say it was one of the first true fusions of the two genres. While it hasn’t aged well (the cheaply made but admittedly colorful sets look a lot like those on Tracy Morgan’s “Astronaut Jones” sketches on SNL), the actual plot of Planet—a strange virus is turning the crew of a space shuttle into bloodsucking vampires—was later stolen for Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) as well as the camp classic Lifeforce (1984).
Another man started mining the same vein as Bava: Antonio Margheriti, whose most memorable classic of the era, 1964’s Castle of Blood, can be seen as a neat companion piece to Black Sunday: both are shot in black in white; both star Barbara Steele; and both have an ambience much closer to a 1930s Universal film than to anything else released that year. Its detractors have dubbed it a great cure for insomnia, but the story-within-a-story of Castle of Blood moves at its own pace, and we must accept both the premise—Edgar Allan Poe himself betting a skeptical man he can’t spend the whole night in a reputedly haunted mansion—and the way the premise is illustrated on its own terms, or not at all. The Italian propensity for pushing the envelope is in full swing here; nudity and lesbianism, not to mention the underlying subtext of necrophilia, are found within.
Eventually Margheriti re-made Castle as Web of the Spider in 1970; now it was in color. Alas, the only print I have seen is a full-screen knockoff, so it’s hard for me to compare it with the original. But Antonio himself later admitted, “It was stupid to remake [Castle of Blood], because the color photography ruined everything, the atmosphere, the tension. I’m now convinced that the only way to make a really scary horror film, with that kind of disturbing atmosphere and suspense, is to shoot in black and white.” Has the man never seen Blood and Black Lace or Suspiria?
So the time was right, world-wide, for the horror resurgence of the early 1960s. The 1950s had been a time where sci-fi reigned supreme, owing to the onset of the Cold War and paranoid feelings about “outsiders,” not to mention the curious lingering effects—real or imagined—from the A-bomb, that original WMD, but in the “New Frontier” of the 1960s, all of a sudden it seemed anything was OK—and in fact that did increasingly seem to be the case as the decade wore on. Bava was leading the way in Italy, and in Great Britain, Hammer Studios was in full swing with their takes on the “traditional” Universal monsters of the ‘30s (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, et. al.), updated with more sex and violence than the prior generation could have ever imagined. In America, Roger Corman started cranking out at least half a dozen low budget adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, most of which featured the legendary Vincent Price. At their craftiest, Hammer films gave Italian films a run for their money in the sex and violence department, while Corman’s ability to stretch a lack of budget rivaled Bava’s. Many of the actors of the day were bi-continental, moving between the Italian, British, and American genre pictures.
And what a list of stars: Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Cameron Mitchell, Luciano Pigozzi (the “Italian Peter Lorre”), Eva Bartok, and the elderly Harriet White Medin (who I truly think would make a cool grandmother), to name just a few.
But between 1966 and 1968, all of a sudden it seemed the horror film in Italy took a back seat to other genres, most notably the spaghetti Westerns of the two Sergios (Leone and Corbucci), but also pepla (sword and sandal epics a/k/a cheap gladiator movies), plus comedies of all stripes. Even Mario Bava gave up on horror during this time to make “still-decent-but-not-his-forte” films in other genres like Danger: Diabolik (a James Bond spoof) and Four Times That Night (a sexy comedy). Not to mention such timeless classics like Erik The Conqueror and Knives of the Avenger. By 1969, however, a newcomer with a deep love of both Bava and Hitchcock showed up ready, willing, an’ able to kick some major ass. He was a somewhat scrawny little guy with a bad bowl haircut and perpetual bags under his eyes, but Dario Argento immediately started creating some of the scariest, most thrilling, and most beautiful-simply-to-look-at horror films of the late 20th Century.
It all started with The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1969), which made the giallo fashionable again after a 5-year layoff and proved to be the blue-print for the subgenre for the coming decade. Argento “oozes” style on every frame, sometimes at the expense of a coherent plot, but you found yourself waiting with baited breath for the “payoffs”: his frequent murder set-pieces. Bird was followed by The Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971) and Four Flies On Grey Velvet (1972); collectively his first three gialli were dubbed his Animal Trilogy.
As the 1960s became the 1970s, Italy suddenly seemed littered with dozens of young directors; each seeking to become the next Dario Argento—and Argento himself was only getting started! Right out of the gate, a prime candidate for the title of the “next Dario” was Lucio Fulci.
Fulci has been called everything from a hack to a visionary, something like an Italian Jess Franco (but not quite as prolific or quite as challenging as that idiosyncratic Spanish enfant terrible). At base, Lucio Fulci was a pragmatist who actually had kicked around for several years before sort of stumbling upon his métier in the early 1970s with two unforgettable gialli: A Lizard In Woman’s Skin and Don’t Torture A Duckling. The latter is a favorite of mine for several reasons; one, it is set in a small rural village (as opposed to the usual oh-so-urbane giallo setting), and two, it dared to tackle the hypocrisies of the Roman Catholic Church—in Italy, no less! In fact (spoiler!), a priest is the one committing the murders because he cannot stand to see his young charges (the boys of the town) developing an interest in sex when they hit puberty. It takes only a small leap of faith, so to speak, to say the film eerily predicts the Church’s public problems with pedophilia which putridly peppered the early 2000s! At the end, the priest in Duckling gets his just desserts by taking a very long fall off a rocky cliff. His face becomes more and more shredded with each contact it has with the cliff, a foreshadowing of all the blatant, unavoidable gore these films would come to include in alarmingly increasing amounts as the decade slithered on. After the one-two knockout punch of Lizard and Duckling, however, Lucio went back to the drawing board for half a decade, trying his hand at crime films and a brutal spaghetti Western, before truly finding what he was born to do…
Sergio Martino certainly made his fair share of gialli in the early 1970s: The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, Your Vice Is A Locked Room and Only I Have The Key, and the more-violent Torso. Many of these films featured a stunningly beautiful Algerian-born actress named Edwige Fenech, who had more acting chops than the average damsel in distress of the period. Projecting a curious mix of strength and sad vulnerability, not to mention both sex goddess and girl next door, she lit up the screen. And even today she looks good. This woman is my Mom’s age!?! What a “cougar”! She looks like a teenager! For his part, Martino proved himself to be a deft, no-nonsense director, a class act, even if he was often accused of misogyny. Granted, all these guys were, in varying degrees!
One of the more emotionally involving gialli would have to be What Have You Done To Solange? (1972), directed by Massimo Dallamano, and featuring a truly haunting score by Ennio Morricone. The story: someone is murdering students at an exclusive all-girls high school in London. Simply put, the killer has been sticking a very long knife up their vaginas. Who could be doing such a thing—the good looking young teacher who has been having an affair with one of the girls, and who naturally runs afoul of the police? The teacher’s jealous wife, who is herself also a teacher? The dirty old man who keeps spying on the girls in the showers? Or a suspicious priest? The answer to this question—and the motive for the killings—ironically points to a sort of creaky conservatism normally somewhat out of place for the time and place of the giallo, but somehow it works. Solange is a highly watchable film which a fan can let his wife/girlfriend see without her being grossed out (despite the grotesque manner of death, the gore is actually handled quite discreetly save for a few pretty nas-tay black and white police photographs). Unique also is the setting: have any other gialli ever taken place in London? Some of the characters are more sympathetic than others, and in fact many of the girls are quite catty and deserve some sort of punishment (well, perhaps not murder). At the very least we want to do know whodunit. Solange plays like a straightforward murder mystery moreso than a flashy, psychedelic exercise in plotless style and overly affected camera angles (in other words, it avoids many of the things for which critics enjoyed ripping Argento apart). And if nothing else, watch it see where the inimitable Camille Keaton got her start, six full years before becoming the most infamous cinematic rape victim of all time in I Spit On Your Grave. Anyone dare to watch a double feature of Solange and Grave?
Umberto Lenzi got into the game with Seven Bloodstained Orchids. Other minor gialli of the period include Death Walks At Midnight, Strip Nude For Your Killer, Eyeball, Death Laid An Egg, Cold Eyes of Fear (a major stinker), Black Belly of the Tarantula, and The Killer Must Kill Again, this one directed by Argento hanger-on Luigi Cozzi, and which in my judgment shouldn’t even be considered a true giallo because we know the killer’s identity right off the bat. It defeats the purpose.
As mentioned a few paragraphs back, the music could often make or break a giallo. Carlo Rustichelli had been Mario Bava’s composer of choice; he was well-schooled in the mid-19th Century Romantic tradition. He could also jazz it up when he wanted. Ennio Morricone certainly proved he was more than just the man who came up with the heavily clichéd theme to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. A bit later, Riz Ortolani emerged as a composer of some note. But by the mid 1970s, rock music (as opposed to orchestral music) started creeping into these films—most notably, the works of a struggling Italian jazz-rock combo called Goblin. And their first film score was a li’l ditty called Deep Red.
