Horror Cinema from the Italian Giallo to John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN w/ Troy Howarth - a podcast by J.G.

On this spooky season edition of Parallax Views, film historian Troy Howarth, author of such books as So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years of Italian Giallo Films, Assault on the System: The Nonconformist Cinema of John Carpenter, Splintered Visions: Lucio Fulci and His Films, Murder by Design: The Unsane Cinema of Dario Argento, The Haunted World of Mario Bava, and the new Make Them Die Slowly: The Kinetic Cinema of Umberto Lenzi, joins us for a wide-ranging conversation about horror movies.

Among the topics covered:

- How Troy got into horror through the Hammer Studios' horor movies of the late 1950s through to the 1970s. These films starred such actors as Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and centered around classic monsters like The Mummy, Frankenstein's Monster, and Count Dracula

- Why Troy doesn't like the "cheesy" description when it comes to older movies; especially when said movies are deliberately infused with comical elements

- John Carpenter's Halloween and the dark side of suburbia; Carpenter's films in the context of the Vietnam War and Watergate; the rebellious nature of Carpenter's filmography

- Similarities between horror and comedy as genres; the art of the jump scare; the label "elevated horror" and the problems with it

- Explaining the term "Euro-Horor" and why Troy doesn't like the term "Euro-Trash" to describe such movies; the history of the Italian murder mystery aka giallo and it's relationship to film noir, whodunits, and the German krimis written by Edgar Wallace; psycho-sexual themes in the giallo; the pulp vibe in Italian gialli; the effect of WWII and fascism on Italian filmmakers like Dario Argento; the politics of Italian horror movies (are they left-wing or right-wing?); Dario Argento's latest movie Occhiali Neri (Dark Glasses) and it relevant social themes in the post-COVID era

- Violence and women in the Italian giallo; the complex portrayal of women in the Italian gialli; Argento's collaborator Daria Nicolodi and her importance to films like Suspiria; accusations that Lucio Fulci's films are misogynistic; the decadence of the upper class or bourgeoisie in Italian horror movies

-The jazz stylings of the controversial Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco and how living under the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco influenced his films; sympathy and perversion in regards to women in Jess Franco's films

- Analyzing the political subtext of Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso aka Deep Red starring David Hemmings and (slightly) futuristic Tenebrae

- The ecological sentiment of Mario Bava's Twitch of the Death Nerve and Bay of Blood; the importance of Mario Bava's horror films and his giallo Blood and Black Lace; Mario Bava's Boris Karloff-starring Black Sabbath and the difference between the more subversive European cut (with sexual subtext) and the American International Pictures cut of the film; continental horror films of the mid-20th century were aimed at adults whereas many American horror films were aimed at youth and teenagers

- Ruggero Deodato, the director of Cannibal Holocaust

- Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and the explosion of the giallo on the silver screen

And much, much more!

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