In my time as a horror journalist writing reviews on Let’s Talk Terror, I have come across so many movies and so many filmmakers that have district styles and bodies of work. But in the past few months, I have become acquainted with an indie filmmaker who forced my mind to consider something outside of my cultural zone, something that challenges what I as an American moviegoer think of as being “horror.” Something uniquely Italian.
You may recognize Mattia de Pascali‘s name from my recent reviews of The Forbidden Lands, Resurrection Corporation, and Beyond the Omega. Now, I was able to pick his brain about these movies and his thoughts on the genre from his perspective.
Getting to Know Mattia De Pascali
For readers who may be discovering your work for the first time, how would you introduce yourself and your work as a filmmaker?
I am a European who tells stories. I started out making short films and then moved on to feature films. When I realized that making a film took too much time and that an entire lifetime would not be enough to tell all the stories I had in mind, I experimented with other forms: theatre and literature. Outside Italy, however, I am known exclusively for my films. I believe my most widely seen film is still my debut, McBetter, which is technically the one with the most limitations, but it has found quite a few admirers thanks to its healthy dose of madness.
What first sparked your interest in filmmaking, and why choose horror over other genres?
My parents started taking me to the movies when I was very young. They used to go every weekend, and not to see children’s films, but whatever they considered the best movies of the moment, especially Italian ones. The first one I remember is Mediterraneo (which I saw after it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1992). However, I became aware that I wanted to be a director when I was thirteen, after seeing A Clockwork Orange. That was when I realized that cinema has infinite expressive potential. My love for monsters, on the other hand, goes back to childhood, but explaining why a child is drawn to strange and disturbing figures would probably require a psychologist.
What was your path into filmmaking like? Did you study film formally, or were you largely self-taught through experimentation and making your own projects?
As a young man, I was determined to make directing my profession, so I studied film at university and then supplemented my education with other courses and by working my way up on film sets. Unfortunately, however, the Italian system is very closed because the money does not come from tickets sold to audiences, but from money advanced by the State in various forms. Dependence on public funding puts the artist’s merits in second place and favors directors who are already part of the “right circle,” often simply because of who they were born to. When I realized that no production company was going to open its doors to me, rather than throw away all the sacrifices I had made up to that point, I chose to continue as an independent filmmaker.
Who are some of the filmmakers or films that have had the biggest influence on your work? Are there any Italian horror filmmakers in particular that you consider major inspirations?
The first films I loved, even as a child, were Gremlins, Edward Scissorhands and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Even today, they are a good representation of what I like. The first director I fell in love with was Kubrick and, shortly afterwards, I began discovering the filmographies of many other filmmakers. I was particularly crazy about Álex de la Iglesia and Takeshi Kitano. But, in all likelihood, the director I admired the most, almost to the point of worship, was Mario Bava.
Italian Horror and His Filmmaking Style
Italian horror has such a distinctive history, from giallo and gothic horror to exploitation, folk horror, and the films of directors like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and others. What does Italian horror mean to you personally?
I love twentieth-century Italian horror, perhaps even more than it deserves, because alongside some wonderful films there are many others that are bad and boring, yet they still have an enormous fascination for me. If I have to choose between watching a Bergman masterpiece or a Z-grade Italian horror movie, my more perverse side pushes me toward the shoddy national production, even though I already know it will disappoint me. But I love the freedom of old Italian horror films. They not only had no inhibitions, they were always trying to push the boundaries further. It was the triumph of imagination in its purest, most childlike form.
Do you think there are qualities that distinguish Italian horror from horror made in other countries today?
The renewed international interest in folk horror has inevitably meant that even the few Italian horror films that have benefited from substantial production budgets have anchored their stories to the territory. But, apart from the locations, I don’t see any distinctive traits in today’s films that would allow us to say, “This is typical of our horror.” Over the last few decades, no successful Italian horror film has emerged that has set the rules by saying, “Let’s do it this way because this is what the audience wants.” There is undoubtedly less of a willingness to take risks, and films are made according to what people think a film should look like: according to the standard. The best exceptions to this flattening can be found in underground cinema, but we are still talking about films made with very little money and buried beneath hundreds and hundreds of other movies that are considerably less interesting.
