Italian horror cinema and Italian film journals of the 1970s

This chapter focuses on the domestic reception of Italian horror cinema in journals and magazines during the 1970s in order to begin a process of understanding the ways in which the genre was valued, discussed and (less commonly) analysed by Italian critics of the period. Although Italian horror benefited of a considerable amount of scholarship, in fact, little has been written (in English, but also in Italian) about the criticism it aroused, and the way it was used by Italian critics to deal with genres and popular cinema. Compared with the previous decade, which witnessed the blossoming of Bava, Ferroni, Freda and Margheriti’s gothic genre, and the subsequent one, which accompanied the work of Dario Argento as a director and a producer of both his and others' films, the brief but intense season of the cannibal movie and the exploitation films of directors like Fulci, Massaccesi and Lenzi, the 1970s were relatively ‘empty’. Most notably, there were a handful of titles that attempted to emanate the success of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), the release of an Argento film (Suspiria, 1977) and the production of another (Inferno, 1980), and little more. Nevertheless, if we consider the period in the light of the developments in Italian criticism at the time, the situation changes radically and in fact the 1970s fast become a crucial case study: it permits us to evaluate how horror as a genre is framed within the conceptual and ideological frameworks of criticism at that time, and moreover the ways in which discussion of horror impacts on the birth of a critical and academic tradition.