Aristide Massaccesi (15 December 1936 – 23 January 1999), known professionally as Joe D'Amato, was an Italian film director, producer, cinematographer, and screenwriter who worked in many genres (westerns, decamerotici, peplum, war films, swashbuckler, comedy, fantasy, postapocalyptic film, and erotic thriller) but is best known for his horror, erotic and adult films.
D'Amato worked in the 1950s as electric and set photographer, in the 1960s as camera operator, and from 1969 onwards as cinematographer. Starting in 1972, he directed and co-directed around 200 films under numerous pseudonyms, regularly acting as cinematographer as well. Starting in the early 1980s, D'Amato produced many of his own and other directors' genre films through the companies he founded or co-founded, the best known being Filmirage. From 1979 to 1982 and from 1993 to 1999, D'Amato also produced and directed about 120 adult films.
Among his best known erotic films are his five entries into the Black Emanuelle series of films starring Laura Gemser (1976–1978) and his horror/pornography crossover films Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and Porno Holocaust (both shot in Santo Domingo in 1979). In the horror genre, he is above all remembered for his films Beyond the Darkness (1979) and Antropophagus (1980), which have gained cult status, as well as Absurd (1981).
Biography Early life and work (1936–1969) Joe D'Amato was born on 15 December 1936 in Rome, Italy. His father was Renato Massaccesi, who after an incident on a ship had been declared a war invalid and had started to work at the Istituto Luce in Rome first as electrician, fixing power generators left by the United States army at Cinecittà, and then as chief photographic technician.Renato Massaccesi In 1950, at the age of 14, D'Amato joined his father at work together with his brothers Carlo and Fernando (called Nando). Being the most enterprising of the three sons, D'Amato took on the task of delivering the movie cameras his father sold. D'Amato also assisted in the dubbing of Italian film productions and designed title and end credits with Eugenio Bava, cutting the letters out by hand. In 1952, D'Amato worked as a still photographer on the set of The Golden Coach, later as electric. In the 1960s, D'Amato eventually moved on to work as a camera operator on numerous films including Mario Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World.
First work as cinematographer and director (1969–1975) In 1969, Piero Livi's Pelle di bandito and Silvio Amadio's No Man's Island (Italian: L'Isola delle Svedesi) were D'Amato's first films as cinematographer. In the next few years, D'Amato continued to work as cinematographer on Italian productions such as Umberto Lenzi's A Quiet Place to Kill, Massimo Dallamano's What Have You Done to Solange? and some of Demofilo Fidani's low-budget Spaghetti Westerns.
D'Amato took on the role of director for the first time in 1972. He started out with a number of small western films (Go Away! Trinity Has Arrived in Eldorado and A Bounty Killer in Trinity) and decamerotici (More Sexy Canterbury Tales and Novelle licenziose di vergini vogliose) which he partly directed, partly co-directed before going on to direct the gothic horror film Death Smiles on a Murderer (1973) and the war film Heroes in Hell (1974), both starring Klaus Kinski. D'Amato briefly relinquished directing and reverted to cinematography in films such as Luigi Batzella's The Devil's Wedding Night, Steve Carver's The Arena and five films directed by Alberto De Martino: Crime Boss, The Killer Is on the Phone, Counselor at Crime, The Antichrist, and – two years later – Strange Shadows in an Empty Room. When D'Amato was in Canada shooting a sleigh ride sequence for Lucio Fulci's Challenge to White Fang, the film's producer Ermanno Donati asked him to stay and direct the adventure film Red Coats for him, in which D'Amato used the pseudonym "Joe D'Amato" for the first time. It turned a good profit, and D'Amato later considered it his best film in this period.
First films with Laura Gemser and the Black Emanuelle series (1975–1977) D'Amato's next film, Emanuelle's Revenge (1975), which he co-directed with Bruno Mattei (who remains uncredited because D'Amato was a "rising name"), was one of several films at the time with titles that alluded to the successful French erotic film Emmanuelle (1974). In retrospect, it was a kind of turning point in D'Amato's career, being his first pornographic film – though still softcore.
In his next film, the commedia sexy Voto di castità (1976), scripted by George Eastman), D'Amato met Laura Gemser, who would star in many of his films. In the 1980s and early 1990s, she would also regularly work as a costume designer for his productions. In this first film, she only played the small part of a French maid, but it was during the shoot that D'Amato got the idea to use her as star in his next film.
Eva nera, an erotic drama, stars Gemser as a topless snake dancer alongside Jack Palance and Gabriele Tinti – her future husband. The film was produced by Harry Alan Towers and Lucio Fulcisano and shot both on location in Hong Kong and at the Elios Studios near Rome.
Gemser, who had previously starred in Bitto Albertini's Black Emanuelle (1975), went on to shoot the following five films of the Black Emanuelle series under D'Amato's direction. (Albertini, on the other hand, had to find a new actress for his own Black Emanuelle 2 (1976) – a sequel only in name.) Although the main character's name in the Black Emanuelle series alludes to the original French Emmanuelle, it is spelled slightly differently in order to avoid copyright lawsuits. Also, the character herself is different; Black Emanuelle is an international reporter and photographer who travels to exotic locations. D'Amato added some violence and horror to the series, such as the fake snuff film footage in Emanuelle in America, a gang rape scene in Emanuelle Around the World (1977), and gore scenes in the cannibal film Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. As D'Amato later remembered, this "was a very good period in my life. Movie business was very good. We travelled round the world, finding new and fascinating locations for our movies."
