After several years’ in the making, Roberto De Feo and Paolo Strippoli’s unabashedly self-aware tribute to the Italian genre tradition, ‘A Classic Horror Story’ finally took this year’s Taormina Film Fest by storm, winning the best direction award and the film is now deservedly earning all kinds of critical buzz on Netflix since it landed on the streaming platform earlier this month.
Written 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 travelling in a motor home to reach a common destination. As night falls, to avoid a dead animal carcass, they end up crashing into a tree and, when they come to their senses, they find themselves in the middle of nowhere.
The road they were travelling on has literally vanished and there is now only a dense, impenetrable forest and a mysterious wooden house in the middle of a clearing, which they soon discover is the home of a spine-chilling cult. And, to make matters worse, the car-poolers start wondering if they will be able to trust each other in order to escape this nightmare predicament?
With ‘A Classic Horror Story’ now streaming on Netflix, SCREAM caught up with Lutz who explained how she fell into the horror genre by chance, how she almost didn’t end up playing Jen in Coralie Fargeat’s ‘Revenge’ or Elisa in ‘A Classic Horror Story’, before finally revealing details on ‘Z (comme Z)’, Michel Hazanavicius’ “very different” remake of Shin’ichirô Ueda’s singular horror comedy ‘One Cut of the Dead’.
Words: Howard Gorman
