TORONTO – Fans of the Italian Horror subgenre known as “Giallo Films” might view “A Classic Horror Story” as a pastiche of the 1960s murder mystery films. Giallo films were highly stylized and usually ultraviolent for their time – enjoying a heyday from the mid 60s to the late 70s. Filmmakers like Argento, Bava and Fulci who made films like “Suspiria”, “Blood and Black Lace” and “Zombie” arguably paved the way for the American Slasher films of the early eighties – and later the 90s neo-noir films of Tarantino and De Palma. 

Film historians will know that the term Giallo is derived from the Gialli Mondadori book series of the 1930s, which were mostly translations of Anglo-American crime literature. Fast-forward to Netflix’s release of “A Classic Horror Story” by Roberto De Feo and Paolo Strippoli, and you have a horror film that’s inevitably mimetic of the genre’s seminal works – making it a “classic horror story”.

The gruesome opening scene, scored to Gino Paoli’s love serenade “Il Cielo in Una Stanza”, follows the Killer’s feet across a cabin floor as he drags a mallet toward his chained-up victim. A cutaway to the story’s beginning then introduces the viewer to the film’s protagonist Elisa (Matilda Lutz), a despondent woman on her way to Southern Italy to perform an abortion – only she’s chosen to car pool with a group of strangers through a ride share app.

It’s a predictable device to ensure eventual mayhem, as the Camper inevitably crashes and the travelers wind up in a forest inhabited by sinister forces. In the aftermath and amidst the confusion, the driver mentions that he’s seen “an American movie where people ended up in Purgatory and didn’t realize it. They were trapped. They wake up in the same place, or get off on one floor and always wind up where they started”.

It’s an intriguing setup for a film that borrows from some of the genre’s best works, while adding ideas that only 21st century audiences could appreciate. Ultimately, the film’s backbone is an arresting performance by the [always] saccharine yet sturdy Matilda Lutz, an actress whose roles have ranged from 16th century Simonetta Vespucci to a Rambo-esque girlfriend in “Revenge”. It’s through Lutz that the viewer navigates the torturous journey, which as it unfolds, generates more questions than it does answers.

The film is not for the faint of heart as the killing is invariably gory – worthy of the worst descriptions of medieval torture methods. Thankfully the Directors never quite shove the audience’s face in it, but the implications are brutal enough for the squeamish.

Despite this, “A Classic Horror Story” is not merely a horror highjinks. It has something resonant to say about violence, and says it with great respect to the Giallo genre. At the time of making the film, “True Crime” as a genre was the most popular topic for podcasts in America, according to a Pew Research Center Study from April 1 to Sept. 30, 2022. The film if nothing else is a commentary on that very obsession – with a finale that sadly portends to a grim future for humankind.

Watch “A Classic Horror Story” on Netflix

Photos courtesy of Colorado Film 

Massimo Volpe is a filmmaker and freelance writer from Toronto: he writes reviews of Italian films/content on Netflix