The word "splatter" in the English language means "to splash," "to spray"; when we use this term, we mean a film in which scenes with copious blood spills take place.
The word "gore" means "spilled and congealed blood"; we use it in the presence of scenes with disemboweled and eviscerated corpses.
These two elements are crucial for any fan of hard-hitting cinema. And it does not necessarily have to be a horror film. In the last 15 to 20 years, we find films of the most diverse genres with the presence of a high hemoglobin rate. Just think of the sci-fi Starship Troopers and Point of No Return, or to the Spielbergian Saving Private Ryan, or even to action-movies such as The Hyenas and Pulp Fiction by Tarantino, or even to the western Ready to Die by Raimi; different genres, but united by the presence of grand-guignol effects sure to grip the viewer. They are even necessary in some Eastern countries, as in the action cinema of Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, where the demand for extreme scenes is very high among audiences. But we will pause in our own country, briefly tracing the origin of splatter, without in any way presuming to recount it in its entirety .
It all begins in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We are in the period of the great student protests, the Vietnam War and peace demonstrations, the "flower children" and sexual liberalization, divorce and coming of age laws. From all this social upheaval, cinema could not remain immune. What better occasion to try to subvert the classic patterns and attempt to unsettle the viewer's mind with disturbing images of blood and amputated limbs?
It will be a certain Dario Argento To dare beyond the pale with his debut work The Bird of Crystal Feathers. With this title, he will kick off the long and successful season of the Italian-style thriller. It is in this phase that we find the first films stained with the red color of blood and the first signs of quartering shown explicitly to the audience. Other directors will help fuel the nouvelle vague of the hard-hued giallo, with names such as Fulci, Lenzi, Martin, etc., and with titles such as. A Lizard with a Woman's Skin, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh o The Beast Kills in Cold Blood; they are just a handful of titles among the many that have made the history of the modern detective story and inspired later filmmakers from across the Channel such as De Palma o Tarantino.
Even the detective story (renamed by our press as "poliziottesco") does not remain immune to the novelty and shows us very violent images, where mercy has no chance, thanks to directors such as Stelvio Massi who best interpreted the variation on the theme. Protagonists such as Maurizio Merli, Black Franco, Philippe Leroy, Franco Gasparri and Tomas Milian have left an important imprint, with their half-cop, half-cowboy characters, often alone against everyone and against the very law they must defend. Thanks to the success of such films as The Violent Arm of the Law and The Executioner of the Night, our detective story has taken a very different path than in the past, in which the shock image has taken over the story and reality is rendered naked and stripped of all respectable concepts.
By the mid-1970s a small subgenre had sprung up that, in terms of brutality and repulsive scenes, had nothing to envy: the Nazi-erotic. It was the child of such films as Salon Kitty by Tinto Brass, of Ilsa, the SS Beast by Don Edmonds and Love Camp 7 by Robert Lee Frost, will carve out its own slice of glory, thanks to the extreme morbidity and violence perpetrated against the victims. Here again we find filmmakers now accustomed to genre jumping, who make the craft of knowing how to get by their main baggage. Swastika in the Belly by Mario Caiano, The Beast in Heat by Louis Batzella o The Long Nights of the Gestapo by Fabio De Agostini give moments of strong visual impact and pain.
Following the success of the The Shark by Spielberg and Piranha by Joe Dante, several of our filmmakers have transported the horrors among the waters of rivers and seas halfway around the world. In this case Enzo Castellari earns the palm of the best, with The Last Shark and The Shark Hunter. Ovid Assonitis prefers to devote himself to octopuses with his Tentacles and John Old Jr. (born Lamberto Bava) thinks the sea monsters are military-derived in his Shark, Red in the Ocean. A herd of piranhas that escaped from a nursery sows death in Killer Fish by Antonio Margheriti, while Larry Ludman (Fabrizio De Angelis) e Giannetto De Rossi are the authors of Killer Crocodile and Killer Crocodile 2.
The cannibal-movies subthread also contributed in no small measure to the cause of cinema, with images high in "gore" and hemoglobin in industrial quantities. Among all of them, the following should be mentioned Last Cannibal World and Cannibal Holocaust, both directed by Ruggero Deodato. These films owe their fame mainly to the actual killings of animals. Beyond all moral conceptions, Deodato expanded the horizon of disgust, reaching levels rarely touched later. Other titles to remember include. Cannibal Ferox and Eaten Alive; again, the signature is unique and it is the expert Umberto Lenzi.
