by Gary Johnson
The Italian gothic horror cinema of the '60s was hypnotically beautiful. Luminous fogs rolled through graveyards. Elegant tracking shots pulled us down musty subterranean passages. Crypt doors exploded and witches were burned at the stake while they swore vengeance. With a rich, baroque visual style that recalled silent cinema,
Italian gothic horror spoke of repressed desires and ominous dark powers that lurked in the shadows.
Join us in the following group of articles as we examine the films and filmmakers that made Italian gothic horror one of the most exciting forms of horror cinema.
Introduction
Secluded castles with musty hallways, rolling fog, tree branches that reach like hands, stranded travelers, duplicitous lovers who conspire to murder, secret passageways that descend to deteriorating crypts--this is the stuff of Italian gothic horror, one of the most exciting and atmospheric sub-genres of film.
The golden-age of Italian horror began in 1957 with Riccardo Freda's I Vampiri (American title:
The Devil's Commandment). This marvelously photographed tale of rejuvenation by blood transfusions took its story from the legend of Elizabeth Bathory, who as legend has it, preserved her beauty by bathing in the blood of virgins. Most significantly, however, I Vampiri was the first movie to give us the monsterwoman character, a frequently reoccurring (and crucial) ingredient of the Italian horror cinema--borne of the culture's paradoxical attitude toward female sexuality, which combined equal parts of love and fear.
After a world-wide lull in horror filmmaking since the mid-forties, I
Vampiri signaled the approach of a new storm of horror filmmaking that would even surpass the days of Frankenstein and
Dracula at Universal in the 1930s.

But the immediate impact of I Vampiri remained relatively insignificant. As much as the movie is respected and considered one of the classics of Italian horror cinema, few Italian horror movies immediately followed in its wake. In a parallel development in England, Hammer
Studios was busy with their own interpretation of a different legend--a remake of Frankenstein, starring Peter Cushing as the doctor and Christopher Lee as the creature. The immediate success of the Hammer productions of The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula (American title:
Horror of Dracula) signaled to filmmakers around the world the power of the old iconic monsters of Universal's reign--especially in full color versions with increased gore.
While filmmakers in Mexico
(where Fernando Mendez made
The Vampire in 1957) and
France (where Georges Franju made Eyes Without a Face in
1959) began weaving their horrific tales, Italian filmmakers responded with a flurry of activity. From
1960 through 1966, Italy would create some of the finest, most atmospheric horror films ever made.
Barbara Steele as the witch Asa in Black
Sunday.
After photographing Freda's I Vampiri and Caltiki, The
Immortal Monster (an atypical Freda movie that features an amorphous creature not unlike the title creature from
The Blob), Mario Bava turned to directing. He had previously directed several scenes in both I Vampiri and
Caltiki after Freda had left the sets during disagreements with the producers. Bava specifically responded to Hammer's Dracula: "As Dracula had just been released, I thought I would make a horror movie myself."
His first movie, Black Sunday (Italian title: La Maschera del Demonio, "The Mask of the Demon") is quite simply a masterpiece of gothic horror, a film arguably the equal of any horror film ever made. With magnificent set designs that evoke a treacherous world of deep black shadows (akin to the American film noir) and prowling cameras that pull us into the world of deteriorating crypts and musty castle passageways, Black Sunday creates a world of foreboding imagery, a world of near
Lovecraftian implications, as the forces of evil are constantly in danger of emerging from the shadows and squeezing life from the living.

Black Sunday would also introduce us to one of the crucial icons of Italian horror: the face of Barbara
Steele. Without Barbara Steele, Italian horror might have been very different. Her face, however, captured simultaneously beautiful and demonic features--instantly suggesting a dual and possibly dangerous power of character. With her sharp nose, Joan Crawford-style eyebrows, angular jaw and large eyes, shadows became accentuated on her face. Compare her, for example, with
Daliah Lavi in Bava's What (Italian title: La Frusta e il
Corpo, "The Whip and the Body"). Lavi's face was filled with soft curves and gentle arches. Her sensual face didn't suggest the wicked duality of Steele. While Lavi's performance in What is one of the finest performances in the golden-age of Italian horror (her eyes, in particular, are marvelously expressive), she didn't possess the iconic features of Steele, who instantly suggested a gentle child-like visage and a perverse, twisted countenance. It's no wonder that Steele would star in many of the greatest movies from this period of
Italian filmmaking. A list of her movies is very nearly a list of the greatest Italian gothic movies, including in addition to the aforementioned Black Sunday, Freda's The
Horrible Dr. Hichcock and The Ghost, Antonio Margheriti's
Castle of Blood and The Long Hair of Death, and Mario
Caiano's Nightmare Castle.
Barbara Steele becomes trapped in a coffin in
The Horrible Dr. Hichcock.
Freda's The Horrible Dr. Hichcock does not make use of the duality that her face implies; instead, it gives us
Steele as a victim. Yet, the movie is one of the great
Italian horror movies. Steele plays the new wife of Dr.
Hichcock (British actor Robert Flemyng)--a doctor who

