About this episode

The episode explores Lucio Fulci's 'Massacre Time' and its themes of cruelty and capitalism within the spaghetti Western genre.

Western month begins here. Lucio Fulci's Massacre Time (1966) arrived in the wake of Django riding a wave of Italian genre fever, and it announced something different lurking inside the spaghetti Western: a director with a genuine appetite for cruelty. Franco Nero plays Tom Corbett, a gold prospector summoned back to a hometown now wholly owned by the Scott family — their name on every building, their violence on every street corner. Waiting for him is his brother Jeff (George Hilton), drinking himself to death, and Junior Scott (Nino Castelnuovo), a white-suited sadist with a bullwhip and nowhere near enough supervision. Mike White, Spencer Parsons, and Joe Odber dig into Fulci's pre-horror career, Fernando Di Leo's crime-inflected screenplay, the film's feudal vision of capitalism, and the charged dynamics of the Scott family — Oedipal, theatrical, and deeply strange. They also trace Junior's lineage forward to a certain plantation dandy in a white suit. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support . Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

People in this episode

Host: Mike White

Guests: Spencer Parsons, Joe Odber

Topics covered

• Italian Westerns
• Lucio Fulci
• film analysis
• spaghetti Western
• capitalism
• Oedipal dynamics

Keywords

• Massacre Time
• Lucio Fulci
• spaghetti Western
• Franco Nero
• film analysis
• Oedipal dynamics
• Italian cinema

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Massacre Time, Django

Places: Scott family

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