Italian Horror Cinema and Italian Film Journals of the 1970s

This chapter will focus 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 in general has been subject to 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. Given the entire history of Italian horror, the decision to focus on the 1970s is not casual and merits some preliminary contextualisation. 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’.