In 1975 Argento directed Deep Red (Italian title: Profundo Rosso), considered by many to be the finest giallo ever made, and the finest film Dario ever made. (I must confess I think Suspiria is better, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) After an opening in which a woman is stabbed to death in front of a child while a perverted take on nursery rhyme music hums in the background, the film gets down to business with the parting of red curtains and the POV shots of someone walking into an auditorium, where a blonde German psychic is demonstrating her powers. Following a few innocuous warm-ups (“you sir, have your car keys in your right front pocket!” “Wow, yes I do!”), she gets down to business and senses that a brutal killer is the audience—of course, it’s the POV person who had just taken a seat! Argento gives us a closeup of the psychic quickly drinking, and then forcefully expectorating, water into a glass, while the killer leaves. From there we are introduced to Mark, an expatriate British lounge pianist (played deftly by David Hemmings, who had starred several years earlier in Antonioni’s proto-giallo Blow Up), who by chance witnesses the brutal murder of said psychic through her apartment window. Almost against his will, Mark finds himself drawn to discovering the killer’s identity, with a little help from a flaky reporter with a bad perm (Daria Nicolodi). As usual, the police are no help whatsoever. Along the way we get several ingenious death set pieces, red herrings, and—to be sure—“comic relief” scenes of dialogue between the two leads, discussing whether women are truly the weaker sex. (Note to Dario: Arm-wrestling scenes between a man and woman will always look slightly corny.) We also see the smallest car ever on the silver screen, which would make a Volkswagen Rabbit look like a Ford Excursion. Deep Red also tackled the twin subjects of homosexuality and cross-dressing head-on, still something of a rarity even in the sexually liberated Europe of the mid-1970s, and Freud would have been quite pleased to see how the opening sequence tied in to the motive for the killings. The de rigueur animal cruelty of later cannibal flicks is foreshadowed when a young girl sticks a lizard with a pin, and Mark also gets to break down a wall to find an important skeleton, a conceit later seen on TV’s Miami Vice. The killer finally dies in a most memorable way, when he (or she) is wearing a necklace that gets caught in the doors of an ascending elevator, leading to a quick decapitation as Mark’s reflection stares, unbelievingly, into the resultant pool of deep red blood over the closing credits.
The acting, set design, camera work, and editing of Deep Red are all exemplary. So is the music. Long a fan of rock music, Argento had in 1971 approached none other than Deep Purple to provide music for Four Flies On Grey Velvet, but that band was too busy to take him up on the offer. (In later years he would employ already-recorded songs by Iron Maiden, Mötorhead, and Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman on 1984’s self-parodic Phenomena). But the association with Goblin, particularly in Deep Red, is the most memorable of Argento’s musical scores. There, Goblin’s pulsing score is almost like a character unto itself—the hard-hitting opening theme, following the creepy death-in-front-of-child set piece, informs the viewer that they won’t be getting a lot of sleep over the next 90 plus minutes. The guitar and bass ostinato in D minor, resembling the ticking of a twisted clock, perfectly matches the scene where Hemmings is looking up at the huge house and debating whether to enter. Goblin returned to make music for Suspiria, Tenebre, and Bava’s Shock, among other films of the late 70s and early 80s. Former Goblin keyboardist Claudio Simonetti is still at it today with his new band Daemonia, who often play covers of Goblin music, and in fact contributed brand new videos to the DVDs of Suspiria and Opera.
After Deep Red, it seemed like there was nowhere else for the giallo to go. For the rest of the 1970s, various gialli were released, but most of them seemed like they were running on fumes from past glories. A case in point: Umberto Lenzi’s Spasmo (1976). The trailer tells it all—a group of blurry images including a car crash and a plastic dummy hanging from a tree, all punctuated by the sound of a male voice who sounds like he’s sitting on the commode, trying to push a big one out: “Spasmo! Spas-mo! SPASMO!” Was this any way to fly the friendly Italian skies?
Dario Argento turned his back on the giallo and went in a whole new direction. Influenced heavily by his spiritual wife, Daria Nicolodi, he unleashed upon the world his masterpiece, Suspiria (1977). Although it has elements of the giallo to it, Suspiria is at its core a modern-day horror “fairy tale.” Not since the glory days of Bava had the supernatural been so thoroughly embraced in an Italian film, and probably not since the early 1960s had color been employed in said genre so deftly. In fact, Suspiria was one of the final three-strip Technicolor movies. I have shown this film to friends and tried to get them to guess what year it was filmed, and no one has ever guessed it was back in 1977, so pristine and alive are the blues, reds, and greens. Hell, even the hairstyles and most of the clothes don’t even look that ’70-ish. No matter what the method of color production, however, Suspiria is nothing if not the very definition of eye candy. I once had an opportunity to participate in a web chat with him where I asked him, “Given your love of and incredible use of color, would you ever consider shooting a film in black and white?” He answered, “No, absolutely not.” Anyone who sees Suspiria will agree with him.
To paraphrase another writer, for those who are “Suspiria Virgins”—those who have never seen this film—I truly envy you. I would love to see it for the first time all over again. It was my grand introduction to Eurohorror proper in November 2001 via Anchor Bay’s gorgeous DVD, and I’m still trying to piece my former life back together, the way someone forever changes after their first kiss, first sexual experience, first concert, you name it. The first 20 minutes alone are some of the most compelling filmmaking you could ever hope to see. Suzy Banyon, an American, has flown to Freiberg, Germany to advance her studies at the Dance Academy. She arrives in a terrific thunderstorm and heads to the school in one of cinema’s creepiest cab rides. Spurned away at the door by a mysterious voice, she must spend the night at the hotel. Meanwhile, a ballet student who has apparently “escaped” makes her way to a friend’s apartment, replete with funky Escher-like wallpaper and gorgeous mood lighting, where a sinister monster pulls her head through a window. Her friend tries in vain to rescue her, but of course the door is locked. Running into the apartment lobby, she looks up to see her friend’s lifeless body crashing through the stained glass ceiling, having been hanged by the killer (after several closeup shots of her heart getting stabbed by a knife). Said stained glass impales the victim’s friend’s head, and so she too lies dead, surrounded by blood so vibrant it looks like red acrylic paint. Where to go from there?
Suzy finally makes it inside the school, where she meets a host of bitchy fellow dance students, a guy who can’t quite work up the nerve to ask her out (he does take ballet, he he), an über-butch instructor, and strange noises at night. Somehow she realizes that the school is being run by a witch: none other than Mater Suspiriorum, the “Mother of Sighs” (the other two Mothers, spread throughout the world, being Mater Tenebrarum, the “Mother of Darkness,” and Mater Lachrymorum, the “Mother of Tears.”) What tipped her off: could it be the sinister Goblin score, which subtly punctuates the “Tubular Bells”-like motif with a voice crying out “Witch!”? As Suzy sneaks out of her bed every night to investigate (actress Jessica Harper, with her doe eyes and brunette hair set against the reds, the blues, and greens, looks just like Snow White), she encounters all sorts of death scenes: Another girls falls into a room filled with barbed wire. And a rather unpleasant blind pianist gets his entire throat ripped out by his newly-possessed seeing-eye dog.
Eat your heart out, Cujo!
Suspiria makes less sense than almost any other film mentioned in this essay, but it’s not supposed to make sense. Sometimes atmosphere and mood happily trumps storyline. The supernatural, by definition, exists outside the modernist twins of logic and science, so why would a modern-day fairy tale be any different? And yet the film itself went on to virtually define Eurorhorror and set it apart forever from product spewing forth from the rest of the world.
It is a supreme irony, then, that the rebirth of the supernatural Italian horror film never really took off. Perhaps Argento’s contemporaries (I almost typed “peers” but caught myself just in time!) realized they just couldn’t compete. Three years after Suspiria, Argento directed a sequel of sorts called Inferno, which while exemplary, almost seemed like he was going through the motions, an exercise in abilities more so than a pushing of boundaries. Instead, other directors in the late 1970s turned to grittier, more controversial, and almost always more gorier fare: the twin sub-sub genres of zombie films and cannibal films.
When Dawn of the Dead, George A. Romero’s long-overdue sequel to 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, became an international hit ten years after the original, “zombie fever” took off. Sensing this demand, an Italian producer named Fabrizio De Angelis approached Lucio Fulci with a view to filming a “sequel” of sorts to Dawn. The director was only too eager to sign up, given the fact he’d spent much of the decade floundering from genre to genre. Because Dawn had been retitled Zombi in Italy, it was only natural that Fulci’s film was named Zombi 2. Released in 1979, Zombi 2 was an instant sensation, accompanied by a classic marketing campaign (“We Are Going To Eat You!”, plus barf bags often given out to the theatre audiences as a gimmick). And no one could touch Zombi 2 for hot, sweaty claustrophobia: unlike Romero’s more suburban and urban settings, Fulci chose to shoot Zombi 2 in the Caribbean, which was after all the birthplace of voodoo. It also brought to mind images of one of the original zombie movies, Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943). The incessant pounding of voodoo drums lightly in the background, coupled with the eerie electronic score (scarier than Halloween’s, in this writer’s opinion), only added to the flick’s permanent sense of dread.
