Many horror film fans think they have their horror film fill when they've watched the various offerings of Universal, Hammer, Roger Corman, and the better-known horror studios and producers. But you really haven't experienced classic horror filmmaking until you take a trip to sunny Italy and explore the dark shadows of its cinema...as David White amply proves in part one of his three-part series on the...
By David White
Part One: The Black and The White
The young
milkmaid leaves the crowded, noisy tavern in the middle of the
night. Only one path in the small village leads to the old drafty
barn. As she 
exits the tavern, the dark,
tree-lined forest looms in front of her. She has no choice. She
must walk forward. She continues to walk and the trees seem to
take on a macabre life of their own. The girl’s pale skin
stands in stark contrast to the pitch black of the night that
wraps around her like a blanket, threatening to suffocate her.
She begins to shake as the wind picks up and seems to whisper all
manner of threats while whistling through the trees…The film
is Mario Bava’s Mask of Satan
(AKA Black Sunday). Very
few films have conveyed a sense of dread more effectively. Here
are some other examples: The opening credits of Pupi Avati’s
House with the Windows that Laughed feature
a yellow-tinted male torso spinning in space. Periodically, a
hand brandishing a knife plunges into the man’s chest. The
gentle tinkling of a piano is broken by the sound of his screams
and a menacing voice; "The colors," the voice repeats.
"The colors". In Dario Argento’s Inferno,
a young woman walks down the hallway of an ominous looking
library. The silence is broken only by the sound of her footfalls
as she passes several people seated in desks, staring at the
books in front of them. Suddenly, she passes another woman who
stares directly at us, the unsuspecting viewers. "I’ve
got you right where I want you," her eyes are saying.
There’s nothing quite like an Italian horror film. As a
genre, they constitute the missing link of the cinema world;
straddling the fence between cerebral art films and base
exploitation. Although they have never been accepted by many of
the so-called "cinema scholars" (many of whom limit
their studies to Hollywood films released between 1939 and 1979
and a smattering of foreign films that developed good critical
reputations in America), Italian horror films have found a
comfortable niche among aficionados of the unusual and people
looking for movies with a little more "oomph", as it
were. Still, most of them remain unavailable except through
mail-order. The few that manage to slip through the Blockbuster
Video net are seldom complete, having been shorn of violence, sex
or important visual composition that can only be seen in
letterboxed prints. Nevertheless, these cinematic gems came to
the attention of movie buffs from their exposure in drive-in
theaters and the early days of videotape, prompting the more
adventurous cinema scholars to track down complete prints,
decipher anglo-psuedonyms and start yelling at anyone who would
listen that Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci are the
unsung heroes of the fantastic cinema. This enthusiasm soon
brought about the rise of many mail-order companies specializing
in overseas horror. Happily, most of these films are no longer as
hard to locate. Part one of this article will deal with the early
days of Italian Horror and the gothic, haunted fairy tales of
Maro Bava, Riccardo Freda and Antonio Margheriti. Part two (The
Silver and Yellow) will examine the giallo film and the rise and
influence of Dario Argento. Part three (Deep Reds) will discuss
Italian horror in the last twenty years and how the influence of
American films like Dawn of the Dead
and The Exorcist have
brought about some of the best ,and worst, examples of the genre.
I
Vampiri AKA The
Devil’s Commandment (1956): The Italian
Horror film was "invented," in 1956, by film-maker and
sculptor Riccardo Freda. The Paris-set 
ilm told the story
of a reporter investigating a series of mysterious deaths in
which all of the victims have the blood drained from their
bodies. The investigation leads to the culprit; a mad doctor
collecting the blood of young women in order to maintain the
youth of his beloved Duchess. The production was plagued with
problems, prompting director Freda to abandon it on the tenth day
of shooting. Cameraman Mario Bava took over for the final two
days. The film was unlike anything that had been seen in Italy
and despite the baroque visuals and atmospheric photography, the
film died at the box office. It faired even worse in America
where it was subjected to several cuts and new scenes featuring a
hilariously lascivious Al "Grandpa Munster" Lewis.
Still, there is much here for the Italian Horror fan to
appreciate. The influence of Bava and Freda is evident throughout
and even if the Italian horror "look" is better defined
in their later films, this is where it all began.
