Splatter Capital by Mark Steven

Author:Mark Steven
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Splatter Capital: The Political Economy of Gore Films
ISBN: 9781910924860
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2016-12-28T16:00:00+00:00

Third Intermission

Global Ferox

I don’t properly remember when or where I first heard about Italian horror. Maybe an IMDB list on a school library computer screen. But this could be a phantom memory. Or maybe it was just a video nasties catalogue. Though I don’t know how I first picked up on that one either. Nevertheless, before gaining access to any of the films I had already become fixated on Italy, and in particular on the films directed by Lucio Fulci, Joe D’Amato, Umberto Lenzi, and Ruggero Deodato. I had seen a handful of Dario Argento’s more accessible works, but was never really taken with the witchcraft and the black-gloved killers. Giallo just wasn’t my thing. To my mind, there was an extraordinary exoticism to those other directors, which was at least partially fuelled by the fact that their films were totally banned and so without distribution in Australia. Morbid curiosity thus attached itself to an unreachable set of films whose aesthetic, I imagined not inaccurately, might obtain somewhere between the legacy of Mussolini and a vexed obligation to Catholicism. So deeply scarred and so wracked by guilt, I thought, theirs must have been a horror beyond all comparison.

The first of these films I eventually acquired for screening was the most infamous of all, Cannibal Holocaust, which I bought second-hand from an underground record store. The cover featured a badly xeroxed composite image: a human skull, on the forehead of which a band of grass-skirted natives had been superimposed. The design was totemic yet austere, unlike the baroque iconography that first lured me into the world of gore. It suggested something much darker. The man at the counter told me my purchase was “seriously sick shit.” He seemed approving. This must have been sometime in the very early 2000s.

Before getting into the film, here are some of the things I did and didn’t know from reading about it. I knew that it invented the found footage style of horror, which had just been thoroughly commercialized by The Blair Witch Project in 1999. I knew all about the twin sources of its controversy and suspected that both had something to do with the play on verisimilitude. One was that it included the killing of live animals, and the other was that its actors all signed contracts forbidding them from any media appearances for one year following release. The combination of these two factors, actual slaughter and vanished actors, emphasized the realism inherent to found footage, but also triggered a homicide investigation into the director and producers.

What I didn’t know is that its director, Ruggero Deodato, had previously worked as production assistant to Roberto Rossellini, and that its verisimilitude should be thought of as an appropriation and extension of neorealism, with that movement’s commitment to economic anxiety and class conflict. Truthfully, I had no idea what neorealism was and Rossellini’s name meant nothing to me. I didn’t know that its footage was modelled on the anti-socialist propaganda films utilized in Italy during the Years of Lead.

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