Your three films I’ve reviewed are surprisingly different from one another: The Forbidden Lands is folk horror, Resurrection Corporation is an animated gothic/Expressionist story, and Beyond the Omega leans into the erotic and psychological side of Euro-horror. Do you consciously try to explore different corners of horror with each project?
I don’t like repeating myself, and I love artists who try to move as far away as possible from what they have already done. There are filmmakers I respect who make very similar films over and over again and, inevitably, they start to bore me after a while. Even though I start from different subgenres, I realize in retrospect that certain themes, approaches and styles keep returning in my work. For example, the animated film Resurrection Corporation has many points of contact with the black comedy McBetter because they were written around the same time. So imagine what would happen if I started from ideas that were very similar to one another.
What do you think modern independent filmmakers can do with horror that bigger studio productions sometimes cannot?
Let me start with the opposite question: what shouldn’t independent filmmakers do?
They shouldn’t imitate big productions. If I want to watch The Conjuring, I will watch The Conjuring, not a cheap version of it. If, on the other hand, a viewer chooses to watch a film that cost one hundredth or one thousandth as much as a mainstream production, then they want to see what mainstream cinema will never give them. That’s the principle of Herschell Gordon Lewis: “Hollywood doesn’t show blood? Then I’ll make movies with gallons of blood.” Or Andy Warhol, who, upon hearing that Jon Voight was going to play a gigolo in New York, supposedly thought: “What do they know about New York gigolos in Los Angeles? We’ll make a movie that shows how things really are.” Being independent means not being dependent on either big financiers or their taboos.
The Forbidden Lands
In my review of The Forbidden Lands, I was particularly struck by the contrast between the beautiful, sun-drenched Italian setting and the increasingly disturbing events taking place within it. What inspired the setting and atmosphere of the film?
First of all, laziness: shooting at night is exhausting, and after Beyond the Omega I had promised myself that I would make a horror film in daylight. My homeland, Salento, is a tourist destination known above all for its sea and sunshine. But I wasn’t interested in making a postcard of the region. I wanted to use the landscape in an original way, as happens with Australia in the first Mad Max. The difference is that George Miller moved forward in time, whereas I moved backward, but still within the realm of fantasy: mine is not a historical reconstruction; it is a world that exists only in my film.
The film explores religious dogma, superstition, witchcraft accusations, mob mentality, and fear of the unknown. What ideas or themes did you most want audiences to take away from The Forbidden Lands?
Criticism of faith is one of the themes that returns most often in my stories. I grew up in a Catholic environment, but I am an atheist. Conceptually, I understand the usefulness of religions in centuries past: when your entire life is suffering, you carry on hoping that you will be better off when you are dead, in paradise. Today, however, relying on faith does not seem like much of a virtue to me. Faith is, by definition, the voluntary suspension of reason. The priest tells you, “Just believe. Don’t doubt, don’t question.” In Italy, more than one third of the adult population is functionally illiterate, meaning that they are unable to use logical thinking. So perhaps we need to stop teaching children that they simply have to believe and start encouraging them to use their brains, to question contradictions and to ask themselves why things are the way they are. I firmly believe that the greatest threat to democracy is stupidity. And the “voluntary suspension of reason” certainly doesn’t help us.
The film also gives us a strong female perspective through its heroine and the women who begin questioning what is happening in the village. What drew you to telling this particular story through those characters?
In the very first version of the idea, the protagonists and antagonists were men, and there wasn’t much room for women in the story. I realized that this was the result of centuries and centuries of storytelling in which the hero of the adventure is a man, while the woman is either the person who needs to be saved or the prize to be won. Partly to offer an alternative to the millions of stories that had already been told, I decided to consider giving women the active role in the story. I think it was the right choice because it allowed me to look at the conflict in the film from a new perspective: war, at least until the twentieth century, has always been men devouring other men. Perhaps, then, it is up to women to break this vicious circle, as happened in Naples in 1943, when the uprising that led to the expulsion of the Nazis from the city was started by the wives and mothers of the men who were about to be deported.
Resurrection Corporation
I was completely surprised by Resurrection Corporation because of how different it is from The Forbidden Lands. What made you want to tell this story through animation rather than traditional live-action filmmaking?