The
Mask of Satan AKA Black
Sunday (1960): It was four years before an
Italian filmmaker attempted a horror film again. Following Renato
Polselli’s indifferently received The
Vampire and the
Ballerina (1960), cameraman Mario 
Bava struck out on
his own as director for the first time and created a horror
masterpiece that gave life to an entire genre. The
Mask of Satan is a bonafide masterpiece of
horror cinema. The story (loosely based on Gogol’s "The
Viy") tells the story of a witch, resurrected two hundred
years after her execution, taking her revenge on the descendants
of the family that killed her. The story is almost secondary,
however, to Bava’s extraordinary visuals which seem to leap
off the screen. Every frame of the film could be blown up and
hung on the wall, so intricate is Bava’s composition. The
stark contrast between light and shadow creates an atmosphere of
dread surpassing even the gothic look of the early Universal
horror films. Bava creates a lush, haunted fairy-tale filled with
witches, ghosts, secret passageways, howling dogs, evil
coach-drivers and tree branches that threaten to attack anyone
who passes by them. For any horror film fans who think
they’ve seen it all, The Mask of Satan is
an eye-opening experience. The film was a success in Italy and
launched Bava’s film directing career. It also fared well in
the states under the title Black Sunday where
it was subject to cutting and rescoring. Despite this tampering,
however, the film lost little of it’s impact and is fondly
remembered by American fans lucky enough to see it on it’s
initial release. A great deal of the film’s success is due
to the presence of it’s star, Barbara Steele. Mask
marked the beginning of Steele’s career
and she went on to star in nine Italian horror films; every one
elevated by her appearance. Her dark features and icy sensuality
made her a natural for the horror film and many of the films in
which she appears owe a great deal of their success to her. Her
other Italian horror films are: The Horrible
Dr. Hichcock, (1962) The
Ghost (1963), Long Hair
of Death (1964), Castle
of Blood (1964), Nightmare
Castle (1965) and She-Beast
(1965) Terror Creatures
from the Grave (1966), An
Angel for Satan (1966),.
The
Terror of Dr. Hichcock AKA The
Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962): Not one to be
outdone by his former colleague, Riccardo Freda hid behind the
Anglo-pseudonym Robert Hampton and went on to create his own
horror masterpiece. Whereas Bava had concentrated on folklore
witches and howling ghosts, Freda focused his films on man’s
inner demons. Utilizing 
color photography
and an unusually sparse number of actors, Freda and screenwriter
Ernesto Gastaldi weaved the tale of Dr. Hichcock and his two
unfortunate wives. Unable to make love in a more (ahem)
conventional manner, the good doctor begins injecting his all
too-willing wife with a sedative in order to bed her. After
discovering an anesthetic that slows the heartbeat to almost
nothing, his dark, sexual desires get the better of him and he
substitutes the new formula for the old. His plan backfires,
however, and his wife really dies; or so we think. The rest of
film deals with Dr. Hichcock’s second wife (Barbara Steele
in one of her best performances) and her gradual discovery of his
horrifying obsession. Mixing elements of Daphne Du Maurier’s
Rebecca with Walt
Disney’s Snow White,
Hichcock may deal with a tasteless subject matter but its
execution (unlike Joe D’Amato;’ Buried
Alive two decades later) is anything but.
This is a classy horror film that is genuinely chilling and
brimming with atmosphere. Not content to simply tell his story
through creative visuals, Freda allows his actors to act. Pay
close attention to actor Robert Flemyng in the scene where he is
driven to visit the body of a young, dead female only to be
interrupted by one of his colleagues. Also of note, is the scene
in which Steele slowly discovers that she has been locked inside
a casket. Seldom are the actors in Italian horror allowed to
perform so passionately and their characterizations add an
indispensable dimension to the final product. Screenwriter
Gastaldi also had a long career in the genre, having contributed
his first horror screenplay to the forgotten Vampire
and the Ballerina. He went on to script
Mario Bava’s What!,
AKA The Whip and the Body
(1963) and Paolo Heusch’s Lycanthropus,
AKA Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory
(1962). Freda went on to make a sequel entitled Ghost
(1963). Rather than picking up his story where it left off, Ghost
seems to give us an alternate reality in
which Dr. Hichcock is the victim and his wife, the conniving
villain. Parallels are drawn between the syringes in the previous
film and the injections Dr. Hichcock must receive in the sequel
in order to keep him alive; injections that his wife and lover
are using to slowly poison him. The story progresses in this
manner until the surprisingly violent conclusion when the evil
from the first film manifests itself in all its glory.
Castle
of Blood (1964): Although less revered than
Freda and Bava, director Antonio Margheriti contributed a handful
of outstanding films to the genre. Castle of
Blood is his first, and arguably best,
horror film. George Riviere plays a young writer named Foster who
tracks down Edgar Allen Poe in a tavern. After making a wager
with Poe’s friends that he can spend the night in a local
haunted castle, Foster sets off into the night, eager to prove
the non-existence
of ghosts and collect his reward.
Once he arrives at the castle, however, he is treated to haunting
visions of the Blackwood family; a family torn apart by lusts
that eventually led to their brutal murders. Along the way, he is
romanced and falls in love with the ghost of the beautiful
Elizabeth Blackwood, played (surprise!) by Barbara Steele. As the
evening wears on, the house begins teeming with life and Foster
begins to realize that the Blackwood family seems to have a
sinister plan in store for him. His only salvation may be
Elizabeth, who appears to have fallen in love with him as well.
