Marco Malvestio
Italian literature is rarely associated with horror. Surely, Italy is associated with the genre: after all, the country was one of the favorite settings of Gothic novels for at least a century, from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860). At the same time, Italian horror cinema (under the various labels of Gothic, giallo, cannibale, and so forth) is a persistent presence in the imagination of the fans of the genre, with several of its masterpieces reaching cult status. Who could deny that the work of auteurs like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci is as important as that of their Anglo-American counterparts? Yet, when it comes to fiction, most readers would be unable to name an Italian horror writer or literary work. The Italian literary tradition has tended to undervalue expressions of popular genres like horror in favor of a more highbrow, intellectual form, like the Todorovian fantastic, and this has resulted in an exclusion of this genre from the national canon.
In this context, the decision of Valancourt Books to publish a selection of the works of Luigi Musolino, A Different Darkness, is a pleasant surprise. Born in 1982, Musolino is relatively well-known within the small world of Italian horror aficionados, but he is far from being a famous author in the traditional sense of the term: his work mostly appeared with independent publishers (Acheron, Zona 42, Edizioni Hypnos), and while it was well received among fans, horror fandom is only a small niche in the Italian literary market. Yet, Musolino has been actively circulating his fiction in the foreign market as well, and his work has appeared in the United States, Canada, Ireland and South Africa. A Different Darkness, which Valancourt Books published in 2022, collects some of Musolino’s best short stories, as part of the publisher’s ongoing effort to bring voices from underrepresented literatures to English-speaking readers (an effort best exemplified by the anthology series Books of World Horror Stories, in which some of Musolino’s pieces originally appeared). This article discusses Musolino’s work, and the complex reality and reception of contemporary Italian horror, while attempting to answer some crucial questions: how uniquely “Italian” is Italian horror today? In what sense is Musolino’s work folk horror – and what do we mean by the “folk” in folk horror? What commercial strategies guide the policies of translation of foreign horror fiction in the American context?
The most consistent part of Musolino’s production could be labelled as folk horror, one of the most popular subgenres in recent horror fiction. Often set in the author’s native Piedmont or taking up the local folklore of other Italian regions, Musolino’s work exhibits the opposition between modernity’s urban life and the traditional ways of rural communities that is at the core of folk horror; at the same time, it presents the Italian countryside as a liminal space where repressed psychological and social issues can come to light in horrific form. While folk horror as a subgenre has been theorized largely on the basis of its British and (later) American examples, Italian classics such as Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972) or Pupi Avati’s The House with the Laughing Windows (1976) are being re-read as examples of this vogue (see Malvestio). Indeed, Italy’s complicated history of modernization (which took place, in a rather traumatic way, from the 1950s onwards) occupies a crucial place in the imagination of Italian horror cinema of the 1960s and the 1970s, and the conflict between modernity and tradition, urban and (disappearing) rural life is a recurring theme.
The recent resurgence of this subgenre, however, is mostly a British and American affair. In the last ten years, movies such as Robert Eggers’s The VVitch (2015) and Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) were both commercial and critical successes, helping folk horror’s ascendency in shaping contemporary horror imagery. The subgenre’s distinctive opposition between tradition and modernity, urban and rural areas, community and individualism has also provided countless artists and critics with the tools to address the traumatic changes of the Anthropocene and to explore the ecophobia underlying our culture’s relationship with the environment. However, since folk horror has been codified in an Anglo-American context, its forms and tropes largely depend on the traditions, landscapes, and cultural expectations that belong to a limited part of Western culture. The culture and the landscapes depicted in The VVitch, for instance, are specific to American history (one shaped by religious fundamentalism and an antagonistic relationship with the ‘wilderness’ – a word that, as William Cronon shows, is heavily embedded in ideology). The export of this specific subgenre outside the Anglosphere always comes with a risk of homogenization. Those who are familiar with Italian environmental history know that, despite its many beautiful landscapes, Italy is not a country of wilderness, but rather one of ancient and widespread anthropic impact: while a third of Italy’s territory is covered in forests, for instance, only a small fraction of these are old-growth forests, the rest being artificial.