Perhaps its most remarkable set piece involved the underwater sequence in which a shark and a zombie engage in mortal combat. They shark bites the zombie and draws blood. Not to be outdone, the zombie bites the shark and draws blood in kind. And yes, it was a real shark and a real man dressed as a zombie. For many horror buffs, it was a match made in heaven: everyone loves Jaws, and everyone loves Dawn of the Dead, so when you put them together, it was a gorehound’s take on the old Reese’s peanut butter commercial (“You got your Jaws in my Dawn of the Dead! No, you got your Dawn of the Dead in my Jaws! Let’s see how they taste together! Mmm!”) If the shark was the most remarkable set piece, the actual grossest would go to the eye piercing scene: in which Olga Karlatos (who later played Prince’s mom in Purple Rain!) is grabbed by her hair by a zombie and pulled towards a huge, splinter-filled piece of wood. Most directors would leave what happens next to the audience’s imagination, but not Fulci. A huge shard of wood is shown completely piercing the actress’s eyeball, accompanied by a screaming at least as piercing. Just before the camera finally does cut away we see the eyeball itself sort of falling out to the side.
And now time for the most controversial statement I’ll probably make in this entire essay: Fulci was a better maker of zombies than was George Romero. Why?
Quite frankly, even with the help of makeup demigod Tom Savini (sometimes I think Fangoria should be renamed Tom Savini Worshippers-R-Us), Romero’s zombies sometimes look like high school play-level crap. I mean, come on: Dawn’s green or blue face makeup and a dab of blood on the side of one’s mouth just can’t compare with Fulci’s “walking, stinking flowerpot” couture. The zombies of Lucio Fulci looked like they’d really been stuck in their graves since the days of the Spanish conquistadores. Savini obviously honed his technique over the years, but the Eye-talians seemed to have it down pat much earlier on. It’s damn near impossible to top the iconic “eye worm” man in Zombi 2, or even the zombie that gets his head shredded by an outboard motor on the beach in the otherwise sub-par Zombie Holocaust (which tries to be both a zombie film and a cannibal film and fails to satisfy either camps most of the time).
Zombi 2 ushered in Fulci’s “golden age” of 1979-81, where he became Italy’s foremost zombie auteur. Many of his films of this period got help from his “brain trust” of producer De Angelis, composer Fabio Frizzi, and screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti. Fulci himself was not averse to showing up in his films in cameos, usually as a police chief or professor. 1980 saw City of the Living Dead and 1981 both House By The Cemetery and what many consider his true masterpiece: The Beyond.
The Beyond makes little sense, but at least one could sit back and “enjoy” the ride. A young woman, played by Catriona MacColl, inherits a decrepit old hotel in pre-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans; little does she know that 60 years earlier, a sorcerer had been executed by suspicious locals by getting whipped nailed the walls of the basement Christ-style, then having hot limestone thrown on his face. His spirit has decided to haunt the basement, which also happens to be one of the seven gateways to hell (and in fact on home video The Beyond often got re-titled Seven Doors of Death). We are treated to acid burning a woman’s face, extremely fake looking spiders made out of pipe cleaners attacking some guy who’s fallen off a step stool, and shots of Catriona looking pretty but confused. These strange goings-on continue to build and build with no sense of logic whatsoever, until finally zombies are invading a local hospital, where our heroine enlists the help of a doctor (the late David Warbeck), a man so stupid he keeps aiming his gun at the zombies’ chests, even though he’s seen that the only way to “kill” them is to shoot them in the head. Just when they think they’ve escaped through a passage in hospital’s basement, our couple takes a wrong turn and end up in hell. Turning to the camera in slo mo, their eyes have gone a milky white, a sign that they are damned for all eternity. Such an ending is almost symbolic of Fulci, once highly critical of Catholicism, suddenly doing a 180 and deciding that hell is inevitable unless one repents, and unfortunately for the couple in The Beyond, their pride just got the better of them. In fact, such religious subtext often distinguishes Italian (and Spanish) horror from northern European and/or American horror: in the horror films birthed in Catholic countries, the final reels are often ridden with despair, while Protestant horror films are more likely to have “happy” endings, where evil is vanquished by some white knight. Christian Fundamentalism writ large: if one just follows the Bible to the letter, nothing bad will happen to you. By contrast, the so-called heroes in Italian horror are often skeptical, clueless, bumbling (“shoot them in the head, David!”) or morally repugnant, and as such often they end up barely breaking even in the final frames—if they’re lucky. The Beyond deserves its cult, and it often drew praise from the fringes of the populace. In the late 1990s it inspired a little-known death metal band called Necrophagia to write and record a video for their song “You Will Live In Terror,” perfectly edited together with Fulci footage and included on the Anchor Bay DVD as a gratis. In addition to being a knowledgeable gorehound, one apparently must weigh at least 250 pounds and be able to sweat like a pig to be a member of Necrophagia.
Directors besides Fulci who tried their hands at the zombie sub-genre include the perennial Umberto Lenzi with Burial Ground, where the skilled-with-garden-implements zombies look like walking cabbages. And of course the frankly cruddy Zombie Holocaust (aka Dr. Butcher, MD), directed by the now-forgotten Marino Girolami.
Ever the whore for cash, Lenzi also tried his hand at a more fringe sub-genre: the cannibal film, with equally mixed results. It had to happen: after exhausting the possibilities of the dead returning to earth and eating people, why not have people actually on Earth (mainly the savage tribes of South America or the South Pacific) eat other people? Someone will watch that kind of trash! So Umberto Lenzi gave it a shot. Eaten Alive! and Cannibal Ferox (akaMake Them Die Slowly) had their moments but sometimes seemed like camp (and as it turned out, they often used “stock footage” from superior films). Sergio Martino went from being a giallo man to being a cannibal man with 1978’s Mountain of the Cannibal God, which played like a cheap Indiana Jones movie which just happened to have a few scenes of natives chowing down on snakes and/or human flesh, but Martino and Lenzi were just pretenders to this particular throne. A brief SAT primer for any high schoolers reading this: if the analogy
Lucio Fulci : zombie films :: _______: cannibal films
comes up in the test which may very well determine whether you go to Harvard or the local community college, the answer is “Ruggero Deodato.” This straight-shooting gentleman with the glasses and the perpetual two-day stubble first toyed with the cannibal sub-genre in 1976 with a nasty film called Jungle Holocaust, a sort of modern-day take on Richard Connell’s classic short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” where a stranded man escapes from a bloodthirsty tribe in Mindanao in order to get back to his crashed plane. It broke boundaries with its gore, its provincial attitudes towards primitive cultures, and its naked machismo.
Jungle Holocaust was still just an appetizer, if you will, for the main course, Deodato’s ultimate trump card and still one of the ultimate endurance test flicks: Cannibal Holocaust (CH for short). If ever there was a moment where Satan became Man on Earth, you could find a worse candidate than the day Ruggero Deodato submitted CH to be released. But what a glorious hell for all those who dared enter.
The plot is straightforward enough: a professor in New York travels to the Amazon in an attempt to locate a filmmaking crew which has recently disappeared. Four college-age filmmakers had gone to this isolated region of the world—dubbed the “Green Inferno”—in order to film one of the last known cannibal tribes in existence. Rather than find the foursome, however, the professor finds some of their bones, as well as several cans of film. He returns to New York to watch the footage in the company of his colleagues in order to decide whether to air it on TV. To his horror, the professor discovers that not only will he not be airing the footage on TV, he will be destroying all copies if possible. For the party of four has not only discovered a cannibal tribe, they have provoked them into attacking—and killing/eating them. The normally peace-loving tribe had no choice but to turn on the insensitive Americans. After all, they came into the village, burned it down, raped a few women, mocked them, and fired various weapons at them. All of this is played out in straightforward fashion; the footage is highly realistic. In fact, this is where the makers of The Blair Witch Project got their ideas, although they have denied it. It is cinema verite to the extreme—so much so that Deodato eventually went to court in Italy to prove that no one really died during the filming!To be sure, Cannibal Holocaust, even more so than any other film in this essay, is not a film for everyone. This one tops them all in terms of graphic content. Time to separate the men from the boys.
