The Female Vampires and the Uncanny Childhood

Abstract

By referring to some of the major movies by Riccardo Freda, Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci, the author discusses some of the recurrent themes of Italian Gothic cinema from the Fifties to the Seventies. Far from the political horror directed in the same years by American directors such as Romero, Italians seemed to be more interested in the European literary tradition of the Gothic (e.g. Hoffman and Poe), and infused their movies with psychoanalytical issues. Based on this premise, in his essay the author focuses on the figure of the vampire, which he interprets as symbolic of otherness; on the ghost, as alluding to the ungovernable forces of the unconscious; and on the figure of the child as emblematic of an unknown and uncanny dimension of human life.