In his preface to A Different Darkness, writer Brian Evenson argues that Musolino’s “horrors are decidedly Italian. Not only Italian: many of these stories could only take place at the foot of the Alps” (8). But is it really so? While Musolino’s work ostensibly exhibits an Italian rural setting, its imagery is often shaped by the influences of Anglo-American folk horror fiction and film, rather than by specific Italian traditions or, more importantly, social and environmental issues. In his two-volume short story collection Oscure regioni [Dark Regions] (2015-2016), Musolino embarked on the enterprise of writing a horror story for each Italian region, and several of the stories included in A Different Darkness come from this collection. Such an ambitious aim must sound particularly appealing to foreign readers, as it offers a simultaneously comprehensive and place-based gaze on the country and its many different landscapes. Indeed, it is a laudable effort to investigate the darker corners that official narrations of the Belpaese leave behind and to dwell in what Fabio Camilletti defined as Italia lunare [lunar Italy] – the hidden, occult, irrational dimension of a country that perceives itself, on the contrary, as rational and measured. However, at times, one has the feeling that, rather than trying to depict the specificities of a country through the lens of horror, Musolino is offering readers a tourist guide of some picturesque corners of Italy. In “The Queen of the Sewers,” for instance, the Chiana Valley (laying between Tuscany and Umbria) is presented as a remote, rural corner of the country, while it is in fact one of the most popular tourist destinations in Italy. Similarly, the Aosta valley of “Les Abominations des Altitudes” (one of the most renowned skiing destinations in the country) makes little reference to international tourism and to the over-crowdedness this industry brings to the natural areas of the region.
These purposedly “typical” stories are the ones that American readers might like most, and that Italian readers might find less convincing. “The Carnival of the Stag Man,” for instance, features a real local tradition, the “carnival” of Castelnuovo al Volturno, a small town in the remote Molise region: in the story, the deer-man at the center of the carnival is not just a symbol of the natural world but rather a real creature that awakens every few years to exact a deadly toll. Yet, Musolino is less interested in conveying the sense of place of this particular region and the deep chronology of its ancestral rite than he is in making it resonate with readers accustomed to classics of horror fiction such as Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo” (1910), set in the forests of Northwestern Ontario, or Adam Nevill’s bestseller The Ritual (2011), set in Sweden. As in these fictions, a protagonist is lost in a vast, oppressive natural landscape with a bloodthirsty creature on the loose. The harsh rural area of Molise, an economically depressed and socially degraded region of Italy, is transformed into a generic, non-descriptive horror setting that will surely sound familiar to American readers – but perhaps too familiar to them for it to convey anything distinctively authentic about the region. Already-known models are projected onto an exotic setting, which, however, are rendered less exotic by modelling them according to familiar literary and cinematic models, regardless the fact that they have been conceived for wholly different places.
This is not to say, of course, that Musolino’s stories are not of exceptional quality – both in the Italian and the international context. His prose is dry but effective, his sense of narrative rhythm almost always impeccable, and his reticence in openly describing the horrid and the macabre is to be praised. What is fascinating to notice is the ways in which his work often appears to be purified of its most typical regional elements – either to appeal to a foreign audience or because Musolino himself is not interested in exploring them. In this sense, it is appropriate to discuss Musolino’s work by framing it within Glennis Byron’s concept of “Globalgothic” (2013). Globalgothic is a category aimed at describing the increasing globalization and undifferentiation of the Gothic, notably the appropriation of local traditions and tropes within the frame of a globalized market and production system, which Byron describes as a “Mcglobal-Mcgothic monoculture” (2-3). In this sense, Musolino’s failure to capture the specificities of his country could hardly be considered his fault: it is, on the contrary, the result of a general tendency to homogenization in the sphere of contemporary horror, and, indeed, contemporary culture at large.
At the same time, however, the Globalgothic is a category that investigates “whether globalization itself was being represented in gothic terms, with traditional gothic tropes being reformulated to engage with the anxieties produced by the breakdown of national and cultural boundaries” (2). In relation to this, another question comes to mind, one that might not occur to a foreign reader: what if the bland Italianness of Musolino’s stories was, indeed, their most distinctively Italian feature? What I mean by this apparently paradoxical remark is that, as a globalized country that underwent rapid and dramatic changes in the post-war years, Italy has progressively lost much of its cultural and environmental diversity. As much as tourists like to picture Italy as an archaic place of ancient traditions and picturesque small villages, the country is also an advanced industrial economy and hosts some of the largest metropolitan areas in Europe. Indeed, Musolino is at his best when he describes the non-places of the Po Valley – what Monica Seger calls “interstitial landscapes,” spaces caught between the remnants of traditional ways of life and the explosion of urban sprawl and industrialization.
