The design of fear
From the villas of Gio Ponti and Nanda Vigo to Dario Argento’s beloved Art Deco and Liberty. The invention of the Italian way to horror cinema unfolds through design and architecture.
Distinguished black-gloved serial killers, wearing light-coloured overcoats, wide-brimmed hats, and walking briskly through the darkness. What horror film would be complete without this unmistakable trope? And what would horror cinema be without its iconic figures like It, Jason from Friday the 13th, and Freddy Krueger? Many of these quintessential characters, shaping our collective imagination of fear, owe their origins to Italian cinema. The horror and Giallo genres, in particular, have been instrumental in a stylistic revolution that has left a lasting impact on iconography and continues to inspire countless cult films and directors.
Even Quentin Tarantino, who is wildly enamoured with this style, has often said that Mario Bava was a pioneer, bringing a previously unimaginable sense of lyricism to horror cinema.
In the film, Bava’s mastery and that of makeup artist Francesco Freda are evident in the scene where the character played by Gianna Maria Canale ages rapidly, achieved without any camera cuts. Bava, by using coloured gels applied in front of the lens and taking advantage of the different amounts of light filtered (which would otherwise be invisible in black-and-white film), gradually reveals the various layers of makeup applied to the woman’s face, with a terrifying and unprecedented result for the time.
A handful of years later, in 1964, a now-established Bava directed the charmingly-titled Blood and Black Lace. It is this very sophistication, this unprecedented combination of violence and glamour, that sparked the modernist revolution in Italian horror cinema. Not only did Bava surprise audiences by shedding the outdated gothic motifs of horror cinema and setting his story in a high-fashion boutique in Paris, but he also introduced another crucial innovation. This is hinted at in the opening titles, where Carlo Rustichelli’s jazz score for CAM punctuates the camera’s movement among the enigmatic red velvet mannequins in the boutique.
Here, Bava introduces what could be described as the “aesthetic of murder” – the ability to stylise bloody scenes to such an extent that they are drained of violence and sadism, which are relegated to the background, elevating the act to a pure and sublime stylistic gesture. Bava had already hinted at this lesson the previous year in The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), and it would go on to inspire two other masters of the genre: the globally renowned Italian filmmaker Dario Argento and John Carpenter.
Bava’s second great innovation was the creation of the assassin’s uniform—trench coat, hat, and concealed face—an unmistakable trope today but something never seen before then. These iconographic elements, along with the telephone’s trill, the knife’s blade gleaming in the dark, the stealthy, ominous footsteps of black cats, the wide-eyed terror of the victims, and the unmistakable cries of despair and helplessness, all contribute to shaping the coherent and innovative design of Italian horror. Beyond the cinematographic technique, it is undoubtedly the hallmark of Italian taste—whether in fashion and costumes or design and interiors—that distinguishes and continues to make our horror films beloved today. This goes hand in hand with the desire of screenwriters and directors to bring contemporary relevance to horror cinema through its themes. The supernatural elements of popular legends merge with true crime, introducing sadism, perversion, and morbidity into the genre. The murderer is no longer a figure from the past but an unsuspecting neighbour turned serial killer. Likewise, the setting shifts from gothic to urban.
It is precisely the balance that emerged from the late 1960s between the gothic and modernist dimensions that defines one of the most distinctive and beloved characteristics of Italian horror and Giallo cinema. This balance is also reflected in the soundtracks of these films, which oscillate between contemporary experimentation – fuzzy psychedelia, ethereal easy listening vocals, and pioneering electronics – and gothic elements, manifested through the revival of baroque instruments (such as the harpsichord) in line with popular music from the late ’60s to early ’70s.

The perfect example, both stylistically and sonically, is The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971), directed by the elusive Emilio P. Miraglia, who also created another milestone of the genre: The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, with both soundtracks included in the CAM Sugar PAURA collection. The film’s settings alternate between environments typical of gothic horror and others that celebrate the innovative Italian design of the early 1970s, as groundbreaking as Miraglia’s films themselves. One of the locations chosen by the director was the Beetle under the leaf villa, designed between 1964 and 1968 by Gio Ponti and Nanda Vigo in the woods of Malo, in the province of Vicenza. The building was originally a project offered by Ponti to his readers in the pages of Domus. Among them, collector Giobatta Meneguzzo accepted the challenge, financing the work for a private residence that could also house his art collection. Nanda Vigo, who had already collaborated with the designer and was developing her distinctive style at the time, was responsible for the interiors.
The result is a truly unique house. While the building’s shape embraces Ponti’s slender, Le Corbusier-inspired design – resembling, as the name suggests, the silhouette of a beetle with an elliptical leaf-shaped roof – the interiors are a manifesto of Vigo’s style. The strictly white 20×20 cm stoneware tiles create an unsettling and immersive effect, further enhanced by the chronotopic environments – Vigo’s signature optical surface sculptures. The clinical, kinetic whiteness of Vigo’s walls – adorned with works such as Raymond Hains Seita matchstick series, as well as pieces by Baj, Schifano, Rotella, and the Zero Group, among others – becomes the perfect canvas to highlight the film’s contrasting splashes of blood. It’s no surprise that, in the following years, other projects by the designer would be used as sets for Italian films that challenged visual and cinematic perceptions of the time. Examples include Casa Gialla (Yellow House) in L’Assassino è costretto ad uccidere ancora (1975) and Casa Blu (Blue House) in Milano rovente (1973).
Also in the province of Vicenza, in Thiene, stands Villa Ponte Colleoni, the castle that represents the gothic part of the setting. Here, too, modernist elements can be found, such as the Brionvega television set, contrasting with the opulent halls and the film’s sapphic scenes, in line with the Sacher-Masoch revivalism celebrated by the popular forbidden magazines of the time.

Miraglia’s taste echoes in the early films of Dario Argento’s so-called Animal Trilogy, which would ultimately consolidate the peculiarities of spaghetti horror, as it would be nicknamed by Americans who adored the genre. Like Miraglia and Bava, Argento also pursued the same tension between stylistic elements. The art gallery in the first murder of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and the interiors of the villa of the young musicians in Four Flies on Grey Velvet find their counterpart in the spectral Art Nouveau and Liberty style that Argento is fond of.
Argento sought these stylistic elements in the architecture of Turin – the Italian esoteric city par excellence – such as in Villa Scott, designed by Pietro Fenoglio, for Deep Red (1975), and in his Rome, in the eclectic Coppedè district. The unfinished project, conceived by Gino Coppedè, also served as the set for another Italian cult horror film, The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974) by Francesco Barilli. Art Deco once again took centre stage in Suspiria (1977) thanks to Giuseppe Bassan’s set design, where elements like doors, glass surfaces, and carpets became subliminal and crucial components of the narrative.
These architectural solutions and stylistic innovations celebrate the connection between Italian horror and modernist design, and, above all, the intention to strip violence of its more sadistic connotations, elevating it to an absolute artistic work.

Opening image: Blood and Black Lace (1964), Mario Bava, frame from the film.