Negotiating Minority Identity in Contemporary Italian Horror Cinema
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Female Leads: Negotiating Minority Identity in Contemporary Italian Horror Cinema Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Lauren De Camilla, M.A. Graduate Program in French and Italian The Ohio State University 2020 Dissertation Committee: Dana Renga (Advisor) Linda Mizejewski Jonathan Combs-Schilling Treva Lindsey Copyright by Lauren De Camilla 2020 Abstract Over the last decade, the production of horror films in Italy has surged. Oscar-nominated director Luca Guadagnino recently contributed to the genre’s revival with his 2018 film Suspiria—a remake of Dario Argento’s world-renowned 1977 slasher. However, the extensive contemporary corpus of Italian horror cinema remains largely unexplored even though, according to Guadagnino, “the most transgressive work in cinema right now is being done in horror” (Roxborough, 5). While much Italian horror cinema scholarship has focused on past waves of the genre, few studies assess the contemporary era (Baschiera and Hunter, 2016). As such, this project showcases a popular movie genre, revived with a new urgency in recent years, as a privileged site for socio-cultural work and nonnormative imagination. My dissertation, “Female Leads: Negotiating Minority Identities in Contemporary Italian Horror Cinema,” analyzes eight key films released between 2006-2018 that feature women who are ‘othered’ because of their pregnancy status (Ch 1), their LGBTQ+ identity (Ch 2), their status as migrants (Ch 3) disabled persons (Ch 4), or their religious beliefs (Conclusion). Using textual and socio-historical analysis, I situate my project in the fields of Film Studies, Italian Studies, and Feminist Cultural Studies. This dissertation expands and develops horror scholar Carol Clover’s theorization of the ‘final girl,’ or, the protagonist and survivor in slasher films of the 1970s and 80s. As Clover contends, the qualities of the final girl “enable her, of all the characters, to survive what has come to seem unsurvivable” (85). While elements such as gender, sexual promiscuity, race, or sexual orientation would have ensured death for a character in a 1970s slasher movie, the social prejudices that warrant death in the films of this dissertation have i evolved to manifest differently. This project registers not only anxieties about gender (as Clover originally argued) but also reveals anxieties about social issues in contemporary Italy. In order to heuristically access problematic discourses about survival, I establish and examine how the final girl’s fight and the conditions around her survival reflect and reimagine Italian social crises about minority experience today. In this way, I argue that an expanded model of the trope provides a productive way to demonstrates how the experiences of this character enact the social contentions that she configures. A more conservative European country, Italy provides a rich landscape to map the negotiation of minority experiences visible in the characters of these films. In Chapter 1, I consider the final girl trope in relation to two pregnant women, who are subject to procreative oppression and serve as an analogy for a national “crisis of motherhood” (Lerner and D’Amelio, 9). Chapter 2 analyzes the sexual orientation of the final girl protagonists, and I critically engage with LGBTQ+ identity as it relates to Italy’s recent socio-political climate. Chapter 3 critiques the experiences of two Ukrainian migrants and questions to what extent these final girls face discrimination as racial and/or ethnic others. Chapter 4 treats the theme of failed fathers through mise-en-abyme references to the horror Frankenstein tradition and the representation of a disabled final girl. Finally, the conclusion reviews themes of gender, sexual orientation, migration, and disability in relation to Suzy, the female protagonist in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018) and qualifies to what extent the final girls of these films depict the boundaries of onscreen representations of minority identity. Ultimately, my research updates and reconsiders the final girl trope to determine the extent to which these characters echo and/or critique Italian national and global socio-cultural crises. ii Vita 2013…………………………………B.A. Independent Major in Italian Studies, Colby College 2015…………………………………M.A. Italian Studies, The Ohio State University Publications “Contemporary Italian Horror Cinema: Female Directors and Framing the Maternal.” L’avventura, International Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscapes, 5.1 (2019): 79-92. “LGBTQ+ Female Protagonists in Horror Cinema Today: the Italian Case,” The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 8.2 (2020): 221-235. Fields of Study Major Field: French and Italian Major Field Specialization: Italian Studies Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization: Film Studies iii Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………….i Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………….iii List of Tables……………………………………………………………………………………...v List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………….....vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………....