A suspense-filled, Kafkaesque, meta-horror tale, set behind the scenes of 1970s Italian horror cinema — the era of the notorious giallo.
1976: Berberian Sound Studio is one of the cheapest, sleaziest post-production studios in Italy. Only the most sordid horror films have their sound processed in this studio. Gilderoy, a naive and introverted English sound engineer, who used to sound-mix innocent documentaries and children’s productions back home, is hired to orchestrate the sound mix for the latest film by horror maestro, Santini. Thrown into a foreign environment fuelled by exploitation, Gilderoy finds himself caught up in the world of bitter actresses, capricious technicians and confounding bureaucracy. The longer Gilderoy spends mixing screams, the more homesick he becomes for his garden shed studio. His mother’s letters alternate between banal gossip and ominous hysteria, which gradually mirrors the black magic of Santini’s film. Gilderoy finds himself lost in an otherworldly spiral of sonic and personal mayhem.
»I wanted to make a film where everything that is usually hidden in cinema, the mechanics of film itself, is made visible. Berberian Sound Studio turns this on its head. Here, the film is out of view, and you only see the mechanics behind it. Like dissecting – not in a theoretical way, but in a physical way.« (Peter Strickland)
Peter Strickland
Born in 1992 in Reading, UK. In 1992 he adapted Kafka’s Metamorphosis for an amateur theatre group and has since made numerous short films. In 1996, Strickland and some friends founded an art project, The Sonic Catering Band, which found expression in body pop, sound poetry and other entomological-acoustic excursions. His feature debut, Katalin Varga, received the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin FF.