I knew when I started this blogathon that I wanted to make sure I covered some stalwarts of the Italian horror subgenre. Everyone knows about Fulci and Argento (both have been covered with the first blogathon), but I always feel the urge to carry the torch for the lesser known, underappreciated Michele Soavi. Last blogathon I covered three of his four horror films –
Stagefright, Cemetery Man, and
The Church – and this year I knew I wanted to cover the other one: the much maligned
The Sect. I also knew that I wanted some of these posts to coalesce a little bit more than the previous blogathon, and so I found it natural to talk about this film in light of my piece on Lamberto Bava’s
Graveyard Disturbance, and how that film marked the end of bigger budget Italian horror movies. Made in 1991,
The Sect had a budget of 2 million dollars (actually quite large at the time for Italian horror movies) and wasn’t much of a success. The film clocks in at almost two hours and seems to take itself way more seriously than Italian horror films of the past. However, I’ve always liked the film and feel that it is unfairly maligned when you compare to the weak attempts by contemporaries Argento (
Trauma), Fulci (
Demonia), Deodato (
The Washing Machine), and Bava (
Mask of the Demon) around that same time. Soavi, when compared to his contemporaries, was actually making the most interesting and innovative Italian horror films at that time and was reminding people why the subgenre had such an avid cult following to begin with. In short: When Soavi came on the scene in 1987, he was the only making true Italian horror films (with one exception being Argento’s
Opera which was released in 1987).