It must be remembered that the cannibal-movie has deeper roots, related to a genre that experienced a long period of notoriety beginning in the 1960s, namely the world-movie. Main contributors to this success were two compatriots, Jacopetti and Prosperi, who with their Dog World, Dog World 2 and Africa Farewell have taken true human cruelty and bizarreness around the world, without the use of makeup or make-up of any kind. All that was needed was a camera, filming the customs and costumes, traditions, curious facts and human tragedies of more or less well-known countries, editing them with an off-screen commentary, an appropriate soundtrack and that was it. Other important artists in the genre were the brothers Castiglioni and Antonio Climati. These films generated, in the years to follow, many emulators abroad; famous are the series Guinea Pig and Faces of Death, where scenes are often reconstructed in the studio and passed off as real ( hence the birth of the term "snuff," or "smut").
And we arrive at the end of the 1970s, a period when splatter knew its best moment. It is not understatement to say that Dawn of the Dead by George Romero paved the way for many Italian filmmakers, inspired by the decidedly strong images and special effects of the then little-known Tom Savini.
The first to pick up the signal given by Romero was Lucio Fulci, which with Zombie Flesh Eaters shocked audiences halfway around the world. It would seem to be a standard rip-off of the Romerian chapter, but that would be too easy a label to apply to this work. In reality it develops quite independently and follows more along the lines of the Caribbean tradition. Another film to highlight of Fulci è The Afterlife - And You Will Live in Terror. More zombies, this time walking again among the living involuntarily summoned from the afterlife through one of its doors (a hotel in Louisiana). In both films, the cruelty and viciousness of the undead is shown amply through scenes of rare intensity.
Of note again Black Cat, That Villa Next to the Cemetery and Fear in the City of the Living Dead; each of these interesting titles is rich in special effects, with scripts that are anything but trivial.
Another Roman director, Joe D'Amato (a.k.a. Aristide Massaccesi), he was able to seize the right moment to satiate audiences with scenes of undoubted effect. His most famous film remains Anthropophagus: a group of friends vacationing on a Greek island make the unwelcome acquaintance of a man who has a habit of killing and devouring parts of his victims. Memorable is the scene in which the monster, played by George Eastman (Luigi Montefiori), eats the fetus of an incredulous, and then unknown, Serena Grandi. Its sequel, perhaps a little less strong from a splatter point of view, is still a good film, entitled Blood Red. Noteworthy, both for tricks and for its force of impact, are. Beyond the Darkness and The Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, a successful mix of zombies and explicit sex.
The zombi-movies strand seems to have inspired many Italian filmmakers, who have indulged, with mixed results, in provoking strong emotions and, above all, exploiting the booming phenomenon. Some titles: Zombie Holocaust by Frank Martin (a.k.a. Marino Girolami), Virus - Hell Of The Living Dead by Vincent Dawn (Bruno Mattei), Zombie Horror by Andrew White (Andrea Bianchi), Nightmare City by Umberto Lenzi. In all cases, these are films with low-to-medium artistic content, extremely limited budgets, but decidedly above-average effects and tricks. How to forget in Zombie Horror the scene where Mariangela Giordano Does he suffer the bite to a breast by his zombified son? Or in Zombie Holocaust When one of the main characters is attacked by the natives, who rip out his eyeballs and eat them? Or finally Margi Newton having her tongue ripped out and her eyes blown out with a hand entering her mouth in Virus - Hell Of The Living Dead?
A separate chapter deserves the splendid Zeder by Pupi Avati. It does not contain many splatter or gore scenes, but the script, cast, and direction are of a higher quality than many American films of the genre. The story goes that a certain Paul Zeder is said to have discovered strange potentials in certain soils, referred to simply as "K"; whoever is buried in one is destined to come back to life.
At the same time as the zombies, a new monster was born, thanks to the ingenuity of Hans Gieger and the direction of Ridley Scott: Alien. Italian emulators are by Lewis Coates (Luigi Cozzi) with his Alien Contamination, in my opinion one of the best domestic titles on the genre; also Sam Cromwell (Cyrus Ippolito) means his opinion on possible alien invasions with his Alien 2 on Earth. Several years later, he will take care of it. Anthony Dawson (Antonio Margheriti) to dust off the genre with Alien of the Deep. Of note, for the "sequels never recognized" series, an interesting Terminator 2 (Shocking Dark) by Bruno Mattei, infused with remarkable special effects.