injects his lovers with a drug that approximates death.
In fact his first wife died (?) during one of their love making sessions due to an overdose of the drug. As Freda preferred, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock contains no monsters: "The most terrifying monster is the neighbor who cuts his wife's throat," he said. He preferred psychological horror, where forbidden passions could enslave and destroy men who otherwise were well-respected within their communities.
Unlike Freda, however, both Bava and Margheriti reveled in the fantastic. Bava gave us vampires in "The Wurdalak" episode of Black Sabbath (Italian title: I tre volti della paura, "The Three Faces of Fear"), alien creatures in Planet of the Vampires (Italian title: Terrore nello spazio, "Terror in Space"), and ghosts in Kill, Baby,
Kill (Italian title: Operazione paura, "Operation Fear"), and Margheriti gave us a meteor on a collision course with earth in Battle of the Worlds, vampiric ghosts in
Castle of Blood (Italian title: Danza Macabra), and vengeful witches in The Long Hair of Death (Italian title: I lunghi capelli della morte).
Wolfgang Preiss as the Professor in
Mill of the Stone Women.
Many other Italian directors were pulled to gothic horror in the '60s and many other interesting, atmospheric movies resulted. Giorgio Ferroni gave us one of the most underrated movies of this period, The Mill of the Stone
Women (Italian title: Il mulino delle donne di pietra).

This movie took place in one of the most imaginative and evocative settings of any Italian gothic movie--an old mill with slowly moving wind vanes. The mill functioned like a huge music box and statues of beautiful young women decorated its walls. As the movie progresses, we find out the statues are actually the plaster-covered bodies of murder victims. In addition, Mario Caiano gave us a fetishistic ode to Barbara Steele in Nightmare
Castle. And Luciano Ricci (with uncredited direction from young British director Michael Reeves) gave us Castle of the Living Dead, starring Christopher Lee
Many of the films from the golden-age of Italian horror were never particularly successful in Italy. But elsewhere in the world, these films found an enthralled audience. Many Italian filmmakers and actors even hid their identities with English-sounding names. Riccardo
Freda became Robert Hampton. Antonio Margheriti became
Anthony Dawson, and Mario Bava became John M. Old.
In contrast to the beautiful films of Bava, Freda, and
Margheriti, a cruder horror tradition simultaneously existed in Italy. It was embodied in movies such as The
Vampire and the Ballerina (Italian title: L'Amante del
Vampiro, "The Vampire's Lover"), The Playgirls and the
Vampire (Italian title: L'ultima preda del vampiro, "The
Last Victim of the Vampire"), and Atom Age Vampire
(Italian title: Seddok, l'erede di Satana). These movies contained little of the complexities of Freda, Bava, and
Margheriti. A typical scene from The Playgirls and the
Vampire shows a group of strippers practicing their craft while stranded in the castle of a vampire. But even silly movies such as these are frequently filled with such bizarre images that they take on a surrealistic atmosphere. As a result, even with the ludicrous situations, these movies can be fascinating viewing--especially for those people with a taste for "camp."
(Significantly, courtesy of dubbing, the American version also turned the strippers of The Playgirls and the Vampire into ballerinas!)

