‘The Only Monsters here are the Filmmakers’: Animal cruelty and death in Italian Cannibal Films

Many contemporary horror filmmakers pride themselves on violating taboos in their films, especially taboos concerning violence. However, there is a line that even many of the most hardened filmmakers refuse to cross: violence against animals. In fact, some horror filmmakers have spoken out against animal abuse. For instance, heavy metal musician-turned-horror filmmaker Rob Zombie… teamed up with the organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 2007 to record a message for their ‘Thanksgiving Hotline’, a ‘compassionate alternative’ to the Butterball Turkey Talk Line that offers tips on turkey preparation. Zombie is a self-described ‘ethical vegetarian’ and as such his contribution details the cruelty and mistreatment to which turkeys are subjected in Butterball’s factory farms (PETA, 2007). In 2009 another horror filmmaker, Eli Roth, director of the Hostel films (2006–7), appeared in a promotional spot for PETA.

The Giallo/Slasher Landscape: Ecologia Del Delitto, Friday The 13Th And Subtractive Spectatorship

How Italian is the American slasher film? How American is the Italian giallo film? I begin with these questions not because they have never been asked, but because the answers that are usually offered have not encouraged us to take the relationship between these two important horror film sub-genres as seriously as we should. By examining a seminal Italian giallo, Mario Bava’s Ecologia del delitto/The Ecology of Murder (1971, also known as Antefatto, Reazione a catena, A Bay of Blood, Carnage, Last House – Part II and Twitch of the Death Nerve) alongside a phenomenally popular American slasher film that bears an uncanny resemblance to it, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980), I will argue that we have more to learn about these well-known sub-genres than we might have imagined. More specifically, the centrality of natural landscape to both films suggests that the giallo and the slasher film can cross-pollinate to enable what I will call a ‘subtractive spectatorship’ that challenges some of our conventional assumptions about what watching graphic horror is all about.

The Horror of Progressive rock: Goblin and Horror Soundtracks

Audio is perhaps the most vital component in the construction of horror films; from the child’s lullaby in Profondo rosso/Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975), Bernard Herrmann’s use of stingers in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), to the musique concrète of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), the canon of great horror films are inextricably tied and indebted to their soundtracks. And yet despite the importance of this audio-visual synchronicity, Italian horror soundtracks in particular have endured not only as part of the films they were made to complement, but also independently of them. With Goblin embarking on their first US tour as a band as late as 2013, to being sampled by contemporary electronic and hip hop acts such as Justice and Madlib, the work of Goblin and other composers such as Fabio Frizzi has received a continued level of interest both with and without the context of their accompanying images.

Political Memory in The Italian Hinterland: Locating The ‘Rural Giallo’

This chapter aims to locate a sub-set of what has become known as the ‘giallo’ filone within its historical contexts, and to ask what significance this relationship might hold for the broader study of Italy’s cultural history. Such an undertaking immediately poses methodological questions: what are we looking for when we seek to identify ‘history’ in such popular cinema; by what models can we best pursue a ‘historical’ approach to an amorphous, frequently unruly cinematic format like the Italian filone? Certainly, such films can offer insights into how discourses about the past have been represented and consumed within particular registers of historical address.

Domestic Films Made for Export: Modes of Production of the 1960S Italian Horror Film

Along with the Italian Western, but with an arguably more lasting effect, Italian horror cinema of the 1960s has contributed significantly to the branding of European genre cinema for an international audience. As with Italian cinema a decade earlier, the success of Italian horror film was due at the same time to its compatibility with other, foreign genre products – they could fit in a double bill with an American International Pictures release, for instance – and their perceived ‘otherness’ in respect of the Hollywood standards. In fact, because of their graphic violence, eroticism and visual flair, these films soon gained a cult following outside of Italy, and especially throughout the 1970s with the increasing international success of Italian giallo and with the emergence of horror cult directors like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci.

Kings of Terror, Geniuses of Crime: Giallo Cinema and Fumetti Neri

Any attempt to nominate this or that film as the ‘first’ giallo has to negotiate the question of which version of this notoriously slippery term is being used – the giallo in its more inclusive Italian sense, ‘a metonym for the entire mystery genre’ (Koven, 2006: 2), or as a more particular B-movie filone that surfaced intermittently in the 1960s, blossomed more fully in the early to mid-1970s and has continued to appear sporadically, particularly in the films of Dario Argento.1 Either way, Mario Bava’s La ragazza che sapeva troppo/The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Italy, 1962; refashioned as The Evil Eye, 1964) and particularly Sei donne per l’assassino/Blood and Black Lace (a co-production involving Italy/West Germany/France, 1964) are often accorded seminal status in teleological accounts of the giallo as a cinematic cycle. Both have at various times had the distinction of being identified as the first ‘proper’ giallo; the former with its tourist-eyewitness heroine and the latter with its bodycount narrative, eroticised violence and overheated visual stylisation.

The Argento Syndrome: Aesthetics of Horror

The Argento Syndrome is my term for discussing filmmaker Dario Argento’s consistent, even obsessive, explorations on film of the nature and effects of creating and viewing violence. Argento’s films are an unrelenting investigation of the cinematic uses of memory, trauma and distorted vision, and the cinematic body as threatened site of attack, mutilation and death. The films are symptomatic of a politics and aesthetics that invoke the powers of internalised and externalised forms of horror, particularly tied to the twentieth century and to the uses of media technology, including computer-generated effects. In their blurring of fact and fantasy, challenges to representation, hallucinatory quality and particular strategies to incorporate the viewer into their images, they address a world where the real and illusory have lost their clarity and where art is as dangerous as life. Argento is a filmmaker whose cinematic work is very self-conscious of the uses of horror ‘as a meditation on the aesthetics of filmmaking itself’ (Schneider, 2007: 60).

Bavaesque: The Making of Mario Bava as Italian Horror Auteur

In 2007 the writer/critic Tim Lucas published Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark. This massive tome, glossily produced, extensively illustrated, and over 1,100 pages long, has since been described, with some justification, as ‘one of the most impressive books ever to have been written about any director’ (Williams, 2011: 162). The end result of over thirty years’ research, Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark has served to underline, reinforce and possibly clinch once and for all Mario Bava’s status as a major figure not merely in Italian horror cinema but in world horror as well. However, such status has been bestowed entirely retrospectively, for during his directorial career – which ran from 1960 through to the mid-1970s – Bava, while a respected figure in the Italian film industry, received little critical attention and was not generally known to the film-going public, either in his native Italy or elsewhere.

Scrap Metal, Stains, Clogged Drains: Argento’s Refuse and its Refusals

It is a cliché to title a critical account of horror with a list of things.1 Things such as those that precede the colon in my title announce the uncanny role given to them and the expressive hyperbole granted objects by horror diegesis. What I find interesting about this titular evocation of horror’s things is that the books and essays they announce rarely address these objects themselves. Instead, horror’s things are pretexts for a discussion of the unique affective registers of horror or its exuberant corporeality. This essay will attempt to account for things in the giallo and horror films made by Dario Argento during the first decade of his directorial career, widely regarded as his canonical period. In what follows, I largely bracket the infamously wasted bodies of those iconic films in order to allow the matter that populates Argento’s mise-en-scène to come to the fore.

Introduction

When the esteemed English actor David Hemmings passed away at the end of 2003 his obituary quickly appeared in numerous newspapers. Naturally his long and varied career was widely celebrated. Few newspapers, however, gave much attention to his starring role in Italian horror film director Dario Argento’s ...