These are two films that came from two diametrically opposite needs. With The Forbidden Lands, I wanted to involve as many people as possible and make the most of the locations the area had to offer. In other words, I wanted to make a low-budget epic. Alberto Genovese, the director of Resurrection Corporation, prefers to work alone in his office. When he told me he wanted to make an animated film, I thought that not having to film reality would allow us to let our imaginations run much further. So I wrote a story that would have been impossible for me to shoot in live action. We’ll leave the live-action version of Resurrection Corporation to Tim Burton. We Italian independents can’t offer you anything more than South Park-style animation.
The film has a wonderful German Expressionist influence, with obvious nods to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, and classic Frankenstein imagery. What role did early horror cinema play in shaping Resurrection Corporation?
When Genovese approached me to write the film, he didn’t have a clear story in mind, but he knew he wanted to make a tribute to German Expressionism, the Universal classics, and Poe as well (there are elements of mesmerism from The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and The Raven in Corman’s version). Having certain boundaries in place before inventing a story is very useful for creativity, especially since I knew and loved the elements he wanted to use. However, I tried not to simply repeat what had already been done, but to come up with something new through which I could talk about subjects that matter to me. A film is a wonderful opportunity to say something while pretending not to say anything: you tell a funny little story and, in the meantime, you have shown other people the world through your eyes, reality from your point of view.
The idea of a society where death has essentially been replaced by resurrection is fascinating. Where did the concept of the Resurrection Corporation itself come from?
It ties back to what I was saying earlier about religions: people’s refusal to look at reality, preferring to cling to a lie (immortality). The protagonist, Caligari, wants to solve the great mystery of existence: to bring life back to those who no longer have it. The other businessman, the antagonist, has instead understood that, when it comes to selling something, it doesn’t matter whether it is true. What matters is that people want to believe it. In short, the appearance created by advertising (which is the soul of capitalism) fits perfectly with the desire to believe in the impossible, the greatest human weakness.
What was the biggest challenge of making an animated horror film?
For us Westerners, or at least for us Europeans, animation instinctively makes us think of the world of childhood and, even when we know that a production is intended for an adult audience, we tend not to take it too seriously. That’s why, with Resurrection Corporation, I preserved a comedic tone, albeit a dark one (I hope that hasn’t been lost in the English dub requested by the distributor, because I’ve never actually listened to it, but I’ve always read terrible things about it). In the last film I wrote for Genovese, Stranotrofio, humor is almost completely absent. This time, we started from one of his stories and I adapted my writing more closely to his sensibilities. We’ll see how audiences respond when this dark but sweet animated film is released.
Beyond the Omega
With Beyond the Omega, you move into much more psychologically disturbing and sexually explicit territory. What initially inspired Aris’s story and his descent into madness?
The film was shot in Tuscany, the region where the crimes of the Monster of Florence took place. This notoriously infamous Italian serial killer certainly inspired the figure of the murderer in Beyond the Omega, but I was mainly interested in talking about the fear of being judged by others. The protagonist, Aris, is obsessed with being mistaken for the killer, and the more he fears that other people will point the finger at him and label him a pervert, the more strangely he behaves, thereby feeding their suspicions. It becomes a vicious circle that pushes Aris to turn into the very thing he is trying to escape from, and invites us to question our own point of view: “I am convinced that I am the good guy, but what if the others are right?”
The film uses sexuality, violence, grief, and obsession to explore Aris’s psychological collapse. What should audiences understand about him beneath all of the more shocking material?
Aris is a hypocrite. He represses his sexual instincts by pretending that his love for Iris is pure. But when that love is taken away from him by the maniac, Aris is angry with the world, not so much because Iris has been brutally murdered, but because someone else has taken away what he had been promised: his beloved’s sex, which he was supposed to experience only after marriage. What makes Aris bitter is this obsession: why is sexuality denied to him? It seems to him that everyone else gets to enjoy it except him. And he looks for a remedy not along the ordinary path, where he has already failed, but through more alternative avenues.
The film feels like a deliberate callback to the erotic, transgressive Euro-horror of the 1970s and ’80s. Were you consciously looking back at that era of Italian and European horror while making this film?