This particular kind of landscape features in what is perhaps the most evocative of the stories in this collection, “Uironda.” In the story, a truck driver takes a highway exit to a different world, and ends up in the mysterious region of Uironda, a place of horror and terror. Set in the crowded A4 highway, one of Italy’s most important commercial routes, “Uironda” does not depict any of the specific Italian regions explored in the other stories, but rather the alienated and alienating landscape of a post-industrial country. In this sense, “Uironda” perfectly encapsulates the idea of Globalgothic as a response to the globalization of the country: the hallucinatory dimension of the story is simultaneously an homage to the weird tradition of authors like Thomas Ligotti and a commentary on the brutality of the transport industry, which Musolino depicts without holding anything back: “His existence had become a journey without a destination, a succession of streets leading nowhere. Stinking truck stops, packaged cookies, urinals, high-beam headlights, cigarettes, showers, anti-wart slip-on shoes, pitiful meals, dismal thoughts, Little Trees air freshener, rest areas” (55).
Similarly, “Like Dogs” (a story of domestic abuse set in a degraded rural area outside Turin) depicts a landscape merging suburban expansion and agriculture. While attempting to present the town in which the story is set as isolated, in line with the poetics of folk horror – “A corner of Piedmont untouched by modern life” (169) – Musolino also comments that this archaicity is due to the fact that “everything is just like it was thirty years ago” (169), which is to say, like it was in the years following the economic boom and the environmental devastations it brought to the rural areas of Northern Italy. The horrors of this story are not those of a postcard-like archaic past one might read about in a Lonely Planet, but rather the ones brought on by the reckless modernization of the country and by the diffusion of industrial farming.
The countryside around Turin is also the setting of “Black Hills of Torment,” one of the most powerful stories of the collection, pivoting on a small, isolated town that is plagued by a series of gruesome events born from the imagination of a lonely teenager and manifesting in the real world. While the story’s main concern is the relationship between the community and the individual who creates the horrors, Musolino aptly mobilizes the degradation of the local landscape to convey a sense of general decay: “‘The hills are contaminating the town. Like an infection. It’s like everything is rotting but also alive in a different way,’ Eraldo told me one day as he showed me some ivy growing in his yard on the northern edge of Orlasco. The leaves were withered, almost dead, full of dark and gangrenous veins, and yet they moved slightly, with the vagueness of an optical effect, the undulation of a mirage, opening and closing like macabre vegetal hands” (133). Here, Musolino is not simply reprising some horror tropes, but rather he is commenting on the consistent environmental decay of the countryside of Northern Italy. The notion that the hills “are contaminating the town” hints to the widespread air and land pollution of that part of Italy (one of the most polluted in the entire continent), while the image of a landscape that is “alive in a different way” closely recalls Amitav Ghosh’s remarks about the agency of nature that reveals itself in the extreme weather events characterizing the Anthropocene: “Who can forget those moments when something that seems inanimate turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive?” Ghosh writes in the opening paragraph of The Great Derangement (8). It is precisely in this kind of evocative, atmospheric passages that one can find the real power of Musolino’s fiction, which is able to dramatize the slow, attritional violence (Nixon 2) characterizing environmental degradation in contemporary Italy.
Works Cited
Byron, Glennis. Introduction. Globalgothic, edited by Glennis Byron, Manchester University Press, 2013, pp. 1-10.
Camilletti, Fabio. Italia lunare. Gli anni Sessanta e l’occulto. Peter Lang, 2018.
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History, vol. 1, no. 1, 1996, pp. 7-28.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Penguin Books, 2016. Kindle edition.
Malvestio, Marco. “Catholicism, Unification and Liminal Landscape in Italian Folk Horror Cinema.” Folk Horror: New Global Pathways, edited by Dawn Keetley and Ruth Heholt, University of Wales Press, 2023, pp. 213-27.
Musolino, Luigi. A Different Darkness. Translated by James D. Jenkins. Valancourt Books, 2022.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Seger, Monica. Landscapes in Between. Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film. University of Toronto Press, 2015.
