Butterflies and Monsters – Two Unusual Italian Horror Movies

Italian genre cinema is largely known for particular genre features – spaghetti Westerns, the proto-slashers of the giallo genre, microgenres like the fads for zombie movies or cannibal movies, and rip-offs of more successful Hollywood releases – and I think it’s easy to assume it’s all rather samey. In the interests of this, today’s backlog clearance job is me putting a spotlight of a couple of more unusual Italian horror/crime pieces.

Caltiki – The Immortal Monster

It’s the 1950s, and a team of scientists are investigating the ruins of Tikal – an ancient Mayan city which was abandoned for reasons not known to modern historians. Folklore hints at the rise of a goddess known as Caltiki, a malevolent deity; a subterranean temple, its entrance exposed after a recent volcanic eruption, is discovered by the party and seems to be dedicated to her. Within it is a deep pool – they infer that it’s a sacrificial pool, into which human victims would be tossed to drown bedecked in jewellery as gifts to the goddess, and a quick scuba jaunt into the pool seems to prove this hypothesis. The entity in the lake is no anthropomorphic goddess, though – it’s an ancient, blob-like creature, some 20 million years old, awoken by the fumbling explorers…

This kicks off an old-timey SF-horror adventure that’s massively influenced by Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness – the ancient blob creature is extremely shoggoth-like – as well as the likes of Clark Ashton Smith. (A decidedly shoggoth-like spawn of Tsathoggua is found guarding a temple in one of Smith’s stories of long-ago Hyperborea, The Tale of Satampra Zeiros.) There’s also a certain Quatermass angle to proceedings – the centrality of the scientific enigma to the story, for instance, and the increasing audacity of its revelations. (Just wait until you get to the comet angle…)