Guilty
It may be standard practice — the erotic thrill that Italian cinematographers bring to their experiments with light.
Yet the origin story of that light remains cloaked. Why should so many visual throwbacks, indeed an entire corpus of undead iconography, arrive willy-nilly to boggle the Mod eye? Amid Italy’s love affair with Fellini and its own sexy ebullience, an arch Gothic fountainhead rises up; and this otherwise sun-kissed, suggestive peninsula hungers for crooked headstones, images ripped from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari under German light. The question arises, in my own mind, if nowhere else: mightn’t Italian Gothic Horror have originated in guilt?
Was the genre’s unexpected appearance on the screen a belated reaction to Fascism and Mussolini’s infamous Nazi alliance, perhaps?
If so, I take my hat off to Italian narcissism, which apparently processed national shame into a viable export, weird tales twisted like strozzapreti. Or “priest strangler” pasta. It was a sin committed by the impenitent witch in Black Sunday that started me thinking along these lines. And I wonder if Italy was still Catholic enough in 1960 to register the gravest sin of all.
Final Impenitence finds its voice as the heavens crash around her: “Go ahead," she thunders, “tie me down to the stake, but you will never escape my hunger, NOR THAT OF SATAN!”
Italian Gothic Horror remains the ultimate form of imbroglio on celluloid, seeing in its actors mere compositional elements, its genetic heritage reaching back to Romanticism’s monodrama, Schubert’s song cycle Winter Journey, Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. Since Cabiria, Italian films have utilized the camera to explore space, show off the sets, and to bring the environment to dimensional life. In horror cinema, this becomes an atmospheric duty: the prowling lens suggests a roving POV dislocated from anyone onscreen.
I would prefer to speak bluntly, or in oracular terms…
“Italy imports light from Germany.”
“Barbara Steele is Horror’s first female star.”
“The American camera-eye is a stalker; the Italian a bewitched cat that sees all.”
If, in other words, Italian Gothic Horror looks backward, then it’s out of necessity. Italy had not yet confronted the not-so-distant past. If any one example typifies the genre’s complicated view of evil, which wonders aloud about precisely where that evil resides — whether in kangaroo courts, the witches they condemn, or a generally cowed national populace — that film is Black Sunday. Before the opening credits roll, priestly authority figures intone their denunciations of the witch: their patriarchal power seems distinctly unattractive compared to the emotional display from British actress Barbara Steele, who, unlike the rest, is acting like a proper Italian.
It is here that Steele’s years-long sacrifice to poisonous atmosphere begins: a string of motion pictures essentially lock her inside the Gothic toy box where she’s fated to become an object among objects. Her Ferrari-sleek figure finds itself dragooned into solidarity with funeral urns. Symbolism intended as a morbid affront to that willing partner in Fascist crimes: the Vatican.
She will forever remain Italian horror’s Celtic conscience.
A decade or so later, Italy’s collective guilt overshot itself when Dario Argento commenced punishing viewers of every nation. Pulling us all down in scale to a worm’s eye view — macro closeups of tiny details, the minuscule rendered colossal — unblinking eyes, flies, and even maggots squirming in the teeth of a comb. Then he offers us wide shots, from the Baroque piazza to the hyper-modern Milanese apartment building, agoraphobic vistas exhaling menace whether shadowed, luridly gel-lit, or blasted with sunlight.
We are leaping from the Gothic toy box into a brave new world of stainless steel cutlery and candy-colored light — into that thug of a genre, modishly dressed and psychically damaged beyond hope.
The Giallo.
by Daniel Riccuito