Since we didn’t have any recognizable names in the cast, we decided to promote the film as a tribute to Beyond the Darkness, whose original Italian title is Buio Omega. The title Beyond the Omega was born from the fusion of these two titles. Beyond the tribute, the meaning of the title is that when you look beyond Omega (that is, beyond death) you can only find death. Joe D’Amato’s film also featured necrophilia and the protagonist’s isolation, in a mansion perched in the mountains, far from the village. But apart from these elements, the two films are very different. It would make no sense to make a film simply to remake something that others have already done, and done well. My love for the horror films of D’Amato and so many other directors of that era is so deeply ingrained in me that it emerges spontaneously, without me seeking it out and without me having to betray who I am.
Were you worried that the blatant sexual material would detract at all from the story?
I knew that nudity and sex would attract attention, and when you are Mr. Nobody, the first goal is to emerge from anonymity, even at the cost of shocking people. Then you hope that the more perceptive viewers will notice that there is more beneath the surface. But having profound content and being unable to reach an audience because your product lacks appeal is useless. I make films so that other people will see them, not for myself.
Looking Ahead
After making films that explore such different styles of horror, is there a particular subgenre or filmmaking style you haven’t tackled yet that you’d love to explore?
I would love to have the financial means to explore any genre. I would have a lot of fun telling a story set in a post-apocalyptic future, with punk warriors and radiation-born monsters. But I would also love to make a sword-and-sandal film, a genre that was hugely popular at Cinecittà in the early 1960s. The films of that era featured Hercules or some other muscle-bound hero battling cruel tyrants, Cyclopes, witches, dragons, aliens, prehistoric men and whatever other villain the screenwriters could think of, without giving a damn about consistency. Long live imagination!
What are you currently working on, and what can you tell us about your upcoming projects?
Over the last few years, I have devoted more time to writing because making a film requires enormous sacrifices, and I wanted to be a director, not a martyr. At the moment, I am studying artificial intelligence to find out whether it can give me the opportunity to tell my stories at a lower cost without losing my artistic identity. I would like to adapt one of my books, Il gabinetto del Dottor Güt Alan (literally: The Cabinet of Dr. Güt Alan), with a darker tone than the original. The story is set in the near future, where humanity coexists with other beings accidentally created by science. The protagonist is convinced that treating these creatures as equals to human beings has pushed the world into a dystopian scenario that, however, the masses fail to recognize. It is a metaphor for contemporary democracies, where the right to vote is given away rather than earned.
You’ve now had your work reviewed by an American horror journalist (myself) who has watched three very different films from your body of work. What do you hope international audiences (particularly audiences who may not be familiar with contemporary Italian independent horror) take away from your films?
In general, I would like audiences to be genuinely curious. Rather than chasing the movie of the moment just to be fashionable and have something to say about it (which, to be completely honest, nobody cares about anyway) I dream of a world in which viewers are proud to have seen a film that other people don’t even know exists, proud to have been the first to discover something different and to have brought it to other people’s attention. Independent films exist to show that we don’t always have to tell the same stories in the same way. To the point that today you can watch a big-budget movie while reading messages on your phone, because the plot just runs on autopilot. I would like a viewer to finish one of my films feeling happy that they have watched something new, and still wanting more.
Finally, for readers who want to discover more of your work, which of your films would you recommend they start with — and why?
Making films that are different from one another means that viewers who enjoyed one of them may not necessarily like the next one. It happened to me, for example, with McBetter and Beyond the Omega. Often, people who loved the first one didn’t like the second, and vice versa. So it becomes difficult to choose just one. McBetter is for people who enjoy a more grotesque, scrappy production where the ultimate goal is to make you laugh. Beyond the Omega is for those looking for something more extreme. The Forbidden Lands is definitely the richest of the three, perfect for anyone who wants to see what shadows lurk beneath the sunshine of old Europe.
Speaking with Mattia de Pascali made me realize that no matter the distance, horror from different parts of the world ultimately allows us the same things: freedom of expression as a filmmaker, and freedom of emotion as a viewer. Though his movies show a side of himself with his own background and own thoughts, it still illustrates the heart of indie filmmaking with the urge to create and explore the many facets of life, death, pain, pleasure, and all-out weirdness.
Mattia de Pascali may be independent, but that’s really the crux of the genre, isn’t it? A world of ideas and desires hide in each and every film… De Pascali dares to release them.
Follow writer/director Mattia De Pascali on Instagram for more. Be sure to read my reviews on The Forbidden Lands, Resurrection Corporation, and Beyond the Omega as well.
