Any diehard reader of ShockTillYouDrop.com should be intimately familiar with the Giallo style of horror filmmaking that came out of Italy in the late ’60s and early ’70s, gory and gruesome affairs that made cult figures out of the likes of Dario Argento and Mario Bava. Those films have been hugely influential on American horror, on everything from the original Friday the 13th to the work of Eli Roth and Rob Zombie.
British filmmaker Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio is not a Giallo film, but it pays loving tribute to them by going behind the scenes in an Italian recording studio where they’re doing voiceover and sound FX work for one of those grisly Italian horror films. Toby Jones stars as Gilderoy, a British sound engineer who travels to Italy to work in a studio doing sound FX for what he thinks is an “equestrian film” but turns out to be a gruesome horror film involving the brutal torture of nuns. Eventually, the inner politics of the small Italian studio and the imagery he’s forced to endure starts to get to the meek sound engineer and starts to affect his mind in strange and negative ways.
ShockTillYouDrop.com got on the phone with Jones a couple of weeks back to talk to him about the film, and you can read that interview by clicking here.