Margheriti utilizes black and white photography and the
claustrophobic confines of the castle to great advantage. Though
the film’s pace may lag a bit during it’s final third,
the climax is appropriately chilling and the final moments,
unpredictably shocking. Margheriti also distinguishes himself
from his peers by giving his film a more savage, adult edge than
most filmgoers were used to seeing at the time. There are
explicit references to lesbianism (made less explicit in the
censored American version) and a scene involving the decapitation
of a live snake that looks distressingly real, anticipating the
animal slaughter footage utilized years later in Ruggero
Deodato’s cannibal films (see part three). Margheriti went
on to make several more films in the gothic horror tradition. The
Virgin of Nueremburg (1964) and The
Long Hair of Death (1964) are outstanding
additions to the genre. His remake of Castle
of Blood in 1971 entitled Web
of the Spider was a disappointment, however.
Though the film boasted a more explicit tone and a compelling
performance from Klaus Kinski as Edgar Allen Poe, the remake
failed to capture the excitement of the original.
Kill, Baby, Kill (1966): Following the release of Mask of Satan, Mario Bava continued to grow as a filmmaker and artist. Many film journalists have maintained that Bava never made another film as good as Mask of Satan; a charge often leveled at Orson Welles and his first film, Citizen Kane. As with Welles, however, this point of view is an irresponsible one as it discourages an examination of Bava's later work, which not only expanded and influenced the horror genre, but the crime, science-fiction and western genres as well. After Mask of Satan, Bava continued to explore horror and the nature of sadism. Far from being mere exploitation, Bava's work began to contain mature psychological underpinnings occasionally mixed with the supernatural. His second film, The Evil Eye (1961), invented the giallo film-genre; a genre brought even more spectacularly to life with his delirious, influential 1964 film Blood and Black Lace (1964) More on these films in part two of this series). Following his anthology film Black Sabbath (1963) and the sadistic ghost story What! AKA The Whip and the Body (1963) Bava created, arguably, the high water mark of genre's golden-age; Kill, Baby, Kill (1968). In the small village of Villa Grapps, a young doctor (Giacommi Rossi-Stuart) and is summoned to investigate a series of brutal murders in which a golden coin is found embedded in the hearts of the victims. His investigation leads him to the ghost of a young girl, killed in a carriage accident years ago during a village festival, who has come back to take revenge on the townspeople who refused to rescue her. Fabienne Dali stars as the woman who implants the coins in the ghost's victims in order to save their souls from being damned. Erika Blanc plays Monica, Rossi-Stuart’s assistant. Kill, Baby, Kill is a veritable catalogue of haunting images. The little, blonde-haired girl with the plain white dress and the bouncing ball is a chilling sight, later used by Frederico Fellini in his "Toby Dammit" segment of the anthology film Spirits of the Dead (1967). The delirious conclusion of the film, in which the protagonist chases a mysterious figure through a series of identical rooms only to discover that he is pursuing himself, was to prove an influence in David Lynch's final episode of Twin Peaks. In addition to the stunning visuals steeped in rich, oppressive earth tones, the film conveys a palpable sense of decay emitting from the small village that has become a virtual prison for it's inhabitants due to the supernatural paranoia running rampant. Not even the final image of hope, our protagonist walking into the sunrise, is able to erase our memory of the previous scenes of torture and the sound of the ghostly child, giggling wildly as she chases her bouncing ball through the night. Erika Blanc, admittedly no Barbara Steele, is nevertheless a striking persona whose presence graced other Italian productions such as The Devil's Nightmare (1971).
It may
sound like the excessive ravings of an enthusiastic fan to label
the five 
films described
above as masterpieces, but this is only partially true. The films
above are the linchpins of the golden age of Italian horror and
their creators were the craftsmen and architects of the genre.
This isn't to say that there aren't films equally as good (Giorgo
Ferroni's Mill of the Stone Women
(1960) comes to mind, as well as the previously mentioned films
starring Barbara Steele) or that the genre didn't produce it's
share of clunkers, but these, at the very least, were ambitious
clunkers. Even the awkward, occasionally dissatisfying films (Bloody
Pit of Horror (1965), The
Embalmer (1965), and Atom
Age Vampire (1960)) are worth viewing for
their sheer audacity and moments of brilliance scattered about
the oddball plot elements and prurient goings-on. Sadly, the
industry wouldn't retain this consistency for much longer. The
cinema's newfound sexual freedom, not to mention the popularity
of certain American horror films, would soon conspire to produce
some of the genre's most audacious successes and embarrassing
failures.
To be continued…
Well done, Dave! We'll all be "lurking" for the second installment of the history of Italian horror films. Until then, why not sample a few of the films mentioned above? You'll find a fright film feast awaits you.
Article copyright by David White. Most Barbara Steele posters taken from the "Silent Scream" website. Used with permission.
