Italian Horror: A Forgotten Art

By Flora Irvine-Hall

Image from Letterboxd

Horror films are often associated with America. And While America has produced countless of great horror films, a lot of other countries contributions to the genre is overlooked. One of which is Italy.

Dr Russ Hunter, a professor from Northumbria University, shared his thoughts on the countries take on horror.

He explained that Italian horror can be  tricky to summarise.

“The complex issue with Italian horror, which is why it's difficult to define, is that so many of the films are co-productions. If you take a film, for instance, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, which  I've about written about in the context of it being an Italian horror film, but it's also a Spanish and Italian co-production, if you've seen the film. It's got a Spanish director, but it's got Italian writers, the makeup artist is Italian, the art designer is Italian. But there's so many other aspects of Spain that it becomes really complicated,” he said.

He did say however, that Italian horror films tended to be rather gory.

“I would say it's certainly something that is associated with them, and I think is part of the reason why a lot of them were caught up in the video nasties in the 1980s, because they were really gory. That's definitely one characteristic,” he explained.

The nasties happened in the 1980s when uncensored horror films became available on VHS. This was exciting for horror fans, but for others, was an outrage.

Image from Daily Mail

Italian horror is not a common interest. Russ  discussed  what intrigued him about that genre.

“I grew up watching Hammer Horror films on TV because I grew up in the 80s, so VCR, but my parents were in charge of renting and it usually wasn't horror films. (…)So the horror film I saw  were what was on television and they weren't Italian horror films.

“I  came across Italian horror when I did my masters, someone recommended it to me. I watched some of them and then I became fascinated by them because I just thought, ‘these are such strange films!’ And if you look at something like Zombie Flesh, for instance, if you have a scene with a zombie, kind of attacking a shark or a shark attacking a zombie, that’s quite odd. You don't see that in most films. That kind of stuff fascinate me. I found it quite quirky and sort of aligned to that.

“My wife is Italian, and when I was visiting Italy I would see all this beautiful countryside, they had all this wonderful food, the people were super friendly and super relaxed. But then their horror films would be gory and quite strange. That just made me more interested in it.

“I enjoyed watching the intellectual history part of it, the conditions in which they made the co-productions, the speed in which they were made, all of those things, the fact that people used to use pseudonyms,” he explained.

Image from Nasty Pasty

Throughout his career, Russ has produced lots of interesting content. An example of this is his book Italian Horror Cinema which he co-edited with Dr Stefano Baschiera from Queens University in Belfast.

“ In 2016 (Dr Stefano Baschiera ) got in contact with me. (…). It's not written by just us. It's got lots of contributors in it. (…) The reason we did it was at that point in time, there wasn't that much written about Italian horror. There was some stuff, but not as much as there is now.

“But I think a lot of people thought, ‘why would you bother studying this kind of stuff? You know it's cheap,’ those kind of stereotypes that people had about it. I think what we wanted to do was to explore it in all its different forms. So allow writers to write about the text, but also allow people to write about the industry, to write about critical responses, to write about all sorts in relation to Italian horror cinema,” Russ stated.

Russ is also currently writing a book about Italian film director Dario Argento, he explained why he wanted to write about him in particular.

“Argento is an interesting figure because he is probably the most famous figure associated with Italian horror, but as such, he is the one that's written about quite a lot. There's a lot of stuff written about Italian horror by what we call the more popular press. So you get quite a lot of fan presses that were about Italian horror. But academically, there wasn't as much. And the same was true of Argento. There's been some things that have been written. Maitland McDonough had written a book on Argento, but there wasn't much.

“What interested me about Argento was that he seemed to be quite a divisive figure, because he was clearly visually very talented. And this is a matter of opinion but for me,  but a lot of his films are quite incoherent in terms of they don’t as much sense as you think they should. Fans will disagree I'm sure.

“But visually, really impressive set pieces and stunning camera work, (he has) a really fantastic visual eye. So I was fascinated with this guy, because he had these qualities,” he said.

Image from Far Out Magazine

In terms of how Italian horror compares to other countries horror films such as French horror, Russ had this to say:

“French horror has been much more taught and is more alive than Italian horror has been so a contemporary comparison is quite difficult to make. I think Italian horror, and it's kind of, again, if you want to use the phrase heyday, from the 60s to the 80s, I think if you look at that, certainly the industry was quite different in that the French did a lot less copying of other people's success formulas. One of the things that characterize Italian horror was they would usually look at what had worked and then make lots of slight variations on it.”

For an average horror fan, Italian horror may seem intimidating. But Russ has some great recommendations.

“Zombi Flesh Eaters is a good place to start because it was caught up in the video nasties. It's a really good example of having international casts and of having really stunning visual moments. There's a very famous scene where someone's eyeball is very slowly being dragged towards a big splinter,” he said.

If you hate gore, Russ also has other film suggestions such as The House with Laughing Windows.

“It's more of a mystery where you've got a sort of non-professional detective trying to solve a mystery of some kind. It's quirky, but it's not particularly gory,” he explained.

Image from IMDb

Perhaps it’s time for Italian horror to come back from the dead.

You can buy Russ's book, Italian Horror Cinema, that he wrote with Stefano Baschiera here.