Ti Piacerebbe Ascoltare Qualcosa Di Spaventoso?

It's that time of the year again, folks! Yup, I'm still not a huge Halloween fan and won't dress up for these shenanigans, but give me a good excuse to post something horror-related and the One Buck Guy is in. Last year's collection of scary music (freshly re-upped recently)

Italian music to horror films is a little like the films itself: an aquired taste. The best of Italian genre cinema is among the greatest in at least two genres: the Western and the horror film. Sergio Leone alone is responsible for at least two of the greatest Westerns of all time. In horror, the Italian genre films benefitted from a certain gonzo freewheeling approach that emphasized atmosphere and set pieces over things such as plot, character motivations or coherence. This was even more pronounced in the very Italian subgenre of the giallo ('yellow', like the covers of the dime-store sensationalist crime novels they meant to imitate), which were technically thrillers and crime films, but often extremely horror-adjacent, with heavy body counts and elaborate kill scenes that precede the slasher film's emphasis on them. 

He doesn't need a mask to be scary...

Given their predilection for a certain type of illogical logic and 'whatever pleases' style excursions, it should come as no surprise that the music accompanying these films are also somewhat...ecclectic. Of course no Italian film music compilation would be complete without the late, great Ennio Morricone, il maestro, but we also have such unexpected artists as Bill Wyman and Keith Emerson, both supporting Dario Argento movies. The other big name for Italian horror films cores, especially if you are familiar with Dario Argento's movies, is Goblin. Goblin were little known early 70s prog rockers before Argento drafted them in to do the music for his last (at the time) Giallo, Profondo Rosso (Deep Red), and then his first supernatural horror film, the classic Suspiria. Afterwards, head Goblin Claudio Simonetti stayed on to score most of Dario Argento's movies in some capacity. 

One other thing that was distinctly Italian was re-scoring import movies for the domestic market. Aussie exploitation film Patrick got a new score courtesy of - you guessed it - Goblin, and so did George A Romero's modern classic Dawn Of The Dead, recut and shortened by none other than Dario Argento for the European market and retitled Zombie. Where Romero mainly used stock public domain library music for budget reasons, wilfully or accidentally emphasizing even more the film's ironic sheen, Goblin's new score - like Argento's cut - accentuated the film's action and suspense. 

"One way...or another...we're gonna find ya...we're gonna getcha getcha getcha..."

So, folks, time for an Italian vacation, a Roman holiday maybe, just for All Hallow's Eve. Enjoy some scary music à l'Italia...