![]() ![]() If I were to follow this line I would suggest that Lucio Fulci’s films, especially …E tu Vivrai nel Terrore. I do not wish to retain the signifier woman in order to vindicate the genre because these films include Barbara Steele as at least a strong heroine in a stereotypically male genre. Hichcock, 1962) and Corman’s sharp angles and lurid colour ( The Pit and the Pendulum, 1961). Barbara Steele is less important than, for example a) the things that seem to continually happen around her (gothic landscapes, baroque tales of sexual depravity and death) or b) the ways in which she is filmed, such as Bava’s chiaroscuro and misty close-ups, Freda’s framing of the terrorised face ( L’Orribile Segreto dei Dr Hichcock/ The Terrible Secret of Dr. The third problem is that, as a woman who herself is, among many, enthralled by Steele’s face, I do not visually relate to the signifier Barbara Steele per se, so much as to the particular quality and intensity with which her image, like many other images, whether of bodies, landscapes or even sound-images, affects me as viewer. The second problem is the need for any form of delirious cinematic pleasure – cinesexuality – to be transcribed into an established sexual neurosis at all. The first is the way in which bodies in cinema, and specifically women’s faces, have been subsumed by their capacity to signify, not ‘real’ women per se, but a palpable incarnation of male fantasy, specifically male fetishism. ![]() (1) Hardy’s devotional statement resonates with three major problems that persistently haunt women in film. Barbara Steele’s image, particularly as the reanimated Asa, replete with holes in her face from the hammering of a spiked mask into the witch, is, in the words of Phil Hardy “more than any other, the emblem and fetish of the genre”. One image haunts the history of Italian horror cinema more than any other – the face of Barbara Steele in La Maschera del Demonio. This desire for the strange, impossible and corporeal within the texture of celluloid I have termed cinesexuality – sexuality of and for the cinema. I will not be discussing what happens in Steele’s films but how her image affects her fans. Key to my argument is thinking desire for cinematic images independent of sexual orientation, oriented purely toward the imagetic. ![]() The film concerns the heretic witch Asa (Steele) burned at the stake and tortured with a spiked mask, before being reincarnated years later to haunt her young ancestor Katja (also Steele) whom she resembles. This essay will explore post-fetishistic desire in Italian horror cinema as elicited by British actress Barbara Steele in Mario Bava’s La Maschera del Demonio ( Black Sunday/The Revenge of the Vampire, 1960). ![]()
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