Fresh from taking home the best direction award at this year’s 67th edition of the Taormina Film Fest, Roberto De Feo and Paolo Strippoli’s unabashedly self-aware tribute to the Italian genre tradition, ‘A Classic Horror Story’ arrives on Netflix on 14th July.
Penned by De Feo and Strippoli, along with co-writers Lucio Besana, Milo Tissone, David Bellini, and starring Matilda Lutz, Francesco Russo, Peppino Mazzotta, Will Merrick and Yuliia Sobol, the film follows five car-poolers sharing an RV journey to reach a common destination. As bad luck would have it, they end up crashing into a tree in the middle fo a night only to regain consciousness in the middle a dense and impenetrable wood next to a mysterious wooden house with masked creatures depicted on paintings inside.
How did they get there? What really happened after the accident? And will the car-poolers be able to trust each other in order to escape this nightmare predicament?
With the film hitting Netflix today, SCREAM sat down with De Feo and Strippoli who explained that whilst, on the surface, ‘A Classic Horror Story’ might sound like yet another irreverent mashup of classic horror trappings, the film is firmly rooted in authentic Italian history and firmly devoted to shining a light on the fact that it is nigh impossible to get a horror movie off the ground in Italy any more, despite the nation’s rich history in the genre.
Words: Howard Gorman