Parallel to the success of such films as 1997 Escape from New York and Mad Max which launched the post-atomic genre, our country has churned out some very interesting titles. At the top is the duo 1990: The Bronx Warriors and Escape from the Bronx, both directed by Enzo G. Castellari (Enzo Girolami). The same director shot The New Barbarians, while the workaholic Massaccesi, this time under the pseudonym of Kevin Mancuso, directed Endgame and Year 2020: Gladiators of the Future. Sergio Martino delights in 2019: After the Fall of New York., perhaps one of the most interesting on the genre; also Fulci has fun spinning Warriors of the Year 2072, while it is of Bruno Mattei the signature of Rats, Night of Terror. In all cases, there is no shortage of scenes for strong stomachs.
Having slowly exhausted the zombie genre, an unknown American independent filmmaker named Sam Raimi finds success and glory with a very low-budget but grandiose special effects title: The House. Our filmmakers also seem to be sensitive to the phenomenon and, after the release of the sequel The House 2, begin to tour their "houses" and the like.
The House 3 (Ghosthouse) is from the usual Umberto Lenzi, now accustomed to constant genre switching; story certainly not original, the actors are not among the best around, but it lets you watch and, most importantly, there is no shortage of gore moments. Quite another cast and result achieved The House 4 (Witchcraft) by Fabrizio Laurenti, with the likes of Linda Blair and David Hasselhoff. The tricks are good and the story interesting. Unfortunately The House 5 (Beyond Darkness) by Claudio Fragasso closes the cycle in a colorless manner, both from the point of view of the story, which is very confusing, and from the point of view of the splatter effects, which are reduced to the bone.
The genre of "cursed dwellings" has also been dabbled in. Dario Argento, making a horror trilogy with excellent results from the effects side as well. Suspiria is undoubtedly the best, set in a dance school in Freiburg, Germany; Inferno was filmed between Rome and New York, while The Third Mother only recently closes the circle.
Other films of various mansions, whether owned or not, include. Amityville Possession by Damiano Damiani, The Villa of the Cursed Souls by Charles Ausino, That Villa at the Bottom of the Park by Anthony Ascot. Worth mentioning is a series of titles shot in the late 1980s, commissioned by the then Rete Italia of the Mediaset group, for a horror TV series with the subject of "houses." Unfortunately, the presence of many scenes deemed "excessive" by the censors caused the project to founder, and only recently have they seen the light of day in vhs, after years spent in dusty warehouses. The titles in question are: The House of Time and The Sweet Home of Horrors by Lucio Fulci, The House of Wandering Souls and The House of Sorcery of the ever-present Umberto Lenzi.
In the history of Italian truculent cinema, two directors should not be forgotten who have come to the attention of the public, including international audiences, for making films with decent budgets, substantial special effects, and production of a certain Dario Argento: Lamberto Bava and Michele Soavi. Of the former we remember especially Demons and Demons 2, although he had previously made his bones with thriller titles that were in some cases interesting. By Soavi should be mentioned The Church and The Sect, with perhaps somewhat confusing and pretentious stories, but with undoubted visual shock. Of the director in question we must remember the attempt to recover a strand, the zombies, with Cemetery Man. What ties all five films together is the presence of a talented young makeup artist: Sergio Stivaletti. Heir of Giannetto De Rossi, perhaps the first true homegrown special effects artist, Ankle boots was able to unite the school of Charles Rambaldi To that of the grand guignol.
The 1990s saw the splatter genre gradually lose more and more space in our country; blame perhaps the advent of computerized graphic effects or perhaps the lack of interest in genre films. Some directors took paths more suited to television audiences (cf. Lamberto Bava with the series Fantaghir o Enzo Castellari with its Sandokan 2); others have left us for good, cut down by physical ailments: Fulci, Massaccesi and Margheriti; still others preferred to return behind the scenes, perhaps lending a hand or advice to newcomers.
Only a few daredevils have had the audacity to continue along the path traced by the masters (among them should be noted Roger Fratter), while others lacked the courage to continue daring.
Special edited by Maxena
