Italian Cinema

Italian Cinema has been with us since fairly much the beginnings of cinema itself. The first major wave that can be considered a purely Italian one was the neo-realist movement of the 1940s/50s that featured films shot away from studio confines often using non-professional actors. None of this concerns us here but this did bring to attention names like Federico Fellini.

The first major wave of Italian genre films was the Peplum cycle, colloquially known as the Sword and Sandal film, that began with the international success of Hercules (1958). There were numerous Hercules, Samson, Ulysses and Goliath films, as well as the original Italian creation of Maciste, produced throughout the 1960s, all featuring a series of brawny muscle-builders as various mythological heroes in a series of mostly mundane quasi-historical adventures.

The late 1950s gave birth to the Italian horror film, which gained its own identity with Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960), an incredibly moody black-and-white work that spawned its own genre of Gothic films – for which see Continental Gothic. Mario Bava also created the Giallo film that focused on garish colour schemes, sado-sexual elements and extravagant deaths, all wound an improbably contorted psycho-thriller plot.

The 1960s saw Italy spawning a massive industry of exploitation films copying Hollywood models, including the Space Opera and Spy Film. Some of these copies – in particular the Italian Western colloquially called the Spaghetti Western – became their own genre.

The 1970s brought the notorious Italian cannibal film and various other works that sought to push on-screen sadism, torture and dismemberment to perhaps the greatest extreme it has ever been. Many of these works were banned around the world.

The late 1970s brought the occult giallo with Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), which used the same extravagant deaths but with supernatural and occult focuses. The 1990s saw Italy readily copying the success of George Romero’s zombie films in a series of gore-drenched efforts. The same period also saw a number of low-budget copies of Mad Max 2 (1981), along with assorted Action Films.

The Italian exploitation genre largely died away by the mid-1990s. Sporadic genre works have been produced since but nowhere near the prolific output the came out during the heyday between the 1960s-80s.