Good morning 🐣

Not to scare you too much, but we’re somehow already midway through October 😱 so you should absolutely be knee-deep in spooky festivities. If you’re looking for some solid horror recommendations to add to your queue, check out Variety’s 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time.

As they explain:

If cinema is like dreaming with our eyes open, then horror movies could rightly be viewed as waking nightmares: an opportunity to confront our unconscious fears directly — most often as entertainment, but sometimes with the express purpose of terrifying ourselves.

Variety’s list touches on classics from the 1920s up to today.

A brief intermission 🍿

Faces growing out the back of your neck, brains floating out of your mouth, liminal spaces, dreamlike logic, creepy crawlies — it’s Halloween, baby!

Adult Swim has a series of three animated shorts by Rodrigo Goulão de Sousa collectively titled Uncanny Alley (each roughly two minutes):

• The Screening
• The Night Shift
• The Roommate

The filmmaker explains his technique and thought process behind the films to Ellis Tree at It’s Nice That:

The idea was to take regular situations, or familiar places and add progressive layers of weirdness until the final shot. There is a sense of dread and hopelessness to each episode as we know there is some sort of machination in motion that cannot be stopped.

Now watch this 👀

If you saw this year’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (which is an absolute blast), then you’ll certainly remember a black-and-white scene narrated in Italian with English subtitles that may have left you wondering what the hell that was all about. It wasn’t just some random absurdity; it was also director Tim Burton’s tribute to Italian director Mario Bava.

As Martyn Conterio explains for the British Film Institute:

Mario Bava took a vital role in the creation of the modern horror film. If there was to be a Mount Rushmore-style monument dedicated to four directors whose work pioneered a new form of big screen chills and thrills, those giant faces etched in granite on the mountainside would be: Bava, Alfred Hitchcock, Georges Franju and Michael Powell.

And so our tour through four distinct eras of horror and the legacies they’ve left behind continues, so far having traveled back:

• 25 years ago: The Blair Witch Project
• 50 years ago: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Now we plumb even further back to 1964, a full 60 years of colorful mayhem, paranoia, and style.

The Criterion Channel, which has an abso-ghouly spooktacular lineup of horror films this month, is also showcasing the notorious sub-genre of giallo — “the luridly stylized genre of mystery-thrillers that emanated from Italy in the 1960s and ’70s” — and Bava was one of its forefathers.

Bava didn’t start directing until over 20 years into his filmmaking career and Blood and Black Lace (originally titled Sei donne per l'assassino or “Six Women for the Murderer”) was his eighth film. It follows a simple plot about models being murdered in a fashion house, sometimes ignoring perfect logic or even remotely profound dialogue. Though it didn’t set the world on fire at the time, it went on to influence the entire Italian film industry and eventually the world — Martin Scorsese and Pedro Almodóvar have both referenced the film in their own works.

It helped birth the giallo genre — “giallo” literally meaning “yellow” but referencing essentially Italian pulp fiction novels. As that implies, giallo is often lurid in all meanings of the word, but also features complex gender politics and often questions authority, especially the church and state, what with Italy having just come out of fascism.

For Criterion, Samm Deighan writes about “The Italian Art of Violence:”

In Blood and Black Lace, the elaborately stylized murders serve as the foundation of the film itself. Here Bava emphasizes style above all else, even plot. But instead of the expressionistic black-and-white cinematography of the earlier Italian gothic-horror films, he embraces a distinctly sixties pop-art sensibility, enhanced by a pulsing, jazzy score from Carlo Rustichelli; surreal, candy-colored lighting; and cinematography from Ubaldo Terzano that heightens the disorientation of both the characters and the viewer through extreme angles, fluid camera movements, and reflection shots, joined together through dissonant editing techniques. This primacy of style is the strongest unifying element of all giallo films, with some of Italy’s greatest cinematographers—including Terzano, Bava himself, Vittorio Storaro, and Luigi Kuveiller—leaving their marks on the genre as decisively as the directors they worked with.

Deighan talks about how giallo films upend audience expectations, even playing with who the killer (or killers) might typically be, something we don’t see again in the horror genre until the ’90s with the Scream series:

This air of paranoia and conspiracy would intensify in unison with Italian cultural and political conflicts. The giallo boom of the early 1970s coincided with the onset of the Years of Lead, a roughly two-decade period of political violence marked by explosive battles between right- and left-wing factions, including kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations. Director Lucio Fulci, who helmed some of the most confrontational gialli, claimed that “violence is Italian art,” but throughout the seventies, violence was also a condition of daily life in Italy. The filmmakers who followed Bava’s example refined his approach to murder as spectacle, with operatic levels of bloodshed and even some gore. Even if they do not always address daily politics directly, most giallo films share this air of impending violence and palpable paranoia, in which no one can be trusted and—thanks to some of Argento’s innovations—the protagonist-detective cannot even trust their own eyes.

Until next time! 👻