Gothic obsession

There’s a topic that is common, transversal, to many of the entries in this 80th Venice Film Festival: it is the Gothic subgenre. It all began with Murnau’s Nosferatu, released in 1922. Ten years later, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dryer made Vampyr, a dark, dreamlike movie inspired by an 1872 story by Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla, and the earlier Dracula by Bram Stoker.
In Italy, many, many horror movies were produced after Mario Bava’s trailblazing Black Sunday (1960), starring the beautiful and mysterious Barbara Stelle, a genre’s icon. Some of these films are real gems, and enjoyed success in France and America, too. In the International Film Critics’ Week programme is The Vurdalak by Adrien Beau, an adaptation of an 1839 novella by Aleksey K. Tolstoy. The novella had already been adapted by Mario Bava in 1963 and Giorgio Ferroni in 1972.
In the Main Competition at Venezia80, we will see Poor Things by Yorgos Lanthimos, based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, itself a modern re-reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The latter, Gothic novel par excellence, made its way to cinema earlier than sound did. Later, in 1931 and 1935, Boris Karloff starred as the creature. The latter film, The Bride of Frankenstein, is possibly even more visionary than the former. Die Theorie von Allem by Timm Kröger, set in the Swiss Alps, also has Gothic undertones. Pablo Larraín’s latest film, El Conde, sees Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a hundred-year-old vampire. More vampires in the Venice Days programme, with Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person by Ariane Louis-Seize, starring a guilt-ridden she-vampire that would rather starve herself to death than kill someone else. She’ll find a balance in looking for someone who was willing to off himself anyway.