Movie Reviews for Writers: Ubaldo Terzani Horror Show

I've been rediscovering Giallo works that I managed to miss somehow, and this is one of those beautiful films that blurs the lines between horror and Giallo. 

Horror movie director Alessio is a talented visual storyteller but not as talented when it comes to writing the story he uses the camera to tell. So his producer hooks him up with master horror writer Ubaldo Terzani, the author of many bestselling scary novels. 

Immediately, Alessio picks up a full run of Ubaldo's work, and finds himself thoroughly engrossed in them. When he first meets the master, his first question is the obvious one:

Alessio: How do you write books with such realistic horror? I mean your stories are creepy. They have a concreteness that you do not find in the pages of any other writer of this genre.

Ubaldo: Maybe because the others are amateur. (Ubaldo laughs)

Alessio: Come on, seriously.

Ubaldo: Look. I know horror because I go deep into it to look. I make pacts with my ghosts. I speak to them daily. It's as if I am my right eye and they are my left eye.

Alessio: That's a vague explanation. 

Ubaldo: Then try to be more precise. What else do you want to know?

Alessio: I don't know. Perhaps there is something that inspires you. For example, perhaps your crude scenes were assisted by observing autopsies.

Ubaldo: Autopsies. No, they are the easy way out that I willingly leave to the mediocre writers like Clive Barker (Ubaldo laughs). There's no need for the help of observing autopsies to know horror. The horror is inside of you. It is deep down inside of you where you have to look to pull it out and then work with fantasy. To achieve excellence, we have to destroy the common belief that in order to write certain stories we have to give them directly. there is nothing more false.

It's clearly the more spiritual, more magical, more "art" side of writing rather than the practical, the day-in-day-out, the "craft" side of writing. I know and love authors from both sides of this. I have writer friends who define what they do as some kind of intrinsic, born-with-it art with a capital A. I have writer friends who believe that it's nothing more than a learned and practiced skill set that comes with diligent work. And I have lots of writer friends who believe in a combination of the two extremes. 

But the question of research is another one entirely, in this case, on display as "autopsies." There are simply things that you can't know as a writer without research. There are things that if you fake them in your writing, you will be called out by readers as a fraud. When it comes to science and history and geographic details (along with many other things), research matters, regardless of whether you practice ART or CRAFT. 

Then there's the discussion on whether we writers follow our own rules and advice or not, but we'll cover that in a moment. 

Back to the story, though, where our dear Ubaldo is practically the devil at the crossroads. He's clearly playing with Alessio. This is illustrated magnificently in a scene in which Alessio insists his character Martina would not be so easily seduced by an old man, after which Ubaldo describes the scene and sets it so vividly with details that even Alessio (suddenly finding himself in the Martina role) all but is seduced by the old master of words himself. It's a beautiful way of capturing how it's not the words and characters themselves but the delivery and portrayal of them by the writer that ultimately makes them real, no matter how imaginary they may be. 

 Ubaldo convinces Alessio to invite his girlfriend to the mansion, and during that time he hears the words we all long to as writers (upon learning that Sara has read all the books in her boyfriend's time with Ubaldo). "It was like a drug," she tells him. "I couldn't stop. I read them all."

The remainder of the film sets up a pretty cool contrast between a "live by the sword, die by the sword" moral and the truth that we writers often say one thing but live another. 

You see, we writers tend not to live by our own rules. It is one thing to tell our trade secrets in interviews, but it's another to actually live by all those things we purport to. 

"I always do this," we may say on a podcast, but the truth is often that we did it once or twice and found it worked well for us, but we quickly forgot about it until the interview question triggered the memory.

To say more at this point would be to spoil this bloody, artsy, beautifully deranged movie. Suffice it to say, it's one thing to be the writer you are in interviews, but another to be the writer you are in reality.