After not hearing from the bloke in years, Richard (DUST DEVIL) Stanley’s come out swinging recently: having co-written THE ABANDONED, and begun work on the Bruce Campbell-led VACATION, Stanley’s already got another job lined up. He’s co-writing IMAGO MORTIS (“Image of Death”), and fans of Italian horror will be happy to know it’s a bloody beautiful giallo flick (meaning we can expect a few exquisitely staged, beautifully shot murder sequences)
He talked to Ryan Rotten over at Shock Till You Drop about it: “[‘Mortis’] was one of several stabs I’ve taken at the [giallo] genre and seemingly the first to bear fruit.”
“The plot concerns a death-fixated British film student getting way out of his depth in Rome as he attempts to uncover the truth behind a bizarre series of killings involving one of the darkest and most mysterious footnotes to cinema history – the lost art of ‘thanatography’!”
“It’s a form first perfected in the dark ages by rogue Jesuit Girolamo Fumagalli who – inspired by Kircher’s principle of retinal retention – found a way of recording images in flesh, fixed for all eternity by the moment of death itself. Fumagalli was buried alive by the inquisition when his crimes became public knowledge and the thanatographic apparatus was thought to have died with him. Only now its deadly secret has been rediscovered.”
I’m not sure I know what any of that means, but I’m scared (eyeballs will be removed, that much is certain).
Above are some sketches by the film’s director, Stefano Bessoni, featuring some of the newest looks in Italian headwear.
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