A Poetics of Terror in Italian Dream-Horror
Italian horror was once a gateway to cinematic nightmares at once disjointed and gorgeous
Truth is scarier than fiction. Some of the best horror movies are the ones take the viewers’ fears and simply plaster them onscreen verbatim. The Exorcist exploits religious fears by asserting that demons are real and all around us, Halloween deals in fears of darkness lurking beneath suburbia by retelling the “babysitter and the killer upstairs” urban legend, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre exploits urban anxieties about rural, backwoods America by featuring, you guessed it, rural, backwoods psychos killing off city folk one-by-one. There’s something to be said, however, for scary movies that don’t limit themselves to realism. Italian horror, at least during its best years, existed as a confounding parallel to that of the rest of the world, light on story but high on gore and fantasy. Compare Rosemary’s Baby to Suspiria, easily the two greatest horror films ever made about big-city witches tormenting young women, and the differences become apparent. The former is scary because it confronts very real anxieties about a woman’s right to her body, the latter is scary because a girl’s still-beating heart is exposed and stabbed five times before she’s flung through (and hung from) the stained glass ceiling of her ballet academy.
