10 Of my Fave Italian Horror Films

1. The Beyond (1981)

The New yorker Liza Merril inherits an old hotel in Louisiana, and invests her savings to reopen the place. While repairing the building, many people dies, and local Dr. John McCabe feels close to Liza and tries to help her to solve the mystery of the hotel. Meanwhile, Emily, a blind woman, advises Liza to leave the place as soon as possible. Later they realize that the place is one gate of hell and has been opened, permitting the dead walk on Earth.

2. Porno Holocaust (1981)

A group of castaways wash ashore on a deserted island in this Italian sex/gore movie. They are unaware that a sex-crazed radioactive monster is also on the island. He attacks and rapes several of the women, who die horrible deaths because his sperm is radioactive. The survivors must find a way to either escape the island or kill the monster.

3. Chi L’ha Vista Morire?/ Who Saw Her Die? (1972)

A young girl is brutally murdered somewhere in France. Sometime later, the same thing happens to the daughter of a well-known sculptor. This time the parents (the sculptor and his wife) start investigating, and soon find they are in way over their head. Meanwhile, the body-count keeps rising as the killer now starts butchering all those who find out too much...

4. Gatti Rossi In Un Labirinto Di Vetro (1975)

Killer in red cape and hood is killing off tourists on a tour bus by gouging out their eyeballs.

5. Innocent Blood (1992)

Marie, a female vampire with a conscience, decides to restrict her feeding requirements to the violent Pittsburgh gangsters who are at large in the city. Marie's victims become vampires themselves if she fails to permanently immobilise them, so when this happens, the gangsters become a serious problem which she has to fix.

6. L’ultimo Squalo/ The Last Shark (1981)

An enormous and angry 35 foot Great White Shark takes revenge on humans when they build a beach just for swimmers by a coastal town. After several shark attacks, and the Mayor does nothing to stop it, James Franisscus and Vic Morrow sail in pursuit to stop it.

7. La Casa Dalle Finestre Che Ridono /The House With The Laughing Windows (1976)

Stefano, a young restorer is commissioned to save a fresco representing the suffering of St. Sebastiano. The fresco painter was Legnani, and the fresco is his last work. Legnani apparently was mentally disturbed. He was used to paint people close to die or in agony. These facts together with the strange atmosphere that surround this village near Ferrara, in the north of Italy, contribute to put Stefano in a nightmare reality. Soon reality will change into horror.

8. Trauma (1993)

An anorexic young woman escapes from a psychiatric clinic and meets a young man who wants to help. She is caught and returned to her parents, who are soon beheaded by a garrotting stranger making the rounds about town, apparently striking only when it rains. The orphaned young woman and her new lover launch their own investigation and are endangered when a link is discovered with the victims and a particular operation performed years before.

9. Malabimba (1979)

The Karoli family is a rich, stuck up clan that’s lived in their castle for three centuries. The occupants of the castle are Andrea (Enzo Fisichella) and his daughter, Malabimba (Katell Laennec), along with Andrea’s mother, his paralysed brother and sister in law, Nais (Patrizia Webley). Tragedy has struck the family and Andrea’s wife has passed away, leaving Malabimba without a mother. A medium is called in to try to contact the spirit of the deceased woman, but things suddenly take a turn for the worse. Rather than connecting with the good spirit of Malabimba’s mother, they enrage the spirit of Lucrezia Karoli, the black sheep of the family who was either killed by a lover (of which, we are told, she had many) or committed suicide. The medium flips out and collapses on the table, her body taken over by Lucrezia and people present at the séance lose their tops and are violated by this horny entity.

10. Phenomena (1985)

Someone is killing people in a Swiss village, and then a girl with insect empathy shows up and helps the local entomologist try to solve the mystery.