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| Images courtesy of MVD Entertainment Group |
It is said that the Golden Age of Italian horror jump
started by Mario Bava in the late 1950s throughout the 1960s really began in
the mid-1970s with the emergence of such directors as Dario Argento, Sergio
Martino and Lucio Fulci. As evidenced by
former Michele Soavi assistant director Claudio Lattanzi’s documentary film Il
Tempo Del Sogno – Dream Time chronicling the rise and fall of the subgenre
within Italy, that time has long since passed despite renewed interest in the
height of the Italian horror genre.
Something of an elongated love letter to a genre Italy took very
seriously until it was phased out in the mid-1990s, this documentary film is
both educational for newcomers and a real treat for longtime fans starved for
new content.
As companies like Vinegar Syndrome and Severin Films take
great pains to bring many of these supernatural-demonic gore-infused gialli
and/or genre thrillers to domestic viewership, Lattanzi and his camera traveled
throughout Italy to conduct newly filmed interviews with everyone from
directors Lamberto Bava, Luigi Cozzi and Michele Soavi to actresses Fiore
Argento, Marina Loi and Silvia Collatina and composers Fabio Frizzi and Claudio
Simonetti. All in a valiant painstakingly
thorough effort to try and make sense of why Lamberto Bava’s Demons is
considered both the high point and the coming of the end of the Italian horror
empire. Told with the framework of an
investigative horror film as interviewer and co-writer Davide Pulici skulks
about the Italian countryside or Roman city brushing with key figures of
Italy’s horror past.
Shot handsomely in crisp 4K digital by Marco Testani with original
music by Luigi Seviroli, Il Tempo Del Sogno – Dream Time is painterly
and picturesque as it navigates old warehouses of promotional materials and
Filmirage documentation, directors’ and/or actresses’ homes settling down for
interviews. At one point the camera
brushes through makeup artist Sergio Stivaletti’s workshop where we see masks
for Demons and The Church on display. Other times it moves in and out of Claudio
Simonetti’s or Fabio Frizzi’s music studios where they enjoy playing some
acoustic or keyboard renderings of some of their most famous tracks. Finally near the end an unlikely detail
emerges in conversation apparently Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci disliked each
other professionally and came very close to working together on a film that
ultimately went to Stivaletti instead.
One must wonder what a union between the two titans of 70s/80s Italian
horror would look and sound like.
Very much an Italian release translated for export release
later this summer, Il Tempo Del Sogno – Dream Time is at times too
academic and chatty but nevertheless sheds a lot of insight and detail onto an
area of world horror fans of the genre will eagerly eat up like ravenous
zombies. Detailed, sharp and a bit
exquisite in presentation, this tragicomic memoir and farewell to the subgenre
that put 70s-80s Italian horror cinema on the world map is at once joyful and
poignant. Davide Pulici’s a craggy if not
imposing figure for the film to follow but he’s perfectly suited to this
particular brand of Italian horror and serves as a great tour guide through
this still largely undiscovered netherworld of horror filmmaking.
--Andrew Kotwicki
