Italian Horror Cinema

Stefano Baschiera, Russ Hunter

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Year: 2016
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9780748693535
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In its heyday from the late 1950s until the early 1980s Italian horror cinema was characterised by an excess of gore, violence and often incoherent plot-lines. Films about zombies, cannibals and psychopathic killers ensured there was no shortage of controversy, and the genre presents a seemingly unpromising nexus of films for sustained critical analysis. But Italian horror cinema with all its variations, subgenres and filoni remains one of the most recognisable and iconic genre productions in Europe, achieving cult status worldwide. One of the manifestations of a rich production landscape in Italian popular cinema after the Second World War, Italian horror was also characterised by its imitation of foreign models and the transnational dimension of its production agreements, as well as by its international locations and stars. This collection brings together for the first time a range of contributions aimed at a new understanding of the genre, investigating the different phases in its history, the peculiarities of the production system, the work of its most representative directors (Mario Bava and Dario Argento) and the wider role it has played within popular culture.

Table of contents

• ITALIAN HORROR CINEMA
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Preferisco l’inferno: early Italian horror cinema
• 2. Domestic films made for export: modes of production of the 1960s Italian horror film
• 3. The 1980s Italian horror cinema of imitation: the good, the ugly and the sequel
• 4. Knowing the unknown beyond: ‘Italianate’ and ‘Italian’ horror cinema in the twenty-first century
• 5. Bavaesque: the making of Mario Bava as Italian horror auteur
• 6. The Argento Syndrome: aesthetics of horror
• 7. Scrap metal, stains, clogged drains: Argento’s refuse and its refusals
• 8. The giallo/slasher landscape: Ecologia del delitto, Friday the 13th and subtractive spectatorship
• 9. Kings of terror, geniuses of crime: giallo cinema and fumetti neri
• 10. Political memory in the Italian hinterland: locating the ‘rural giallo’
• 11. The horror of progressive rock: Goblin and horror soundtracks
• 12. ‘The only monsters here are the filmmakers’: animal cruelty and death in Italian cannibal films
• 13. Italian horror cinema and Italian film journals of the 1970s
• Index