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In the first half of Girl with a Suitcase, 16-year-old Lorenzo (Jacques Perrin) looks after the showgirl, Aida (Claudia Cardinale), whom his older brother, Marcello (Corrado Pani), promised to help before cruelly and casually ditching her during a road trip. Unaware that Lorenzo is Marcello’s little brother, Aida accepts his kindness at face value, knowing that doing so may cause him to become emotionally attached to her, but, exhausted and embittered, she can’t resist the reprieve of a young man actually treating her with warmth and tenderness.

Throughout Girl with a Suitcase, the filmmakers use an array of wide shots to elucidate the feelings of alienation and isolation that grip the characters by surrounding them with negative space, and in settings ranging from the immense rooms in Lorenzo’s parents’ mansion to sparsely populated seaside locales. Via meticulous compositions and Perrin and Cardinale’s empathetic performances, the film...

The Frightened Woman aka Femina Ridens [Limited Numbered Edition, Region Free]

The director of The Frightened Woman, Piero Schivazappa, praised the version released by Shameless – saying: “..this is the version which you should watch” – when Shameless initially reconstructed and released this version, revealing the film as he’d originally intended. This is the version which is now presented on Blu-ray – pristinely restored from a 4K scan – finally doing justice to the exuberant 60s pop-art images and set design.

This definitive edition is further enhanced by a unique new interview with the iconic Dagmar Lassander where she relates the groundbreaking and provocative nature of the film.

The captivating Dagmar Lassander shines as Maria, a young journalist working for Dr. Sayer (Philippe Leroy), the head of a philanthropic foundation with peculiar views on humanity’s issues. When Maria is drugged and imprisoned by Dr. Sayer, she is subjected to increasingly sadistic acts by her captor, but she...

The final part in our series on Forgotten Gialli

My problem with the misogyny that runs through the giallo genre is not so much that it's there, but that it's so often unexamined. At least Sam Peckinpah's films seem to tell me something about the demons of insecurity, paranoia and loathing infesting his mind. I'm frustrated, for instance, that Dario Argento has portrayed the graphic mutilation-murder of women in his films so frequently (his own leather-gloved hands doubling for those of the killer), without ever seeming to take much interest in why this subject seems to obsess him. "I love women," he has said, "therefore I would rather show a beautiful woman being killed than an ugly man." Is it just me, or does that statement open up questions, and even paradoxes? For a former critic, Argento seems disinclined to analyze things.

Not only do the films not actively interrogate their own violence,...

The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror By Donato Totaro

One of the more important, if not groundbreaking, accounts/recuperations of the horror film from a feminist perspective is the 1993 Carol Clover's "Men, Women, and Chainsaws". One of the book's major points concerns the structural positioning of what she calls the Final Girl in relation to spectatorship. While most theorists label the horror film as a male-driven/male-centered genre, Clover points out that in most horror films, especially the slasher film, the audience, male and female, is structurally 'forced' to identify with the resourceful young female (the Final Girl) who survives the serial attacker and usually ends the threat (until the sequel anyway.) So while the narratively dominant killer's subjective point of view may be male within the narrative,the male viewer is still rooting for the Final Girl to overcome the killer. We can see this...