Tag Archives: Italian Horror

“The impulse had become irresistible. There was only one answer to the fury that tortured him. And so he committed his first act of murder. He had broken the most deep-rooted taboo, and found not guilt, not anxiety or fear, ...

To me, Opera (1987) is the last true masterpiece in Dario Argento’s long career filled with cinematic masterpieces. Though he occasionally stumbled, he produced consistently mesmerizing films from his debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), to this film ...

Though I spent the better part of my teen years obsessively tracking down, watching, and re-watching Dario Argento’s giallo films, the third title in his so-called “Animal Trilogy”—including The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) and The Cat o’ Nine ...

I took a few days off from celebrating Gialloween for an ill-timed work trip, but since I can’t ever really get giallo films off the brain, staying in a hotel inevitably made me think of the grim, slimy, and little ...

Listen. I don’t know if you’re ready for this, but Alberto De Martino’s L’assassino… è al telefono aka The Killer is on the Phone (1972) is one of the single most batshit giallo films in the history of the genre. ...

In Luigi Cozzi’s The Killer Must Kill Again (1975) aka L’assassino è costretto ad uccidere ancora, Giorgio (George Hilton) and his wife Nora (Tere Velazquez) don’t get along. Giorgio is more interested in his mistress, but he’s utterly dependant on ...

While I love the early days of the genre, I find myself perhaps most excited by the later years of giallo films, after the boom from 1971-1975 had passed. These later films fascinate me, not in terms of how they ...

Mario Landi’s long unavailable Giallo a Venezia (1979) is a truly nasty piece of work, so it won’t surprise anyone who knows of my endless love for Fulci’s New York Ripper (1982) that this puts a similar sort of twinkle ...

One of Italian cult cinema’s most prolific directors, the wonderful Umberto Lenzi dabbled in many horror and exploitation genres, and is generally remembered for gory cannibal films like Eaten Alive! (1980) and Cannibal Ferox (1981), or poliziotteschi classics like Almost ...

While mid-20th century Italian horror cinema is linked most commonly to figures like Mario Bava and Riccardo Freda, Paolo Heusch’s Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory (1961) – aka Lycanthropus – is a significant yet commonly overlooked entry in both Italian ...