Page 123 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

in Italian horror so that our pleasure in the film is not through catharsis but a reflection upon what
desirable. Italian horror is a pleasure to look at but not through traditional paradigms
is conssidered
of what is considered pleasurable - Steele in The Mask of Satan as beautiful victim' with holes in
her face of whom we are frightened. Viscous coils of viscera, stitched flesh or even the saturation of
colout seduce in the later Italian gore films. These images offer pleasure without shock (I think here
specifically of films such as Il Mostro e in Tavola (Flesh for Frankenstein, Paul Morrissey/Antonio
Margheriti, 1974) which are shot beautifully, populated by beautiful people but are nonetheless
extremely gory). If the catharsis no longer prevails then we must ask, is psychoanalysis still the most
effective or interesting way to think of these films?
Thus the definition of 'fetish' as a cathartic repudiation may need to be refigured to address the
ambiguity of so-called 'fetish' figures such as Steele. A turn to French post-structuralism, in this
chapter to Lyotard, may help think this different form of fetishism and its reformulation of the viewer
and her/his pleasure. The choice of Radice will enhance the ambiguity in the suitability of choosing
a male through which to rethink fetishism while pragmatically offering an analysis of an ambiguous
male horror figure. I also wish to trouble the trace of psychoanalytic ptimacy of the male viewer by
offering a male who demands to be looked at (by both sexes).
Radice presents traumatised flesh that momentarily escapes the need to speak the problems
of gender in horror. Italian horror is frequently cited as misogynistic, yet ironically repetitive and
rudimentary representations of women are more frequently found in Hollywood horror, where
female characters resonate around a few stock types - sexualised victim, virginal last girl and
empowered (but masculinised) heroine. These versions of femininity necessarily oppose feminist
ethics to the pleasures of watching bodies in distress, because many horror films relish the deaths of
women because they are women. More so, the structuring of women as volitional and complex into
'types' fulfils certain expectations of femininity as both predictable and resolvable and hence their
fate performs a social catharsis akin to a modern morality play. Neither these representations nor
my unsatisfactotily simple reflection upon them addresses the pleasures of viewing extremes of the
body beyond a form of aggression. Taking a male actor's suffering can afford a masochistic rather
than a sadistic form of cinesexual pleasure if traditional gaze theory that anchors the act of looking
around a male viewer is employed. The focus on female death as either misogynistic or aesthetic is
an astonishing specularisation of women over that of male characters. Dario Argento's films are cited
repetitively as performing female aestheticisation of violence, yet his films include as many male
deaths that could be equally analysed as aesthetic. Additionally most of Atgento's murderers are
female characters, which would lend his films to a lesbian analysis of the pleasures of violence, yet
this analysis is yet to appear. It seems, then, that this is a blind spot not within the films but rather
the theoretical field.

THE MASOCHISTIC BODY: RETHINKING THE FLESH OF ITALIAN HORROR

The reason Italian hortor becomes scapegoated is perhaps due to its sacrifice of character and plot for a
celebration of the intensity of the flesh in various dishevelled and persecuted states. Extremity of gore
and flesh confounds the very meaning of the body beyond gender to infer bodies defined through the

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