Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies I don’t imagine that Black Sunday – to give the film its standard English title, though strictly speaking that name only appears on the version released by American International Pictures in the 1960s, now thoroughly superseded – needs any help from me in getting […]

The first thing worth noting is that Bond parodies and rip-offs were always more successful in Europe than in the United States – not for nothing is there an entire Eurospy subgenre far more robust and long-lived than anything that America or the United Kingdom was able to claim. And thus it was the case […]

From among the Video Nasties As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, director Mario Bava – ex-cinematographer, one of the great color stylists of the ’60s and ’70s, and Italy’s best disciple of Alfred Hitchcock – largely invented all the rules of the giallo with 1963’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much and 1964’s Blood and Black Lace, […]

At the risk of repeating myself, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho changed everything. Everything. American movies had been inching towards more violence, more sex, more “grown-up” material, if that’s the word for it, for quite a while; but Hitch is the one who gave the whole industry a firm shove off the cliff, back in 1960. Now, […]