VAMPIRES IN ITALIAN CINEMA, 1956–1975 66352_Guarneri.indd352_Guarneri.indd i 225/04/205/04/20 110:030:03 AAMM 66352_Guarneri.indd352_Guarneri.indd iiii 225/04/205/04/20 110:030:03 AAMM VAMPIRES IN ITALIAN CINEMA, 1956–1975 Michael Guarneri 66352_Guarneri.indd352_Guarneri.indd iiiiii 225/04/205/04/20 110:030:03 AAMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Michael Guarneri, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/12.5 pt Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5811 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5813 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5814 6 (epub) The right of Michael Guarneri to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 66352_Guarneri.indd352_Guarneri.indd iivv 225/04/205/04/20 110:030:03 AAMM CONTENTS Figures and tables vi Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 PART I THE INDUSTRIAL CONTEXT 1. The Italian fi lm industry (1945–1985) 23 2. Italian vampire cinema (1956–1975) 41 PART II VAMPIRE SEX AND VAMPIRE GENDER 3. Female vampires 77 4. Male vampires 107 PART III SANGUINE ECONOMY, BLOODY POLITIC 5. Vampires of the late 1950s and early 1960s 127 6. Post-1968 vampires 149 Appendix A: Three Italian vampire fi lms that were never made 173 Appendix B: Files from the Italian Show Business Bureau fonds at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome 177 Bibliography 179 Index 209 66352_Guarneri.indd352_Guarneri.indd v 225/04/205/04/20 110:030:03 AAMM FIGURES AND TABLES Figures Cover A rare colour image from the set of La maschera del demonio (photo by Osvaldo Civirani available at Archivio Centrale dello Stato – Archivio fotografi co Civirani (fi lm) – 098 Maschera del demonio La – 098–0516) 1.1 Mario Bava emerging from a grave on the set of La maschera del demonio (photo by Osvaldo Civirani available at Archivio Centrale dello Stato – Archivio fotografi co Civirani (fi lm) – 098 Maschera del demonio La – 098–0483) 37 2.1 ‘The greatest, most sensational fi lm of all times’: advertisement for the Italian release of the Hammer Dracula 43 3.1 Charnel eroticism: Barbara Steele on the set of La maschera del demonio (photo by Osvaldo Civirani available at Archivio Centrale dello Stato – Archivio fotografi co Civirani (fi lm) – 098 Maschera del demonio La – 098–0004) 79 4.1 Arturo Dominici as makeshift Dracula Javutich on the set of La maschera del demonio (photo by Osvaldo Civirani available at Archivio Centrale dello Stato – Archivio fotografi co Civirani (fi lm) – 098 Maschera del demonio La – 098–0232) 111 66352_Guarneri.indd352_Guarneri.indd vvii 225/04/205/04/20 110:030:03 AAMM FIGURES AND TABLES Tables 0.1 The Italian vampire cinema corpus to be studied 8–11 2.1 Censorship and box-offi ce data for 1956–1965 Italian vampire fi lms 55–57 2.2 Censorship and box-offi ce data for 1969–1975 Italian vampire fi lms 64–65 vii 66352_Guarneri.indd352_Guarneri.indd vviiii 225/04/205/04/20 110:030:03 AAMM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my family, my colleagues and my friends. Special thanks to Daniela Mor, Alvaro Guarneri, Russ Hunter, Peter Hutch- ings, Stefano Baschiera, Jamie Sexton, Steve Jones, Johnny Walker, Jin Wang, John Hemy, Corrado Farina, Ernesto Gastaldi, Fabio Frizzi, Paolo Noto, Francesco Di Chiara, Michele Canosa, Carmela Pontecorvo, Barbara Corsi, Dario Stefanoni, Andreas Ehrenreich, Nikolas Weiss, Stefano Lalla, Tommaso Moscati and Sergio Bissoli. Parts of Introduction and of Chapter 1 rework my open-access journal article, ‘The Gothic Bet: Riccardo Freda’s I vampiri (1957) and the Birth of Italian Horror Cinema from an Industrial Perspective’. If not otherwise stated, foreign-language quotations (including fi lm dialogues) have been translated into English by me. This book is dedicated to the memory of Isolina Aletti, Peter Hutchings and Marco Balzarini. viii 66352_Guarneri.indd352_Guarneri.indd vviiiiii 225/04/205/04/20 110:030:03 AAMM INTRODUCTION New blood for thought For more than 200 years now, the vampire has been one of the most popu- lar characters in fi ction across media all over the world. The term ‘vampire’ became a buzzword throughout Western Europe thanks to police inquiries, medical reports and religious treatises compiled in the wake of the epidemics that scourged Eastern and Southeast Europe between the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century (Dimic 1984; Wilson 1985; Groom 2018: 23–40, 56–94), but it was not until the publication of John Polidori’s short story The Vampyre in 1819 that the bogeyman became a cash cow. The key to commer- cial success was simple: with a felicitous intuition undoubtedly inspired by his working experience as Lord Byron’s travelling physician, Polidori turned the Slavic folklore’s ‘plump and ruddy’ (Barber 2010: 