We first reported on Stefano Bessoni's upcoming horror film Imago Mortis way back in June, drawn in part by the involvement of cult director Richard Stanley who did some rewrite work on early versions of the script. Well, Stanley is no longer credited but Bessoni began shooting the picture in November and has posted a series of shots on his personal blog and they are positively astounding. Gothic in the best possible sense, they are sumptuously shot and simultaneously very beautiful and very disturbing. Clearly this will be a very graphic and very bloody picture.
They say that in the 1600s, long before the invention of photography, a scientist named Girolamo Fumagalli was obsessed with the idea of reproducing images. He discovered that by killing a victim and removing the victim’s eyeballs, it was possible to reproduce on paper the last image imprinted on that person’s retinas. He named this technique ‘thanatography’. Today, the same kind of gruesome ritual and abominable crime recurs within the walls of an international school of cinema.
One more fascinating note on this one: looking through the credits for the picture the name of Bessoni's new co-writer leapt off the screen at me. The shooting script was co-written by one Luis Alejandro Berdejo, whose early short films we praised here and who is currently prepping his English language debut for Gold Circle Films.
Those images all the way at the bottom - I can't read Italian, but is that artwork for a second feature film based on Pinocchio? That stuff looks amazing!