Where to begin…there are beheadings, other body parts being cut off, including a penis, human-looking parts and bones being eaten, rapes and other rough sex, people getting shot, a man getting bitten by a snake and his foot cut off in a futile attempt to stop the poison from spreading, a woman being punished by her husband for adultery by having some kind of stone covered with sticks and mud shoved into her vagina, and then pushed out into the river in a canoe where she bleeds to death, another woman killed and hung up on a stake through her rectum and out her mouth (this looked very realistic and will definitely “stick” with you), and a cannibal is taken hostage and has cocaine blown up his nostrils (so he will be “happy” and do whatever they say). Another woman has a fetus ripped out of her by other women, presumably due to adultery. Said fetus is quickly thrust into mud to kill it instantly. There’s also footage from the college film crew’s earlier documentary, “The Last Road To Hell,” showing scenes of people in Africa (Uganda, perhaps?) being executed, bodies piled up in the back of a truck, and the military leading a guy out into a field with a hood on his head before being shot. This may or may not be actual footage from the reign of Idi Amin, but it sure as hell looks real. It makes Mondo Cane look like a Disney film. And rumor has it that a scene of a guy being eaten by piranhas was filmed but cut out.
If you’re still reading, what actually might be more offensive than even these scenes are the many shots of cruelty to animals. It’s somewhat ironic, but some people are more offended by this than anything which happens to humans (and most PETA activists are probably pro-abortion, but I don’t want to go there), but in CH we are “treated” to a rodent of some sort having his skull bashed in and then eaten, a huge turtle being ripped apart and eaten (his internal organs are still throbbing even after his head is removed), a baby pig being shot for no reason, and a snake being killed. Not to mention a huge spider on Faye's shoulder! These scenes were an unfortunate aspect of the late ‘70s cannibal sub-genre, designed to show what “really” happens in the jungle. (In fact, in Martino’s Mountain of the Cannibal God, there’s a scene where a poor little monkey is eaten by a python, and if you look closely you can see a stick hidden in the bushes, pushing the monkey close to the python so that he WOULD get eaten! Then there’s the man humping the large boar like there’s no tomorrow, but I digress…) 1979 was a different time and place; animal rights activism was not as predominant a political force then, and the tag line “No animals were harmed in the making of this film” had yet to be coined. Keep in mind that I am not a vegetarian and I know darn well that I’ve eaten—and continue to eat—thousands of slaughtered animals, but I must concede that the animal scenes in CH and other cannibal films are a little bit gratuitous. They’re not really essential to the plot, but they do make us think: better that we kill and eat animals than humans! Also remember that similar stuff is often shown on the Discovery Channel and considered “educational,” even taped and shown in 7th grade biology class. How about the ratings-busting “Shark Week,” with its mountains of footage of sharks attacking each other, or smaller fish?
And yet: the final line spoken in the film comes from the shocked professor. He shakes his head sadly and asks, “I wonder who the real cannibals are.” In other words, we Westerners are so disgusted at primitive tribes, but are we any better? We fight wars; we murder; we (ahem) slaughter animals for food; we destroy rain forests, pollute the oceans, and consume fuel like there’s no tomorrow. They wear few clothes (how scandalous—people walking around nude!), but many of us Americans go crazy if we see a Playboy. Are the primitive tribes actually more civilized, then? All of a sudden I must sound like a raging liberal (which I’m not), but it does make me think about how much of a narrow-minded consumer I want to be. To top it all off, in CH the filmmaking crew pays the ultimate price only for being so cruel to the cannibals. Alan (the main filmmaker, and one of the biggest assholes ever captured on cinema, a testament to the actor who played him) does horrible things in order to get exploitative, sensationalized footage. The actor himself started to wonder if he was being paid to appear in a “snuff” film; he also objected to shooting the baby pig because he’d gone on a boat ride with it and had developed a relationship with the little fella. Alan’s very cute girlfriend Faye (played by the rather earthy Francesca Ciardi) plays along at first, but becomes reluctant when Alan and another guy start to rape one of the women. It is even implied that they are the ones who impale her on the stake and film it as if they have just discovered her body—they “pretend” to be outraged by it. Eventually Faye becomes the “conscience” of the group, but it’s a case of too little, too late. Guilt by association in the minds of the cannibals. She is herself raped from behind and then literally ripped to shreds, her head brandished like a trophy.
Cannibalism itself is considered a nauseating, deplorable practice, but in primitive times it was done for a variety of reasons. Even in modern times some have resorted to it in extremis (think the Donner party or the soccer-team-crashed-in-the-Andes film Alive!) Obviously the Judeo-Christian tradition frowns upon it, but primitive tribes existed far outside of this tradition. And ironically, look at the disease and devastation many historians say we brought upon these people we did try to “civilize” them.
CH is ultimately a scathing indictment of the media. In this sense, Deodato was ahead of his time. Before Geraldo, before “COPS,” before Reality TV and 24 hour news coverage (whether on TV or on the web—simultaneously one of mankind’s greatest and worst achievements of the past twenty years), Deodato in 1979 was asking when was too much, too much? He also later said that he was inspired by his young son watching the news and wondering why it was all nothing but killing: a question a child might ask, but not a childish question. When does the media cross the line from simply reporting the news, to blatantly making stuff up or distorting the facts. This is a far too relevant topic even now.
When I got my quasi-bootleg EC DVD of CH from ebay in the summer of 2004, I popped it in that night. My family was out of town, and I planned to watch it and two other Deodato films—to have kind of a Deodato film festival of my own, you might say. Yes, with a beer and a Papa John’s pizza. However, after the 90 or so minutes of Cannibal Holocaust had ended, I quietly got up, turned off the DVD player, and went into my room and read an innocuous book cuddled up with the pet cat, rather than watch the other films. For the first time ever, all of a sudden I wasn’t in the mood to watch anything similar to CH, and I felt unclean, like I needed to take a shower. I was furious at myself and wondered how I’d ever gotten into this whole “Eurohorror crap,” but the next day I realized that CH had simply had a profound effect on me, moreso than almost any other film in any genre. After years of watching controversial/graphic film after controversial/graphic film, I’d finally found one which truly “challenged” me. Ruggero Deodato had had the last laugh—I would be coming back for more eventually. More importantly, it made me think and reflect on both what I had seen as well as the ideas behind such depraved and visceral imagery.
The remainder of Deodato’s career seems almost like an anti-climax, but that’s only because CH was such a first-class mindfuck, the type any agent provocateur worth his salt hopes for once in a lifetime. In 1980, he directed House on the Edge of the Park, one of so many “rape/revenge” flicks popular in the wake of 1972’s Wes Craven potboiler Last House on the Left. (Grindhouse denizens can name the other post-Last House flicks by rote: Night Train Murders, Fight ForYour Life, Mother’s Day, and the almighty I Spit On Your Grave, which I wish was Italian so I could talk about it more). Deodato’s ripoff even starred Last House’s iconic sleazeball, David Hess! In all seriousness, it can be argued that Deodato was robbed at the Oscars in 1980 for making the Best Comedy in House, simply for the scene in which a bald black lady, dancing to a disco song called “Do It To Me Once More,” is having such a good time she yells out, “Hot diggity!” In 1985 Deodato returned to the jungle to make Cut And Run, but it was certainly no Jungle Holocaust or Cannibal Holocaust. How could it be? Ay dios mio, it stars Willie Aames, who played one of the kids on Eight Is Enough! But everywhere he goes, people try to work up the nerve to ask Ruggero Deodato how and why in the hell he made CH. Rumor has it he may yet make a CH II, if he can get the funding and a script worthy of the original.
The relative success of films like Deep Red, Cannibal Holocaust, Zombi 2, or any number of lesser achievements can be traced in no small part to the rise of the Grindhouse Cinemas, in particular those on 42nd Street in New York City. Oh, sure, they played other places in America as well, including drive-ins, but 42nd Street certainly came to be the place to see any number of horror, exploitation, porno, kung fu, or avant garde film from the late ‘60s to the mid ‘80s. Before Rudy Giuliani came along and made Gotham at least seem safer than Disneyworld, 42nd Street was sleaze personified, a place for slumming…
Before we move on to the 1980s, a list of major stars to emerge in the shocking Italian cinema of the 1970s includes Rosalba Neri (unfairly called a “poor man’s Barbara Steele” by Joe D’Amato, and at the risk of sounding sexist let me add that she has one of the nicest butts I’ve ever seen), Edwige Fenech, Tisa Farrow, Alexandra Delli Colli, Ian McCullough, Daria Nicolodi, Anthony Franciosa, James Franciscus (whom I always confuse with Anthony Franciosa ‘cause their last names are so similar!), John Steiner, Mimsy Farmer, Christopher George, George Hilton, Barbara Bouchet, Al Cliver, Laura Gemser, Catriona MacColl, John Morghen (who always seems to die in an interesting manner), David Warbeck, and the redoubtable Ivan Rassimov. For those not in the know, Ivan was a handsome but untrustworthy-looking Russian actor who always seemed to turn up in only two or three scenes, but his characters were always vital to the plot (for the entire decade of the 70s at least 50% of all Italian films featured “and with the participation of Ivan Rassimov” in the opening credits).
