We can find, in Pupi Avati’s cinema, a line of demarcation, a wall, made of titles that are frankly horror films. His first feature, Blood Relations of 1968, had a grotesque air already, but little horror per se, and the same is true for his second film, Thomas and the Bewitched of 1970. It is with The House with Laughing Windows (1976) that Avati invents a sub-genre that is all his own, one that finds Gothic in lowland, foggy, swampy Northern Italy. The 1976 film enjoyed great success and earned cult status over the years. Gothic elements are also to be found in All Deceased… Except the Dead (1977). In 1983, Pupi Avati made another atypical horror. It, too, is memorable for its originality and setting. Zeder has something in common with Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, which came out the same year. In fact, similarities are impressive, and include the finale. More recently, Avati turned to the Gothic genre again with two interesting films: The Hideout of 2007 and Il signor Diavolo (lit. ‘Mister Devil’) of 2019, though we should also list a TV series he wrote for Italian state broadcaster RAI, Voci notturne (lit. ‘nightly voices’), directed by Fabrizio Laurenti. It starts like Twin Peaks and will take us to see a very exoteric Rome…
Bologna, 1940s. A young man with mental issues and literary aspirations falls hopelessly in love with an American army auxiliary after a brief glance. A year later, the uniqueness of his situation leads him to live in the American Midwest, in a house adjacent but separated by ...
Book Pseudomonarchia Daemonum is the focus of an exoteric story set in the eighteenth century.
A cursed house, the place of unspeakable crimes and perversion in a town along the Mississippi.
Demonic possession and exorcisms in 1950 Venetia.