……..1 Chapter 1: Alone in the House: Framing Genre and Representations of the Maternal………….22 Chapter 2: LGBTQ+ Protagonists in Horror Cinema Today: the Italian Case……….…….……56 Chapter 3: Migrant ‘Final Girls’ in the Italian Cultural Imaginary…………………………...…87 Chapter 4: Mise-en-abymes, Disability, and Broken Families in Neverlake……………...……115 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………...……………146 References……………………………………………………………………………………... 157 iv List of Tables Table 1. Recently Released Horror Films in Italy………………………………………...……154 v List of Figures Figure 1. The Local 2017 Report Ranking European Country LGBTQ+ Laws……….......…156 vi Introduction: The Final Girl Survives “Women who possess the gaze in horror, and who become aligned with monsters, are typically shown themselves to represent threats to patriarchy” -Cynthia Freeland in “Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films,” 1996 This dissertation, “Female Leads: Negotiating Minority Identity in Contemporary Italian Horror Cinema,” focuses on eight films released between 2006-2018 that fall into a new era of horror movies that I refer to as New Italian Horror. I situate my project in the fields of Film Studies, Italian Studies, and Feminist Cultural Studies and primarily use textual and socio-historical analysis to frame my analyses. This dissertation expands and develops horror scholar Carol Clover’s theorization of the ‘final girl,’ or, the protagonist and survivor in slasher films of the 1970s and 80s. As Clover contends, the qualities of the final girl “enable her, of all the characters, to survive what has come to seem unsurvivable” (85). While elements such as gender, sexual promiscuity, race, or sexual orientation would have ensured death for a character in a 1970s slasher movie, the social prejudices that warrant death in the films of this dissertation have evolved to manifest differently. This project registers not only anxieties about gender (as Clover originally argued) but also reveals anxieties about social issues in contemporary Italy. In order to heuristically access problematic discourses about survival, I establish and examine how the final girl’s fight and the conditions around her survival reflect and reimagine 1 Italian social crises about minority experience today. In this way, I argue that an expanded model of the trope provides a productive way to demonstrates how the experiences of this character enact the social contentions that she configures. A more conservative European country, Italy provides a rich landscape to map the negotiation of minority experiences visible in the characters of these films. Indeed, “the most avant-garde, the most transgressive work in cinema right now is being done in horror,” according to Oscar-nominated director Luca Guadagnino in a 2017 interview (Roxborough, 5). Even though recent scholarship robustly treats past cycles of Italian horror (Paul 2005, McDonagh 2010, Baschiera and Hunter 2016), the extensive contemporary corpus remains predominantly unexplored. According to the online portal cinemaitaliano.info that documents the latest trends in Italian cinema, over two hundred films categorized as horror debuted in Italy between 2009-2018, a fivefold increase over the thirty-eight horror films released between 1999-2008. Guadagnino contributed to, what I identify as, a new wave of the genre with his 2018 film Suspiria—a remake of Italian auteur Dario Argento’s homonymous and world-renowned 1977 slasher. As the Italian horror genre divides into three major periods (Bondanella, 2009), I suggest that the current wave approximates a fourth period that holistically recycles generic trends from past Italian and international horror film traditions. This dissertation does not attempt to systematically address this cycle of films, but instead addresses how the chosen films of this project all perform similar work with their female protagonists. As such, they collectively construct a larger commentary on the tension between old norms and potential new ones for the final girl trope within the contemporary space of the genre. This project begins by foregrounding Carol Clover’s original theorization of the final 2 girl’s uncanniness, and how this trope works to fracture dominant frameworks during the 1970s slasher film. I will demonstrate how the final girl animates the uncanny, that I will then repurpose this understanding of her identity