4), ‘repulsive, smelly, poor’ (Douglas 1967: 36) peasant revenant preying on fellow villagers and livestock into a thin, pale, rich, elegant, urbane, sexually attractive aristocrat – a template that would be more or less faithfully followed by all the most popular male and female vampires to come, from Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871 novella Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula to Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles book saga (1976–present) and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight book saga (2005–8); from the very many British and French theatre adaptations of Polidori’s seminal tale to Hamilton Deane’s and John L. Balderston’s 1920s theatre adaptations of the Stoker novel; and from the Universal Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) and the Hammer Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis 1 66352_Guarneri.indd352_Guarneri.indd 1 225/04/205/04/20 110:030:03 AAMM INTRODUCTION Ford Coppola, 1992), Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994), TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and the Twilight fi lm saga (2008–12). As they branched out from folklore to literature, theatre, cinema and TV, vampires became popular in the academia too. Eastern European tales about the dead sucking the blood of the living started attracting scholarly attention at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when ‘learned essays on questions relating to superstition were by no means uncommon’, and vampire legends presented a special appeal to both the high ranks of the Catholic church (Augustin Calmet, Giuseppe Antonio Davanzati and Prospero Lambertini, among others) and those enlightened ‘philosophers [. .] who were pledged to the idea of progress [and] enjoyed amassing evidence about what they called the “primitive” and “dark” areas’ (Frayling 1991: 23). It was only in the early twentieth century that the focus of scholarly discourse shifted from whether or not vampires really exist to the broader socio-cultural signifi cance of vampire lore and fi ction. To account for such socio-cultural signifi cance, three theoreti- cal tools have been mainly used: psychoanalysis; Marxism; and feminism. Starting from the idea that the literal content of any form of expression is a coded manifestation of the troubling sexual secrets buried in the unconscious mind, psychoanalytic studies see vampire attacks as the uncanny return of the repressed sexual wishes of infancy and childhood. Here, the vampire is a uni- versal symbol, and symptom, of human anxieties related to interfamilial sexual strife, expressing (1) a dread of the father fi gure and (2) a horror of the mater- nal body. The former is described in the Oedipal readings of vampire lore and fi ction based on Freud ([1913] 1950 and [1919] 2003) such as Jones (1931: 98–130), Richardson (1959), Bierman (1972 and 1998), MacGillivray (1972), Astle (1980) and Twitchell (1981, 1985: 105–59). The latter is described in the pre-Oedipal readings of vampire fi ction centred on the vagina dentata scenario fi rst outlined by Bonaparte ([1934] 1971), and later reprised and reworked by other scholars (Bentley [1972] 1988; Dadoun [1970] 1989; Creed 1993: 59–72, 105–21; 2005: 68–95; Berenstein 1995; Roth [1977] 1997; Mulvey- Roberts 1998). On the other hand, Marxist studies take their cue from Marx’s ([1867] 1954: 224–85) indictment of the nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie as vampiric and focus on the political and socio-economic implications of bloodsucking rather than on the psychosexual sphere. Here, the vampire is a scapegoat in invasion narratives concerned with the dialectics of class and nationalism-tinged imperialistic struggle – a monstrous, polluting Other who uses sex appeal, cun- ning and brute force to subjugate the members of a given community, be it a class within the nation-state’s social body or a whole nation-state (Kracauer [1947] 1971: 77–9, 108–9; Roth 1979 and [1984] 2004; Hatlen [1980] 1988; Zanger 1991; Gelder 1994: 1–41, 65–107; Halberstam 1995: 86–105; Arata [1990] 1997; Valdez Moses 1997; Valente 2002; Hutchings 2003: 34–78; Moretti 2 66352_Guarneri.indd352_Guarneri.indd 2 225/04/205/04/20 110:030:03 AAMM INTRODUCTION [1983] 2005; Phillips 2005: 11–33; Gibson 2006: 15–95; Abbott 2007: 61–72; Kaes 2009: 87–129; Ulin 2015; Mulvey-Roberts 2016: 129–78; Hudson 2017: 21–114, 163–91). Finally, feminist studies of vampire fi ction combine a transhistorical approach based on the psychoanalytic notion of sexual repression with a historicist approach imbued with Marxist insights into socio-political oppression to account for the struggle for gender defi nition and domination within the framework of the Western bourgeoisie’s patriarchal order.