Bava & Leone: The “Spaghettification” of the American Cinematic Form

In the 1960s two Italian filmmakers, Mario Bava and Sergio Leone, released a string of notable films that directly challenged and re-framed the revered American genres of horror and the western respectively. Their revisualization and ultimate reinterpretation of these traditional genres reached its zenith with the release of Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963) and Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). They marked the dawn of a “spaghettification” of the American cinematic form. This paper argues that the “spaghettification” of the horror and western genres within Black Sabbath and Once Upon a Time in the West redefined the visual calculus of these American genres and revitalized their core tenets, cementing a new cinematic approach to them. Their use of cinematic close-ups, operatic scores, technicolour cinematography, and subversion of the American icon through the casting of Boris Karloff and Henry Fonda established a bold new cinematic style that reshaped the classic American form. This analysis will also note that the motivation behind this visual reformulation was wholly divergent, as Bava embraced his low-budget circumstances to relish the absurdity inherent in the horror genre, while Leone sought to establish a “New West” that was emblematic of the violence and bigotry of the American frontier. The cinematic style of these two films were primarily motivated by a love for the American classics and their revitalization of these classic genres would permeate in the minds of many budding auteurs such as Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, who in turn would go on to further rejuvenate the American cinematic landscape. Keywords: Sergio Leone, Mario Bava, Western, Horror, Italian, American, Cinema