Slashed: Insect Gazes, Point-of-View Perspectives, and the Rise of a Post/Human Vision in the Italian giallo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Establishing an ecology of Italian horror by looking at Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971) and Dario Argento’s Phenomena (1985)—both of which feature insects’ first-“person” perspective shots, this paper traces the formation and subsequent development of a gaze in these films, one that disrupts the understanding of this gaze as human. From thematic concerns like ecology, entomology, and an emphasis on an anti-anthropomorphic gaze, we can begin to trace a resonance between the two films and their desire to expand vision. Examining early articulations of a posthumanist sensibility and vision in these films, this paper surveys the complex entanglements between Italian formulations of horror and violence, proposing the concept of an ‘insect gaze’ as a mediated gaze before exploring the terror, and possibilities, it engenders. Separated by more than a decade, the films present non-human gazes that trigger deep-seated anxieties specific to their historical context.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".