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Two events dedicated to Lucio Fulci, master of Italian thriller and horror: Talk and Screening

About Lucio Fulci

Owing to often limited budgets, tight production schedules, and the genres and subgenres he explored, the work of Lucio Fulci (1927-1996) was long 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 postapocalyptic science fiction. However, he is most frequently remembered for his distinctive contributions to horror and thriller cinema.

About the events

The Department of Italian and the M.A. in Film Studies, both within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta, celebrate Fulci’s visionary and provocative talent through two closely linked events.

The first event will take place on Thursday 7 May at 18:00 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.

The talk, which will be delivered by Shyla Nicodemi a.k.a. 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 These images remained unpublished until last year, when Bloodbuster – a Milan-based bookshop and publishing house devoted to genre cinema – released them in a bilingual Italian-English volume.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 eighty 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 part will take place on Friday 8 May at 21:00 at Eden Cinemas (Paceville, 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., chaired by Dr Fabrizio Foni.

The two events are organised in collaboration with , the NGO behind the long-running and widely renowned Malta Comic Con, and Video Nasties!, a fast-growing local festival dedicated to independent horror short films.

About the Speaker
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 ten 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.