Vampires in Italian Cinema, 1956-1975

The book takes as its subject a corpus of thirty-three vampire movies made, distributed and exhibited during the peak years of film production in Italy, and certified to be of Italian nationality by state institutions such as the Italian Show Business Bureau and the Italian Film Censorship Office. Positioning itself at the intersection of Italian film history, horror studies and cultural studies, the book asks: why, and how, is the protean, transnational and transmedial figure of the vampire appropriated by Italian cinema practitioners between 1956 and 1975? Or, more concisely, what do the vampires of post-war Italian cinema mean? The aim is to show that – in spite of Italian vampire cinema’s imported and derivative nature, and its great reliance on profits coming from distribution on the international market – Italian cinematic vampires reflect their national zeitgeist from the economic miracle of the late 1950s to the mid-1970s austerity, twenty years of large political and socio-economic change in which gender politics were also in relative flux. The result of an original research into film production data, film censorship files, screenplays, trade papers, film magazines and vampire-themed paraliterature, the book leaves the well-trod track of award-winning art films to shed light on some of the so-called ‘lower forms’ of cinematic culture, looking for the economic backbone and cultural instrumentality of post-war Italian cinema in the run-of-the-mill genre movies rushed through a cheap production and into domestic and international distribution to parasitically (vampirically?) exploit a given commercially successful film.