Welcome to the first installment of GOTH RENAISSANCE: A Critical Introduction to Italian Gothic Horror.
The series will run biweekly for a total of five installments. For a full watchlist of the films covered, see the series announcement page.
In this first installment, I discuss the context in which Italian gothic horror emerged, including the unique conditions of the Italian film industry, as well as the evolution of horror movies internationally since the silent era. With that foundation, I discuss in detail three of the earliest and most important examples of the genre.
Read together, we’ll see how these first Italian gothics set the stage not only for the gothic horror craze of the 1960s, but also for the thing that horror movies would become from the 1970s forward: an exploitation film genre centered around graphic sex and violence.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction and context
5:49 - I Vampiri aka Lust of the Vampire (dir. Ricardo Freda, 1957)
11:40 - The Vampire and the Ballerina (dir. Renato Polselli, 1960)
15:58 - Mill of the Stone Women (dir. Giorgio Ferroni, 1960)
21:05 - Concluding observations: commonalities, themes, and key characteristics
24:35 - Up next
Finally, I must acknowledge that in creating this series, I stand on the shoulders of giants. More than anyone, I am indebted to the work of Tim Lucas, whose magisterial tome Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark furnished me with not only endless factual information and technical observations, but also a tremendous amount of inspiration. Nobody has done more to give this genre its due. I also relied heavily on Roberto Curti’s Italian Gothic Horror Films (1957-1969) for its comprehensive coverage of this moment in horror history, as well as Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s textbook Film History: An Introduction (3rd Ed.) for crucial background on Italian film history in general.
On the off-chance that any of these scholars happen across this page, please know that this series is dedicated to you.
Note: Subtitles are auto-generated and may have inaccuracies.
The Early Italian Gothics