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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".