The gothic mode in Italian horror was effectively launched, and reached its early apotheosis, with the release of Mario Bava’s Black Sunday in 1960. An ensuing tidal wave of likeminded films flooded the market throughout the ’60s, before starting to dry up in the early ’70s, as the more modernist-inclined (and frequently more graphic) giallo came into prominence. Now Severin Films has gathered together four vintage examples of the Italian gothic trend in their new box set Danza Macabra Volume One. When it comes to sex and violence, those two requisite mainstays of the genre, the films run the gamut from almost timidly titillating to unabashedly lurid.
Renato Polselli’s The Monster of the Opera, from 1964, opens with arguably its strongest set piece, which is revealed to have been a dream sequence. This allows Polselli to openly embrace a surrealist aesthetic through oneiric slow motion, tilted cameras, disorienting high- and low-angle shots,...
Renato Polselli’s The Monster of the Opera, from 1964, opens with arguably its strongest set piece, which is revealed to have been a dream sequence. This allows Polselli to openly embrace a surrealist aesthetic through oneiric slow motion, tilted cameras, disorienting high- and low-angle shots,...
- 5/16/2023
- by Budd Wilkins
- Slant Magazine
The poster art for this 1973 Spanish horror yarn, reproduced on the cover of Troma’s new DVD, shows Gothic zombies, underground tombs, stitched-up corpses and buxom females—all depicted in that hand-sketched, morbidly colored, pulpy style that hoped to draw in an audience. To top it all off, there’s Last House On The Left-inspired ad copy that reads, “For the Squeamish, Keep Repeating, It Can’T Be True, It Can’T Be True, It Can’T Be True…” Ah, if only such motion pictures themselves were as good as their advertisements, but The Hanging Woman (a.k.a. La Orgia De Los Muertos, Return Of The Zombies and Beyond The Living Dead) is a fairly slow-going affair.
The narrative follows the structure of a murder mystery, with aloof, secretive townspeople in a 19th-century Scottish village getting picked off one by one by unseen, growling, shadowy figures—though admittedly,...
The narrative follows the structure of a murder mystery, with aloof, secretive townspeople in a 19th-century Scottish village getting picked off one by one by unseen, growling, shadowy figures—though admittedly,...
- 10/5/2009
- by no-reply@fangoria.com (Jeremiah Kipp)
- Fangoria
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