In 1980, Mario Bava died shortly after receiving a positive check-up from his doctors . He was 65 years young and had lived a full life, but all of his disciplines, directors or simply fans, obviously missed him. In retrospect, his death can be seen as symbolic of the beginning of the death of Italian horror proper, for while several good films were made in the first half of the 1980s, even then things were never quite the same.
A leading light of the very early 1980s was Joe D’Amato, whom I stupidly used to confuse with Joe Dante, the man behind Piranha and Gremlins. Joe had been the cinematographer on What Have You Done To Solange?, but he was just itching to become a director, so in 1980 he directed Anthropophagus. While not a classic by any means (although it surprises me just how many people put it in their top 10 lists), it’s still a fun little way to spend a Friday night. Without further ado, things I learned while watching Anthropophagus (potential spoilers):
1. If the Tarot card reader says “don’t visit the Greek island,” then don’t fucking visit the Greek island.
2. If you’re in a basement and a blind 15-year-old girl covered in blood that looks like a young Paula Cole (“Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?”) swipes you with a knife, you won’t die, but you will be in pain, and it will put you at a tactical disadvantage when a large cannibal dude with a bad sunburn and a pre-Nirvana gray flannel shirt shows up to tear you a new one.
3. Real cannibals ain’t afraid to eat THEIR OWN GUTS, even as they are dying
4. Not every Eurohorror film is full of nudity
Come to think of it, Joe D’Amato is a great mentor. I bow to his erudition. I disagree with the guy at horrordvds.com who wrote, “Explaining the story in a Joe D’Amato film is like trying to explain quantum physics to a goat: what’s the point?” For the same year (1980) he released Anthropophagus, he released his other good film, Beyond The Darkness (Buio Omega), and it’s there I learned the following:
1. It hurts like crap to have your fingernails yanked out one by one, especially if you’re an overweight, pot-smoking British girl who shouldn’t be nosing around the autopsy room.
2. If you need help disposing of a dead body, get your weird, ugly pasta-loving maid to help you, but keep in mind she WILL make you suck her tits later that night.
3. Nothing will keep a creepy rich boy living in a country villa away from his girlfriend after she dies. All he needs is a windowless van, a shovel, an advanced understanding of embalming and the realization that from this point on, you will DEFINITELY be doing must of the work in bed.
4. Goblin rocks! (Of course, I already knew that from Deep Red)
A.D. 1982 can almost be considered the giallo’s last gasp: after over half a decade of knock-offs by lesser directors, the genre took an unexpected leap forward when two of the masters made some of their finest films. Argento ditched the supernatural angle (“at long last,” thought some purists) and put out Tenebre to massive acclaim. Of interest is the fact that although Tenebre is Italian for “darkness,” the film itself is bathed in relentless white daylight—all the better to highlight Maestro Dario’s finest gore set piece ever, in which a woman gets her arm cut off at the elbow and proceeds to paint a kitchen wall crimson. For his part, Fulci took out a raincheck on his beloved zombies in ’82 and put out one of the sleaziest, most nudity-filled gialli ever, The New York Ripper (marred only slightly by the fact that the killer spoke in a ridiculous voice like Donald Duck’s, but the post-modern optimist will at least try to paint this as a gallant nod to the glory days of Don’t Torture A Duckling). But afterwards, each man started putting out inferior product.
It’s not entirely their fault. For there are no ifs, ands, or buts about it: after about 1983, the bottom fell out of the Italian film industry, and even two decades later, it has never truly recovered. This point has been driven home by every commentator on the subject, both insiders (directors, actors, and DVD company owners) and outsiders (fans and experts). Horror films were certainly not the only genre to suffer; all Italian films suffered (even if Roberto Benigni pulled off a major coup in 1999 with the Oscar for Life Is Beautiful).
Even as Italian horror was fading, the home videotape market was taking off. Just like the porno industry got an unexpected boost, so did the horror film industry. Now these films could be enjoyed in the privacy of one’s home, and not at an out-of-town drive-in (and those were fading fast) or at some seedy grindhouse where you worried that the guy next to you was going to pull a “Pee Wee Herman” and scar you for life. While not all classic Italian horror received much of a video distribution, the films that did definitely attracted peoples’ notice. A bona fide cult sprang up attracted to those movies packaged in the so-called oversized, lurid “big boxes” which were more plentiful on the dusty shelves of the local “Mom and Pop” stores than they would ever be at tight-assed chains like Blockbuster. Videos became treasured possessions, even if their owners often didn’t know what they were missing by skipping out on the original theatrical run (and the vicissitudes wrought by manufacturers): like many other types of movies, videotape usually mean that incorrect OAR making films look like hack jobs (one reviewer said that Zombi 2 in pan & scan basically meant lots of shots of two noses talking to one another), faded colors, bad dubbing and a plethora of confusing re-release titles. Shock, for example, went by Beyond The Door II, even though it had nothing to do with Beyond The Door I, which wasn’t even a goddamned Italian film! Zombi 2 was re-christened (hehe, that’s an ironic analogy) Zombie. And those were just two less-confusing instances of “Anglicization.” In fact, when the DVD craze took off 15 years later, many fans were pleasantly surprised to find that such-and-such film newly remastered and correctly named was something they’d rented under a completely different title and had never been able to track down since as a result! Since this was the conservative 1980s we’re talking about, it’s only fair to mention that many of these films found their cult audiences on video despite (or—it can be argued—because of) the fact that the powers that be often decided to censor, cut, edit, or BAN them. If anything, Americans were relatively lucky in this respect, for we might have several scenes cut out, but in Britain and Australian the “video nasties” movement meant that certain films were completely banned from being bought, rented, or sold for years. Italian horror was certainly not the only genre to suffer; obviously films like I Spit On Your Grave became “video nasties” as well.
And in the country shaped like a boot where everyone likes lotsa Garlic, a few other directors popped up in the 1980s, each attempting to fight the good fight. First and foremost, Mario Bava’s son Eugenio started directing. His career began promisingly enough; his father apparently let him direct much of Shock (1977), and he assisted Argento considerably on Inferno; then in 1980 he issued Macabre, a nasty but compelling little film about a disturbed woman with a gross twist at the end. After that stunner, he gave the giallo a shot with the disappointing A Blade In The Dark (cool name, though; how’d it take so long for that title to be used?) before turning to the curiously overrated Demons series; ultimately he failed to gain as much of a name for himself as his illustrious father, but at least he gave it the old college try!
Michele Soavi (his first name is pronounced Meek-a-lay, not Mih-shell!) was another “coulda been” or “also-ran” a la Eugenio Bava, who suffered from the additional disadvantage of having been born about a decade too late. First known as an actor (he appears as a cop in Argento’s Opera as well as playing the lead in Eugenio’s A Blade In The Dark), he turned his modest talents to directing, ironically with a little help from Joe D’Amato. In the late 1980s he directed Stage Fright and The Church, and then in 1994 came Dellamorte Dellamore (aka Cemetery Man), considered by many to be a “minor classic.”
If gialli were dead and buried, their influence lived on in the States, as “body count” or “slasher” films took off, starting with John Carpenter’s Halloween (and its subsequent sequels). This was followed by the endless Friday the 13th Series, not to mention the A Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play, Hellraiser, and Silent Night Deadly Night franchises. No kid growing up in the ‘80s didn’t attend slumber parties where films from these series weren’t rented. While these series obviously delved into cheesy clichés and a lack of artistry, there is no denying the fact that gialli had led the way. In fact, Carpenter has admitted that Halloween, as fine as it is for a variety of reasons not even related to anything European, was little more than his “attempt to make a Dario Argento film.” The first Friday the 13th was directly inspired by Bava’s somewhat obscure Twitch of the Death Nerve, and even the conceit of a “killer doll” in Child’s Play was hinted at in Deep Red when that sick-looking ventriloquist doll showed up and scared the shit out of that Barry Gibb-lookalike in the 3rd reel!
In the early 1980s, horror anthology films suddenly came in vogue for a few enjoyable years. Think Creepshow I and II or Twilight Zone: The Movie. On TV, Amazing Stories and HBO’s The Hitchhiker often flirted with horrific imagery wrought by sexual guilt. These were all a direct descendant of Mario Bava’s 1963 anthology Black Sabbath. Dario Argento and George Romero even teamed up for a two-story anthology film called Two Evil Eyes, but this cross-cultural collaboration, a match made in heaven on paper, didn’t set the world on fire.
Argento himself got his act together in 1987 for one final shot of true Euro glory: Opera. Sometimes overlooked, Opera can actually be considered the last giallo ever made.
