“I began to realize that it was not a Western, in a way – that it was an Italian film: that it was more in the Italian theatrical tradition, which is opera.” – Scorsese on Leone, from Christopher Frayling’s Once Upon A Time In Italy
It’s unbelievable to me how many Italian films of the 60s and 70s I’ve watched recently, from zombies to gialli to westerns, and the entire time I’ve found myself questioning what it is that’s pulled me in. I began watching these films in the first place based upon recommendations from more learned film aficionados, but in the beginning I had a hard time getting through them. They weren’t constructed in a way that my North American tastes were accustomed to. Over time I was able to adapt to this kind of filmmaking, slowly letting it seep into my subconscious, much like my introduction to films from the East a few years ago. Possibly the most important breakthrough for me was in reading quotes like the one above. Instead of trying to force my cultural sensibilities upon Italian cinema, I relaxed and allowed myself to just take them as they were, and get what I could from them in the meantime.
A great deal of Italian horror cinema of that period seems to rely more on style then substance, which makes a certain amount of sense if you consider that the power of both horror and film can often diminished when put in service to narrative. In fact, like opera, their greatest strength is in conveying emotion. Argento is the most obvious suspect here and is the one director in particular who has come under the most fire for creating films which make little sense structurally. Hell, he’s even made two films devoted to the opera.
This all leads to the reason why I’ve decided to write these thoughts down; Sean T. Collins’ negative review of Zombie 2. As he points out, much of Fulci’s world makes little sense. But it’s precisely that shifting, nightmare world that gives the horror in his films their strength. It’s a vision concerned less with empathizing with the characters or creating a plausible storyline then making the viewer very uncomfortable. This isn’t just the ascendancy of emotion over logic, but the absolute eradication of reason altogether, a terrifying concept in itself. From a purely intellectual viewpoint, Collins could find very little to recommend Zombie 2. But like take-out eaten right before bedtime, the film turned in his stomach and gave him some fairly nasty nightmares, and that ability to terrify on a subconscious level is precisely why so many have turned to Argento, Fulci and his contemporaries.
