I’ve been watching Italian giallo films since I saw Dario Argento’s Deep Red roughly 20 years ago, and I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. Like a lot of horror fans, I’ve gone through the genre’s most recognizable classics, but there are still so many to see, and so many flavors of giallo still to experience.
At this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, one such film made a glorious re-emergence with a new 4K restoration that’s about to make its way to physical media via Arrow Video. I’d heard about The House with Laughing Windows before from those who’ve seen it and celebrate it, and Fantasia’s repertory selections are always on-point, so I made sure to carve out time.
What I found was a giallo essential that devotees of the genre, as well as horror fans still making their way through Italian horror in the 20th century, won’t want to miss.
Set in a small Italian village with a dark secret, Pupi Avati’s film follows Stefano (Lino Capolicchio), an art restorer who arrives in town to clean up and revive a fresco on the wall of a local church. The painting, a graphic depiction of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, isn’t exactly one the locals are fond of. But it’s important to the town’s history, so it needs repair, and the original artist has been dead for decades.
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So, Stefano settles in, forms a connection with a local schoolteacher named Francesca (Francesca Marciano), and sets about his work, even as various townspeople warn him against messing with the painting. It seems the work has a reputation, stemming from dark legends about its original artist, who was known as the “painter of agony” because he supposedly liked to paint dying models who may or may not have been dying naturally. The more Stefano digs into these local legends in an effort to understand the mysterious artist, the closer he gets to danger, as a mysterious killer starts picking off townspeople one by one.
The classic giallo ingredients are all here. You’ve got a handsome, curious young man unwittingly sucked into a mystery, a beautiful young woman who’s pulled into the madness along with him, an unseen killer, and, of course, dramatic visuals that transform each murder into a setpiece. But the beauty of giallo lies in how each filmmaker chooses to finesse those ingredients, and Avati, who also co-wrote the screenplay, is certainly bringing his own painterly flair to the party.
Many of the most iconic films in the genre, including those composed by Mario Bava and Dario Argento, are best remembered for moments of pure shock and the suspense that precedes that shock. They’re all about building and releasing tension, about directing protagonists to clue after clue and punctuating those clues with the arrival of yet another gruesome death. In The House with Laughing Windows, Avati certainly doesn’t hold back from that narrative structure, but he also adds his own flavors to the stew.
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Of all the gialli I have ever seen (and I have certainly not seen them all, just to be clear), The House with Laughing Windows is the one most thoroughly and completely shot through with dread. It permeates the walls of every room, etches itself onto Stefano’s face, and lurks in the striking art at the center of the narrative. When you finally get to the title house (yes, there’s actually a house with “laughing windows”), you’ve been swept along so thoroughly by the deliberate, steady pacing and the painterly compositions of each shot that the murders are almost incidental to the feeling that you’re being hurled along toward something unspeakable. And when that unspeakable thing finally lands, it delivers one of the best finales any giallo film has ever produced.
What’s most striking and satisfying about all of this is that The House with Laughing Windows is by no means an “unconventional” giallo. It’s not breaking the rules of the genre (flexible as they are) or trying to color outside the lines. What it’s doing is enriching those boundaries, swelling them to bursting with evocative visuals, measured performances, and beautifully composed violence. It’s perhaps less garish and shocking for much of its runtime than other, better-known members of the club, but by the time it’s over, you’ve got an absolute classic that deserves its place in the Italian horror pantheon.
The House With Laughing Windows is coming soon to 4K UHD.
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