Opera certainly featured some amazing set pieces. In a clever nod to Hitchcock’s The Birds, crows figure prominently, including a stunning, swooping bird’s eye view of one of those horrid creatures making its loopy descent upon a perturbed opera house’s patrons—and then later they go to town on the killer. And no one can forget the “scissors puncturing the throat to get at the swallowed necklace” scene, or the ultimate in brutality: needles scotch-taped to a girl’s eye, so that she is forced to watch her lover get murdered (if she closes her eyes, the needles will go deep into the sockets). While Opera features pounding heavy metal songs during the killing scenes, the main theme (composed by Claudio Simonetti) is tender, more classically-oriented (in keeping with the mise en scene) and possessing one of the most beautiful melodies ever written. Retitled Terror At The Opera in the US, it was released by Orion Pictures when that company was still a player, although it didn’t do well in an America that only cared about horror films if the killer was named Michael, Freddie, Pinhead, Leatherface, or Jason (or, God forbid, Chucky). But the quality was vintage Argento; if not for the women’s shoulder-pads (I always think of George Michael’s highly dated video for “Father Figure” when I see this film), men’s Miami Vice jackets, and big hair by everyone, you’d think it had been filmed in 1975 (a good thing).
In retrospect, Opera is quite an anomaly: a seeming near-masterpiece released at a time when everything else on both sides of the Atlantic was basically dung. Even if only “slightly above average” in the overall Argento canon vis a vis Deep Red or Suspiria, it was head and shoulders above any flick laughably dubbed a “contemporary.” Argento has confessed that after the film’s wrap-up, he was deeply depressed and didn’t direct again for a while. One has to wonder if it was really due to Opera itself or due to the fact he knew that the glory days of Italian horror were beyond over, that Opera was a fluke at best. For their parts during these “dark years,” Fulci was ailing (and stuck making Zombi sequels which weren’t an eighth as good as the original), and Deodato had retreated to the world of TV commercials, which might not have grossed anyone out but at least provided a steady paycheck. Sergio Martino had a brief comeback in the mid 1980s with the then-popular post-Apocalyptic subgenre, making sci-fi/action films which ripped off such superior fare as Escape From New York, The Terminator, and Mad Max. Joe D’Amato switched to making direct-to-video porn (and at least acted like he loved it). Many other major players of the 60s and 70s simply retired or occasionally hit the convention circuit.
In 1996, Lucio Fulci died of complications from diabetes. It was the saddest genre-related death since Mario Bava’s, obviously. He died a few years before DVD came along, but at least he got to enjoy attending several conventions, where he was greeted like a rock star. And after he died, the bumper sticker of choice amongst spaghetti horror fans read FULCI LIVES! If he had lived only three years longer, he could have seen a massive resurgence of public interest in his entire oeuvre—not to mention that of all his fellow Italian horror directors’ classic films.
The importance of the development of DVD cannot be overestimated when it comes to quantifying its impact on the public’s awareness of any horror films released before the 1990s, but in the case of Eurohorror (and Italian Eurohorror especially), it can be safely stated that without the little shiny discs, many of these films would have faded into obscurity. In very short order, companies realized there was a slavishly devoted niche market (OK, OK, a CULT FOLLOWING) for them. And these niche companies went beyond simply remastering the original negatives with superior sound and a choice of whether to watch in the original subtitled Italian or in dubbed English. All the usual assortment of DVD extra features—audio commentaries, liner notes, making-of featurettes, full-blown documentaries, trailers, TV adverstisements, poster and still galleries, and hidden “easter eggs”—could be found therein.
So which companies does one go to in order to sample the finest in Italian horror?
First and foremost, Anchor Bay deserves a round of applause for settting standards even at the dawn of the format in the late 1990s. In retrospect, it was the first golden age of Italian horror on DVD. Nearly every major film from the “classic” eras of Argento and Fulci have gotten the Anchor Bay treatment, and while they are all now in various stages of being out-of-print (or being released as two-disc sets which in turn go out of print), there was a time in late 2001/early 2002 when a trip to Best Buy or Media Play could easily yield the purchase of at least 12 films directed between the two of those men. I thank my stars that this is the precise period in time when I got into the genre.
When Anchor Bay heavyweight Bill Lustig left the company around 2002, he delighted genre enthusiasts with the creation of Blue Underground. While Blue Underground has actually focused on a wide variety of horror and exploitation films from around the world, Italian horror nevertheless got its props in a major way with the beyond-staggering 8 disc Mondo Cane collection; the attention to detail would put the Criterion Collection to shame. I must also add that because the Mondo Cane films are essentially documentaries, I have refrained from mentioning them much here. While Blue Underground needs to hire someone in their graphics department with better photoshop skills, they have definitely supplanted Anchor Bay as the outlet for Eurohorror. Without Lustig to guide them, Anchor Bay has mostly released American films the past several years.
Image Entertainment became the go-to place for all of Bava’s 1960s classics; most discs featured highly informative commentary by Bava scholar Tim Lucas, who after years of tantalizing promises, has finally published his mammoth coffee-table book on the Maestro entitled All The Colors of the Dark. Alas, the Image Bava DVDs are all out of print but can still be purchased online at Ebay, etc.
Anchor Bay has also had other imitators: Shriek Show, a division of Media Blasters, has released many definitive Italian films by Deodato, D’Amato, Lenzi, and Fulci; the collection of trailers on each disc is not to be missed either—you never know what goodies are coming down the pike from them, as their website is often woefully out-of-date. Mondo Macabro is another label to watch, although they have actually focused more on Jess Franco films as well as the underrated Mexican horror scene (the nightmarish fantasies of Juan Lopez Moctezuma).
NoShame started releasing films in 2005. They are a class outfit which has thus far focused on the more sex-oriented (as opposed to gore-oriented) gialli, more often than not starring Edwige Fenech. And at long last, Grindhouse Releasing finally put out the definitive 2 disc special edition of Cannibal Holocaust in October 2005. It was worth the half-decade long wait.
Essential viewing (those marked with an asterisk are the 10 absolute must-haves for even casual fans):
*Black Sunday (Mario Bava, 1960)
*Black Sabbath (Mario Bava, 1960)
*Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava, 1964)
Castle of Blood (Antonio Margheriti, 1964)
Kill, Baby Kill! (Mario Bava, 1966)
The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1969)
The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (Sergio Martino, 1970)
Your Vice Is A Locked Room and Only I Have The Key (Sergio Martino, 1972)
*What Have You Done To Solange? (Massimo Dallamano, 1972)
Don’t Torture A Duckling (Lucio Fulci, 1972)
The Night Train Murders (Aldo Lado, 1975)
*Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975)
Jungle Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1976)
*Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)
Shock (Mario Bava, 1977)
Mountain of the Cannibal God (Sergio Martino, 1978)
*Zombi 2 (Lucio Fulci, 1979)
*Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1979)
Anthropophagus (Joe D’Amato, 1980)
House on the Edge of the Park (Ruggero Deodato, 1980)
Inferno (Dario Argento, 1980)
City of the Living Dead (Lucio Fulci, 1980)
Macabre (Eugenio Bava, 1980)
Beyond The Darkness (Joe D’Amato, 1980)
*The Beyond (Lucio Fulci, 1981)
The New York Ripper (Lucio Fulci, 1982)
*Tenebre (Dario Argento, 1982)
Opera (Dario Argento, 1987)
Mondo Cane Collection (Jacopetti and Prosperi, re-released 2003, originally released 1961-1971)
The remainder of Deodato’s career seems almost like an anti-climax, but that’s only because CH was such a first-class mindfuck, the type any agent provocateur worth his salt hopes for once in a lifetime. In 1980, he directed House on the Edge of the Park, one of so many “rape/revenge” flicks popular in the wake of 1972’s Wes Craven potboiler Last House on the Left. (Grindhouse denizens can name the other post-Last House flicks by rote: Night Train Murders, Fight ForYour Life, Mother’s Day, and the almighty I Spit On Your Grave, which I wish was Italian so I could talk about it more). Deodato’s ripoff even starred Last House’s iconic sleazeball, David Hess! In all seriousness, it can be argued that Deodato was robbed at the Oscars in 1980 for making the Best Comedy in House, simply for the scene in which a bald black lady, dancing to a disco song called “Do It To Me Once More,” is having such a good time she yells out, “Hot diggity!” In 1985 Deodato returned to the jungle to make Cut And Run, but it was certainly no Jungle Holocaust or Cannibal Holocaust. How could it be? Ay dios mio, it stars Willie Aames, who played one of the kids on Eight Is Enough! But everywhere he goes, people try to work up the nerve to ask Ruggero Deodato how and why in the hell he made CH. Rumor has it he may yet make a CH II, if he can get the funding and a script worthy of the original.