Maria Giovanni gets staked in
The Vampire and the
Playgirls.
By the late '60s, however, Italian gothic horror desperately needed some new blood. Many of the situations had long become clich � . All too frequently travelers became stranded at isolated castles. All too frequently duplicitous lovers plotted murder against a wealthy husband. And all too often mad doctors searched for blood in order to restore a dead wife or daughter.
As the political climate in Italy changed in the late
'60s, filmmakers found greater freedom and less censorship. As a result, filmmakers focused more upon blood and gore and less upon atmosphere. The gothic horror movie started to disappear, dwindling to a trickle in the '70s. In their place, a new tradition developed, embodied by masked killers and overworked detectives.
Dario Argento showed a path to the future with his giallo-thriller The Bird with Crystal Plumage, and many other mysteriously-titled movies followed in its wake, such as Lucio Fulci's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin. Even
Riccardo Freda succumbed to the changing tastes and created his own murder mystery, The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire, as did
Mario Bava with Five Dolls for an
August Moon and Ecology of a
Crime. (The grisly murders in the latter film would be closely imitated in Friday the 13th.)
As the decade wore on, masked murderers turned into zombies and cannibals in films such as Lucio
Fulci's Zombi 2 and Ruggero
Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, while Mario Bava's son, Lamberto, contributed his own charnel house of horror, Demons in 1980.
By this time, gothic horror cinema, as it existed in the early
'60s, was long gone. Whereas some genres thrive on the familiarity

of their plots and their character types (as in the
Western, for example), horror relies on surprises, and over familiarity tends to crush the thrills. But thanks to home video, most of these movies are now available again. Unfortunately, most of the prints are in sad condition, making watching these films a test of faith.
Italian poster artwork for What
For example, I can only trust Phil Hardy's observations in The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies when he claims that
Nevenka (Daliah Lavi) is the mistress of her husband's father in Mario Bava's What. This part of the story is completely absent from the American print of the movie, and without this information, the father's death makes little sense. But when we see that the same knife was used to kill Nevenka's two lovers--as well as herself-the story gains an extra resonance and purpose. (Many TV prints are also missing all of the movie's sadomasochistic whipping scenes, which has the effect of rendering the movie completely incomprehensible.) That's part of the frustration and the attraction of Italian cinema as you can always wonder if a specific movie might suddenly make complete sense if a certain deleted sequence or mistranslated piece of dialog were restored.
But the faith is really in the images themselves--as in
Black Sunday when a crypt explodes to reveal the heaving body of the revived witch Asa, quickly coming back to life; as in The Horrible Dr. Hichcock when we see the distorted mask of Dr. Hichcock as he descends on his helpless wife Cynthia; as in Castle of Blood when we see the tangle of bloodied bodies around the bed of
Elizabeth. These magnificent images--some of the most powerful images in the history of horror cinema--are enough to give their fans a religious-like faith in the genre. http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue05/infocus.htm
Also, see the site for articles on the following:
Mario Bava
Alain Silver and James Ursini examine the artistry of
Mario Bava. [Plus, see animated GIFs of scenes from Black
Sunday, What, and Hercules in the Haunted World]

Rabid Dogs: The Ironic Eye of Mario Bava
Tim Lucas examines a previously unreleased movie by Mario
Bava, Rabid Dogs--now available on DVD. In addition, Mr.
Lucas looks at death and irony in the career of Mario
Bava. NEW!
The Horrible Dr. Hichcock
(Riccardo Freda, 1962)
Glenn Erickson considers the sexual politics of Riccardo
Freda's hymn to necrophilia. [Plus, see an animated GIF from The Horrible Dr. Hichcock.]
The Devil's Commandment
(Riccardo Freda, 1957)
Italian horror began with this classic by director
Riccardo Freda. Article by Gary Johnson NEW!
Castle of Blood
(Antonio Margheriti, 1962)
The dead must relive their last hour in Antonio
Margheriti's Castle of Blood. Article by Gary Johnson.
Nightmare Castle
(Mario Caiano, 1965)
Barbara Steele stars in a double role in Mario Caiano's
Nightmare Castle. Article by Chris Fujiwara.
The Bloody Pit of Horror
(Massimo Pupillo, 1965)
Mickey Hargitay stars as the Crimson Executioner in this sadistic ode to torture. NEW!
Italian Horror of the Seventies
Robert Firsching examines Italian horror of the seventies and discusses Deep Red, Twitch of the Death Nerve,
Zombie, and several others.
Suspiria
(Dario Argento, 1976)
Robert Firsching examines Dario Argento's masterpiece of horror.
Italian horror Web links
You want more information about Italian horror? Here are the places to go on the Web.