Movie Reviews for Writers: Ubaldo Terzani Horror Show
I’ve been rediscovering Giallo works that I managed to miss somehow, and this is one of those beautiful films that blurs the lines between horror and Giallo.
Horror movie director Alessio is a talented visual storyteller but not as talented when it comes to writing the story he uses the camera to tell. So his producer hooks him up with master horror writer Ubaldo Terzani, the author of many bestselling scary novels.
Immediately, Alessio picks up a full run of Ubaldo’s work, and finds himself thoroughly engrossed in them. When he first meets the master, his first question is the obvious one:
Alessio: How do you write books with such realistic horror? I mean your stories are creepy. They have a concreteness that you do not find in the pages of any other writer of this genre.
Ubaldo: Maybe because the others are amateur. (Ubaldo laughs)
Alessio: Come on, seriously.
Ubaldo: Look. I know horror because I go deep into it to look. I make pacts with my ghosts. I speak to them daily. It’s as if I am my right eye and they are my left eye.
Alessio: That’s a vague explanation.
Ubaldo: Then try to be more precise. What else do you want to know?
Alessio: I don’t know. Perhaps there is something that inspires you. For example, perhaps your crude scenes were assisted by observing autopsies.
Ubaldo: Autopsies. No, there are the easy way out that I willingly leave to the mediocre writers like Clive Barker (Ubaldo laughs). There’s no need for the help of observing autopsies to know horror. The horror is inside of you. It is deep down inside of you where you have to look to pull it out and then work with fantasy. To achieve excellence, we have to destroy the common belief that in order to write certain stories we have to give them directly. there is nothing more false.
It’s clearly the more spiritual, more magical, more “art” side of writing rather than the practical, the day-in-day-out, the “craft” side of writing. I know and love authors from both sides of this. I have writer friends who define what they do as some kind of intrinsic, born-with-it art with a capital A. I have writer friends who believe that it’s nothing more than a learned and practiced skill set that comes with diligent work. And I have lots of writer friends who believe in a combination of the two extremes.
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