The relative success of films like Deep Red, Cannibal Holocaust, Zombi 2, or any number of lesser achievements can be traced in no small part to the rise of the Grindhouse Cinemas, in particular those on 42nd Street in New York City. Oh, sure, they played other places in America as well, including drive-ins, but 42nd Street certainly came to be the place to see any number of horror, exploitation, porno, kung fu, or avant garde film from the late ‘60s to the mid ‘80s. Before Rudy Giuliani came along and made Gotham at least seem safer than Disneyworld, 42nd Street was sleaze personified, a place for slumming…
Before we move on to the 1980s, a list of major stars to emerge in the shocking Italian cinema of the 1970s includes Rosalba Neri (unfairly called a “poor man’s Barbara Steele” by Joe D’Amato, and at the risk of sounding sexist let me add that she has one of the nicest butts I’ve ever seen), Edwige Fenech, Tisa Farrow, Alexandra Delli Colli, Ian McCullough, Daria Nicolodi, Anthony Franciosa, James Franciscus (whom I always confuse with Anthony Franciosa ‘cause their last names are so similar!), John Steiner, Mimsy Farmer, Christopher George, George Hilton, Barbara Bouchet, Al Cliver, Laura Gemser, Catriona MacColl, John Morghen (who always seems to die in an interesting manner), David Warbeck, and the redoubtable Ivan Rassimov. For those not in the know, Ivan was a handsome but untrustworthy-looking Russian actor who always seemed to turn up in only two or three scenes, but his characters were always vital to the plot (for the entire decade of the 70s at least 50% of all Italian films featured “and with the participation of Ivan Rassimov” in the opening credits).
In 1980, Mario Bava died shortly after receiving a positive check-up from his doctors . He was 65 years young and had lived a full life, but all of his disciplines, directors or simply fans, obviously missed him. In retrospect, his death can be seen as symbolic of the beginning of the death of Italian horror proper, for while several good films were made in the first half of the 1980s, even then things were never quite the same.
A leading light of the very early 1980s was Joe D’Amato, whom I stupidly used to confuse with Joe Dante, the man behind Piranha and Gremlins. Joe had been the cinematographer on What Have You Done To Solange?, but he was just itching to become a director, so in 1980 he directed Anthropophagus. While not a classic by any means (although it surprises me just how many people put it in their top 10 lists), it’s still a fun little way to spend a Friday night. Without further ado, things I learned while watching Anthropophagus (potential spoilers):
1. If the Tarot card reader says “don’t visit the Greek island,” then don’t fucking visit the Greek island.
2. If you’re in a basement and a blind 15-year-old girl covered in blood that looks like a young Paula Cole (“Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?”) swipes you with a knife, you won’t die, but you will be in pain, and it will put you at a tactical disadvantage when a large cannibal dude with a bad sunburn and a pre-Nirvana gray flannel shirt shows up to tear you a new one.
3. Real cannibals ain’t afraid to eat THEIR OWN GUTS, even as they are dying
4. Not every Eurohorror film is full of nudity
Come to think of it, Joe D’Amato is a great mentor. I bow to his erudition. I disagree with the guy at horrordvds.com who wrote, “Explaining the story in a Joe D’Amato film is like trying to explain quantum physics to a goat: what’s the point?” For the same year (1980) he released Anthropophagus, he released his other good film, Beyond The Darkness (Buio Omega), and it’s there I learned the following:
1. It hurts like crap to have your fingernails yanked out one by one, especially if you’re an overweight, pot-smoking British girl who shouldn’t be nosing around the autopsy room.
2. If you need help disposing of a dead body, get your weird, ugly pasta-loving maid to help you, but keep in mind she WILL make you suck her tits later that night.
3. Nothing will keep a creepy rich boy living in a country villa away from his girlfriend after she dies. All he needs is a windowless van, a shovel, an advanced understanding of embalming and the realization that from this point on, you will DEFINITELY be doing must of the work in bed.
4. Goblin rocks! (Of course, I already knew that from Deep Red)
A.D. 1982 can almost be considered the giallo’s last gasp: after over half a decade of knock-offs by lesser directors, the genre took an unexpected leap forward when two of the masters made some of their finest films. Argento ditched the supernatural angle (“at long last,” thought some purists) and put out Tenebre to massive acclaim. Of interest is the fact that although Tenebre is Italian for “darkness,” the film itself is bathed in relentless white daylight—all the better to highlight Maestro Dario’s finest gore set piece ever, in which a woman gets her arm cut off at the elbow and proceeds to paint a kitchen wall crimson. For his part, Fulci took out a raincheck on his beloved zombies in ’82 and put out one of the sleaziest, most nudity-filled gialli ever, The New York Ripper (marred only slightly by the fact that the killer spoke in a ridiculous voice like Donald Duck’s, but the post-modern optimist will at least try to paint this as a gallant nod to the glory days of Don’t Torture A Duckling). But afterwards, each man started putting out inferior product.
It’s not entirely their fault. For there are no ifs, ands, or buts about it: after about 1983, the bottom fell out of the Italian film industry, and even two decades later, it has never truly recovered. This point has been driven home by every commentator on the subject, both insiders (directors, actors, and DVD company owners) and outsiders (fans and experts). Horror films were certainly not the only genre to suffer; all Italian films suffered (even if Roberto Benigni pulled off a major coup in 1999 with the Oscar for Life Is Beautiful).
Even as Italian horror was fading, the home videotape market was taking off. Just like the porno industry got an unexpected boost, so did the horror film industry. Now these films could be enjoyed in the privacy of one’s home, and not at an out-of-town drive-in (and those were fading fast) or at some seedy grindhouse where you worried that the guy next to you was going to pull a “Pee Wee Herman” and scar you for life. While not all classic Italian horror received much of a video distribution, the films that did definitely attracted peoples’ notice. A bona fide cult sprang up attracted to those movies packaged in the so-called oversized, lurid “big boxes” which were more plentiful on the dusty shelves of the local “Mom and Pop” stores than they would ever be at tight-assed chains like Blockbuster. Videos became treasured possessions, even if their owners often didn’t know what they were missing by skipping out on the original theatrical run (and the vicissitudes wrought by manufacturers): like many other types of movies, videotape usually mean that incorrect OAR making films look like hack jobs (one reviewer said that Zombi 2 in pan & scan basically meant lots of shots of two noses talking to one another), faded colors, bad dubbing and a plethora of confusing re-release titles. Shock, for example, went by Beyond The Door II, even though it had nothing to do with Beyond The Door I, which wasn’t even a goddamned Italian film! Zombi 2 was re-christened (hehe, that’s an ironic analogy) Zombie. And those were just two less-confusing instances of “Anglicization.” In fact, when the DVD craze took off 15 years later, many fans were pleasantly surprised to find that such-and-such film newly remastered and correctly named was something they’d rented under a completely different title and had never been able to track down since as a result! Since this was the conservative 1980s we’re talking about, it’s only fair to mention that many of these films found their cult audiences on video despite (or—it can be argued—because of) the fact that the powers that be often decided to censor, cut, edit, or BAN them. If anything, Americans were relatively lucky in this respect, for we might have several scenes cut out, but in Britain and Australian the “video nasties” movement meant that certain films were completely banned from being bought, rented, or sold for years. Italian horror was certainly not the only genre to suffer; obviously films like I Spit On Your Grave became “video nasties” as well.
And in the country shaped like a boot where everyone likes lotsa Garlic, a few other directors popped up in the 1980s, each attempting to fight the good fight. First and foremost, Mario Bava’s son Eugenio started directing. His career began promisingly enough; his father apparently let him direct much of Shock (1977), and he assisted Argento considerably on Inferno; then in 1980 he issued Macabre, a nasty but compelling little film about a disturbed woman with a gross twist at the end. After that stunner, he gave the giallo a shot with the disappointing A Blade In The Dark (cool name, though; how’d it take so long for that title to be used?) before turning to the curiously overrated Demons series; ultimately he failed to gain as much of a name for himself as his illustrious father, but at least he gave it the old college try!
Michele Soavi (his first name is pronounced Meek-a-lay, not Mih-shell!) was another “coulda been” or “also-ran” a la Eugenio Bava, who suffered from the additional disadvantage of having been born about a decade too late. First known as an actor (he appears as a cop in Argento’s Opera as well as playing the lead in Eugenio’s A Blade In The Dark), he turned his modest talents to directing, ironically with a little help from Joe D’Amato. In the late 1980s he directed Stage Fright and The Church, and then in 1994 came Dellamorte Dellamore (aka Cemetery Man), considered by many to be a “minor classic.”