The Caribbean phase (1978–1979) Of the 12 films D'Amato directed in 1978 and 1979, 9 were shot in the Dominican Republic. In a 1982 interview, he said that once the trip was paid for, the costs were low and the setting suggestive ("the Caribbean... all for free"; Italian: "i Caraibi... tutto gratis").
The first time D'Amato went to Santo Domingo was in May 1978 for the erotic horror film Papaya, Love Goddess of the Cannibals. He returned there in September to shoot the mercenaries-at-war film Tough to Kill.
In mid-October 1978, back in Italy, D'Amato started shooting the nunsploitation film Images in a Convent, and in early 1979, which was to become a particularly productive year, he directed the violent erotic thriller Il porno shop della settima strada (The Pleasure Shop on Seventh Avenue) on location in New York, both films produced by Franco Gaudenzi's company Kristal Film. From late June to early July 1979, D'Amato went to South Tyrol to shoot and direct the horror film Buio Omega starring Kieran Canter and Cinzia Monreale, a remake of Mino Guerrini's The Third Eye produced by Dario Rossetti and Ermanno Donati with music by Goblin.
Immediately afterwards, D'Amato went back to Santo Domingo to film Paradiso blu, an Italian counterpart to The Blue Lagoon starring Anna Bergman and Lucia Ramirez, and the voodoo-themed Orgasmo nero (Sex and Black Magic) starring Ramirez, Susan Scott and Richard Harrison, before directing two films combining hardcore pornography and horror – Porno Holocaust and Le notti erotiche dei morti viventi (Erotic Nights of the Living Dead) – as well as three adult thrillers: Hard Sensation, Porno Esotic Love and Sesso Nero. For Porno Esotic Love, D'Amato reused material from Eva nera (1976), especially those scenes D'Amato had shot with Laura Gemser in Hong Kong. (Eva nera had done very poorly at the Italian box office and therefore was still relatively unknown.)
First work as producer (1979–1982) The voodoo-themed Sesso nero, written by George Eastman, was the last film D'Amato shot in the Caribbean, at the end of 1979, and the first film D'Amato produced on his own, through his newly founded company, P.C.M. (Produzioni Cinematografiche Massaccesi). Of the Caribbean group of films it received the earliest theatrical release – the films only being released gradually throughout 1980 and 1981.
After his return from the Caribbean, D'Amato also co-founded Filmirage and used the companies to produce and direct the gore film Antropophagus (1980, produced through P.C.M. and Filmirage) and its follow-up, the slasher film Absurd (1981, co-produced by Filmirage and Metaxa), both of which starred George Eastman and later became cult films for fans of extreme cinema.
D'Amato also founded and co-founded two further production companies, "Cinema 80" and "M.A.D." (an acronym for [Aristide] Massaccesi, Alessandroni, and [Donatella] Donati) on 15 January 1980 and 9 January 1981, respectively. For M.A.D., Alessandroni, an engineer, provided the funding, while his son acted as producer on set. Donatella Donati, the daughter of Ermanno Donati, became D'Amato's assistant and constant collaborator, usually acting as production secretary and assistant director.
The two companies were the main vehicles for D'Amato's film production of this period. From 1980 until 1982, D'Amato produced 14 hardcore pornographic films through both companies (Cinema 80: 9 films, M.A.D.: 5), 10 of which he directed and lensed himself, while 3 of the films (Blue erotic climax, Labbra vogliose and Le porno investigatrici) were directed by Claudio Bernabei. Officially, Bernabei was both executive manager and director, his pseudonym Alexander (or Alexandre) Borsky being used for almost all directorial credits although the films were for the most part directed by D'Amato personally, who was only given credit in the non-committal phrase "a Joe D'Amato film" () used for marketing purposes. The reason for this lay in avoiding one of two criminal charges per film since the state only charged the executive manager of the company and the director; them being the same person, only one charge was brought forth. One notable exception was Porno video (1981; sometimes: Pornovideo), which was directed entirely by Giuliana Gamba (under the pseudonym Therese Dunn); it was the first film D'Amato produced for another director – a practice he would start expanding six years later in his Filmirage period. Il succo del sesso (1982; a punning title which can mean both "The Essence of Sex" and "The Juice of Sex") was the only film of this period that was directed but not produced by D'Amato, being a "Promo Film" production of Giovanni Perrucci's.
The average Cinema 80 or M.A.D. film cost 55 million lire, was shot in 10 days, edited over a period of two months, and had a generic title such as Super climax, Super hard love or Voglia di sesso (literally: Lust for Sex). A group of three films produced through Cinema 80 stands out. In 1981, building on Tinto Brass's Caligula (1979), D'Amato produced, shot and directed Caligula... The Untold Story in both a hardcore and a softcore version, starring David Brandon, Laura Gemser and Gabriele Tinti. It recounted the final days of the Roman Emperor Caligula and was followed by two purely hardcore pornographic films – Una vergine per l'impero romano and Messalina orgasmo imperiale – in which D'Amato reused sets and costumes from the first film, albeit on a significantly lower budget. The three films were signed by D'Amato as director under different pseudonyms and released separately in December 1982, May 1983 and July 1983. They have been called his "porno-peplum trilogy".