Splatterfest XIV

Often credited with creating Italy’s first sound horror film with 1957’s I Vampiri, Riccardo Freda nevertheless remains one of the great unsung architects of Italian genre cinema. A consummate journeyman who made everything from swashbucklers and literary adaptations to “white telephone” comedies, Freda struck horror gold with the deliriously perverse The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, to which The Ghost serves as an unofficial follow-up. Reuniting Freda with the incomparable Barbara Steele, this Gothic shocker serves up murder, adultery, blackmail, greed, and enough poisonous scheming to make the Borgias blush. Elegant, macabre, and gleefully disreputable, The Ghost stands as one of the crown jewels of the 1960s Italo Gothics. 35mm Technicolor print courtesy of Exhumed Films.

SLAUGHTER HOTEL (dir. Ferdinando Di Leo, 1971)

Things take an incredibly sleazy turn with this 1971 slasher-in-the-asylum whodunit, a gloriously disreputable concoction featuring outrageous red herrings and enough sex appeal to power a small city. The legendary Rosalba Neri stars as the institution’s resident nymphomaniac, one of several troubled patients whose treatment by none other than Dr. Klaus Kinski is interrupted by a black-gloved maniac stalking the grounds with various weaponry. Equal parts giallo mystery and sexploitation, Slaughter Hotel delivers exactly what its title promises. Ferdinando Di Leo, a master of Italian crime cinema and director of the notorious shocker To Be Twenty, temporarily trades his 9mm for knives and axes, yielding one of the most shamelessly entertaining slices of Eurocult delirium ever to emerge from the golden age of Italian genre filmmaking. 35mm print courtesy of Exhumed Films.

WEREWOLF WOMAN (dir. Rino Di Silvestro, 1976)

Despite what its title might suggest, Werewolf Woman isn’t really a werewolf movie at all. Instead, director Rino Di Silvestro delivers a bruising revenge thriller wrapped in the tattered fur of a Gothic horror film. Following a young woman who becomes convinced she has inherited the curse of a lycanthropic ancestor, the film mutates psychological trauma into feral vengeance, blurring the line between reincarnation, madness, and righteous retribution. A longtime favorite of Quentin Tarantino, Werewolf Woman combines dreamlike hallucinations, lurid sexuality, dubious psychiatry, and brutal revenge into one deliriously entertaining package. Strange, sleazy, and just a little bit tragic, it plays like an homage to Val Lewton’s Cat People, with the producer’s celebrated subtlety gleefully discarded in favor of the exploitation-crazed sensibilities of 1970s Italian genre cinema. 35mm print courtesy of Brian Darwas.

HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD / NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES (dir. Bruno Mattei, 1980)