If gialli were dead and buried, their influence lived on in the States, as “body count” or “slasher” films took off, starting with John Carpenter’s Halloween (and its subsequent sequels). This was followed by the endless Friday the 13th Series, not to mention the A Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play, Hellraiser, and Silent Night Deadly Night franchises. No kid growing up in the ‘80s didn’t attend slumber parties where films from these series weren’t rented. While these series obviously delved into cheesy clichés and a lack of artistry, there is no denying the fact that gialli had led the way. In fact, Carpenter has admitted that Halloween, as fine as it is for a variety of reasons not even related to anything European, was little more than his “attempt to make a Dario Argento film.” The first Friday the 13th was directly inspired by Bava’s somewhat obscure Twitch of the Death Nerve, and even the conceit of a “killer doll” in Child’s Play was hinted at in Deep Red when that sick-looking ventriloquist doll showed up and scared the shit out of that Barry Gibb-lookalike in the 3rd reel!
In the early 1980s, horror anthology films suddenly came in vogue for a few enjoyable years. Think Creepshow I and II or Twilight Zone: The Movie. On TV, Amazing Stories and HBO’s The Hitchhiker often flirted with horrific imagery wrought by sexual guilt. These were all a direct descendant of Mario Bava’s 1963 anthology Black Sabbath. Dario Argento and George Romero even teamed up for a two-story anthology film called Two Evil Eyes, but this cross-cultural collaboration, a match made in heaven on paper, didn’t set the world on fire.
Argento himself got his act together in 1987 for one final shot of true Euro glory: Opera. Sometimes overlooked, Opera can actually be considered the last giallo ever made.
Opera certainly featured some amazing set pieces. In a clever nod to Hitchcock’s The Birds, crows figure prominently, including a stunning, swooping bird’s eye view of one of those horrid creatures making its loopy descent upon a perturbed opera house’s patrons—and then later they go to town on the killer. And no one can forget the “scissors puncturing the throat to get at the swallowed necklace” scene, or the ultimate in brutality: needles scotch-taped to a girl’s eye, so that she is forced to watch her lover get murdered (if she closes her eyes, the needles will go deep into the sockets). While Opera features pounding heavy metal songs during the killing scenes, the main theme (composed by Claudio Simonetti) is tender, more classically-oriented (in keeping with the mise en scene) and possessing one of the most beautiful melodies ever written. Retitled Terror At The Opera in the US, it was released by Orion Pictures when that company was still a player, although it didn’t do well in an America that only cared about horror films if the killer was named Michael, Freddie, Pinhead, Leatherface, or Jason (or, God forbid, Chucky). But the quality was vintage Argento; if not for the women’s shoulder-pads (I always think of George Michael’s highly dated video for “Father Figure” when I see this film), men’s Miami Vice jackets, and big hair by everyone, you’d think it had been filmed in 1975 (a good thing).
In retrospect, Opera is quite an anomaly: a seeming near-masterpiece released at a time when everything else on both sides of the Atlantic was basically dung. Even if only “slightly above average” in the overall Argento canon vis a vis Deep Red or Suspiria, it was head and shoulders above any flick laughably dubbed a “contemporary.” Argento has confessed that after the film’s wrap-up, he was deeply depressed and didn’t direct again for a while. One has to wonder if it was really due to Opera itself or due to the fact he knew that the glory days of Italian horror were beyond over, that Opera was a fluke at best. For their parts during these “dark years,” Fulci was ailing (and stuck making Zombi sequels which weren’t an eighth as good as the original), and Deodato had retreated to the world of TV commercials, which might not have grossed anyone out but at least provided a steady paycheck. Sergio Martino had a brief comeback in the mid 1980s with the then-popular post-Apocalyptic subgenre, making sci-fi/action films which ripped off such superior fare as Escape From New York, The Terminator, and Mad Max. Joe D’Amato switched to making direct-to-video porn (and at least acted like he loved it). Many other major players of the 60s and 70s simply retired or occasionally hit the convention circuit.
In 1996, Lucio Fulci died of complications from diabetes. It was the saddest genre-related death since Mario Bava’s, obviously. He died a few years before DVD came along, but at least he got to enjoy attending several conventions, where he was greeted like a rock star. And after he died, the bumper sticker of choice amongst spaghetti horror fans read FULCI LIVES! If he had lived only three years longer, he could have seen a massive resurgence of public interest in his entire oeuvre—not to mention that of all his fellow Italian horror directors’ classic films.
The importance of the development of DVD cannot be overestimated when it comes to quantifying its impact on the public’s awareness of any horror films released before the 1990s, but in the case of Eurohorror (and Italian Eurohorror especially), it can be safely stated that without the little shiny discs, many of these films would have faded into obscurity. In very short order, companies realized there was a slavishly devoted niche market (OK, OK, a CULT FOLLOWING) for them. And these niche companies went beyond simply remastering the original negatives with superior sound and a choice of whether to watch in the original subtitled Italian or in dubbed English. All the usual assortment of DVD extra features—audio commentaries, liner notes, making-of featurettes, full-blown documentaries, trailers, TV adverstisements, poster and still galleries, and hidden “easter eggs”—could be found therein.
So which companies does one go to in order to sample the finest in Italian horror?
First and foremost, Anchor Bay deserves a round of applause for settting standards even at the dawn of the format in the late 1990s. In retrospect, it was the first golden age of Italian horror on DVD. Nearly every major film from the “classic” eras of Argento and Fulci have gotten the Anchor Bay treatment, and while they are all now in various stages of being out-of-print (or being released as two-disc sets which in turn go out of print), there was a time in late 2001/early 2002 when a trip to Best Buy or Media Play could easily yield the purchase of at least 12 films directed between the two of those men. I thank my stars that this is the precise period in time when I got into the genre.
When Anchor Bay heavyweight Bill Lustig left the company around 2002, he delighted genre enthusiasts with the creation of Blue Underground. While Blue Underground has actually focused on a wide variety of horror and exploitation films from around the world, Italian horror nevertheless got its props in a major way with the beyond-staggering 8 disc Mondo Cane collection; the attention to detail would put the Criterion Collection to shame. I must also add that because the Mondo Cane films are essentially documentaries, I have refrained from mentioning them much here. While Blue Underground needs to hire someone in their graphics department with better photoshop skills, they have definitely supplanted Anchor Bay as the outlet for Eurohorror. Without Lustig to guide them, Anchor Bay has mostly released American films the past several years.
Image Entertainment became the go-to place for all of Bava’s 1960s classics; most discs featured highly informative commentary by Bava scholar Tim Lucas, who after years of tantalizing promises, has finally published his mammoth coffee-table book on the Maestro entitled All The Colors of the Dark. Alas, the Image Bava DVDs are all out of print but can still be purchased online at Ebay, etc.
Anchor Bay has also had other imitators: Shriek Show, a division of Media Blasters, has released many definitive Italian films by Deodato, D’Amato, Lenzi, and Fulci; the collection of trailers on each disc is not to be missed either—you never know what goodies are coming down the pike from them, as their website is often woefully out-of-date. Mondo Macabro is another label to watch, although they have actually focused more on Jess Franco films as well as the underrated Mexican horror scene (the nightmarish fantasies of Juan Lopez Moctezuma).
NoShame started releasing films in 2005. They are a class outfit which has thus far focused on the more sex-oriented (as opposed to gore-oriented) gialli, more often than not starring Edwige Fenech. And at long last, Grindhouse Releasing finally put out the definitive 2 disc special edition of Cannibal Holocaust in October 2005. It was worth the half-decade long wait.
Essential viewing (those marked with an asterisk are the 10 absolute must-haves for even casual fans):
*Black Sunday (Mario Bava, 1960)
*Black Sabbath (Mario Bava, 1960)
*Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava, 1964)
Castle of Blood (Antonio Margheriti, 1964)
Kill, Baby Kill! (Mario Bava, 1966)
The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1969)
The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (Sergio Martino, 1970)
Your Vice Is A Locked Room and Only I Have The Key (Sergio Martino, 1972)
*What Have You Done To Solange? (Massimo Dallamano, 1972)
Don’t Torture A Duckling (Lucio Fulci, 1972)
The Night Train Murders (Aldo Lado, 1975)
*Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975)
Jungle Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1976)
*Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)
Shock (Mario Bava, 1977)
Mountain of the Cannibal God (Sergio Martino, 1978)
*Zombi 2 (Lucio Fulci, 1979)
*Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1979)
Anthropophagus (Joe D’Amato, 1980)
House on the Edge of the Park (Ruggero Deodato, 1980)
Inferno (Dario Argento, 1980)
City of the Living Dead (Lucio Fulci, 1980)
Macabre (Eugenio Bava, 1980)
Beyond The Darkness (Joe D’Amato, 1980)
*The Beyond (Lucio Fulci, 1981)
The New York Ripper (Lucio Fulci, 1982)
*Tenebre (Dario Argento, 1982)
Opera (Dario Argento, 1987)
Mondo Cane Collection (Jacopetti and Prosperi, re-released 2003, originally released 1961-1971)
posted by Raymond Dovetail at 8:41 PM
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