Owing to often limited budgets, tight production schedules, and the genres and subgenres he explored, the work of Lucio Fulci (1927-1996) has long been overlooked by critics and academics.
For decades, Fulci was regarded, at best, as a resourceful craftsman. Nevertheless, figures such as Quentin Tarantino, Sam Raimi and Clive Barker – all instrumental in legitimising genre cinema – have consistently expressed admiration for his work.
In more recent years, Fulci’s filmography has undergone a significant critical reappraisal, extending well beyond cult audiences and earning a place within university curricula.
Spanning from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, Fulci’s prolific directorial career traversed a wide range of genres, from comedy and parody to spaghetti westerns and adventure films, and even ventures into sword-and-sorcery and post-apocalyptic science fiction. However, he is most frequently remembered for his distinctive contributions to horror and thriller cinema.
The Department of Italian and the MA in Film Studies, both within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta, will celebrate Fulci’s visionary and provocative talent through two closely linked events.
The first event will take place tomorrow, May 7, at 6pm in Room 116 of the Dun Mikiel Xerri Lecture Centre (LC116), Msida Campus. The talk, entitled ‘Fulci’s Poetics of Subversion and the Rediscovered On-Set Photographs of Don’t Torture a Duckling’, will focus on Non si sevizia un paperino, a 1972 film that blends detective fiction, horror and sharp social critique, marking a decisive shift towards explicit violence, elements already present in Fulci’s earlier work, but here elevated into a defining stylistic signature.
“Quentin Tarantino, Sam Raimi and Clive Barker have consistently expressed admiration for his work”
The talk, which will be delivered by Shyla Nicodemi, aka Shyla N., will offer a historical and thematic overview of Fulci’s cinematic corpus before concentrating on recently rediscovered on-set photographs from Non si sevizia un paperino. These images remained unpublished until last year, when Bloodbuster – a Milan-based bookshop and publishing house devoted to genre cinema – released them in a bilingual Italian-English volume.
The more than 80 photographs were meticulously restored by Shyla N. through a rigorous analogue and manual digital process, deliberately avoiding the use of AI tools in order to preserve the material integrity of the original negatives.
The second event will take place on Friday, May 8, at 9pm at the Eden Cinemas, St Julian’s, where for the first time in Malta Non si sevizia un paperino will be screened in its newly restored version by Arrow Films, presented in Italian with English subtitles. The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with Shyla N.
The two events are organised in collaboration with Wicked Comics, the NGO behind the long-running and renowned Malta Comic Con, and Video Nasties!, a fast-growing local festival dedicated to independent horror short films.
A sound engineer and street photographer with over two decades of experience in both analogue and digital formats, Shyla N. began working with 35mm film at the age of 10 under the guidance of her grandfather, Cesare Saska, who had worked at the legendary Barrandov Studios in Prague.
Her photographs have been exhibited in both solo and group shows in Milan and Berlin, and have appeared in several publications.
