The author examines the Italian Gothic horror of the period, providing previously unpublished details and production data taken from official papers, original scripts and interviews with filmmakers, scriptwriters and actors. Entries include complete cast and crew lists, plot summaries, production history and analysis. An appendix covers Italian made-for-TV films and mini-series.

At the book’s core are recurring concerns including: the boundaries of the human; rational and irrational forces; fears and dreams; ‘the uncanny’ and transitions between the wilds and civilization. While chronology shapes the book, it is thematically driven, with an interest in the cultural and political functions of fairytale and gothic horror, and the levels of transgression or social conformity at the heart of the films.

The genre of Gothic horror is selected for this purpose, given how this form of performance has transfixed audiences for centuries and has been adapted for both the stage and the screen. In order to demonstrate how each performance medium has produced its own unique set of foregrounding devices to enthral and captivate audiences, a comparative analysis of excerpts from the novel The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, a videotaped theatrical performance, and the 1989 British television film of the same name is undertaken. The paper discusses the implications of the multimodal semiotic approach for developing a better understanding of the semiotic transformations that horror genre conventions undergo in different media and the viewership positions that are thus re-drawn for audiences. The paper concludes with a view of multimodal recontextualisation processes which form the underlying basis of human sociocultural life.

By holding the two film versions up against Jackson's novel, it can be determined how each of them managed or failed to provide audiovisual analogues for the innovative literary techniques that Jackson employed to horrify her readers.

Drawing on previous literature examining the “narrative” role of colour and lighting that lies at the heart of German Expressionism and interacting with Anthony Vidler’s analysis of architecture and décor as embodiment of states of the body and states of the mind through the geometries of the setting, this article discusses how Argento’s use of a highly artificial colour palette and references to Art Deco and Art Nouveau in Suspiria are granted the same “expressionist” function, both acting as projections of metaphorical bodily and mental types within the film to such an extent as to determine the progress of the story itself as well as to articulate its various subtleties.

This article examines mutes and acousmêtres in Persona and Hour of the Wolf, and how the quality of their voices or, indeed, their silence, aids them in articulating their identities and manipulating and tyrannizing those around them. Bergman's characters threaten to destabilize the narrative if and when they find their bodies and/or voices, and thus maintain an ominous power as they straddle diegetic and non-diegetic aural space.

This article examines mutes and acousmêtres in Persona and Hour of the Wolf, and how the quality of their voices or, indeed, their silence, aids them in articulating their identities and manipulating and tyrannizing those around them. Bergman's characters threaten to destabilize the narrative if and when they find their bodies and/or voices, and thus maintain an ominous power as they straddle diegetic and non-diegetic aural space.