I have been a movie buff since childhood. I don’t remember exactly which film ignited in me a love for the seventh art, but I clearly remember the excitement of entering my first movie theater, where they were showing Rocky V. Although not a masterpiece, that experience was formative: Battleship Potëmkin would have aroused the same enthusiasm.
The defining moment for horror came in the summer of 1991, when I was seven years old, with Nightmare 2 on Italia 1, during “Horror Night.” Ecstatic, I devoured Hellraiser, Creepshow and especially Evil Dead, which terrified me to the point that I watched it twice on VHS during the day to conquer my fear. I plundered the local video store, entranced by the vivid and ominous posters, renting tapes until they wore out and sharing afternoons with (a few) friends who were fans like me. I began a collection of VHS, later transiting to DVD and Blu-ray for practical reasons, reaching over 1,500 titles, 1,000 of them horror.
In 2007 I founded a site (Hell of the Living Dead) for reviews, columns and interviews with directors, screenwriters, makeup artists and actors, cultivated via correspondence or during Italian festivals. This resulted in part-time professional collaborations with international publications such as Horror Show, Écran Fantastique, Fangoria, SciFiWorld, Scream, Virus and others, where I published articles and interviews of all kinds.
Fifteen years of film essays, international festivals, and contacts have generated an archive of nearly one hundred interviews (published and unpublished). The result is Horror Talks, an encyclopedic essay on modern horror that privileges behind-the-scenes stories, production anecdotes, creative challenges, technical innovations, and soundtracks, drawing on the voices of the filmmakers. I eschew subjective criticism in order to offer an objective narrative of seminal films that have marked audiences and filmmakers.
Following the publication of the two volumes (the first devoted to the 1970s and the second to the 1980s), the idea of creating a website of the same name was born.
