April 14: Viva Italian Horror — Pick an Italian horror movie and get gross.

The restoration and release of Fabio Salerno’s work by Blazing Skull—specifically within the collection The Other Dimension and the Films of Fabio Salerno—has finally shone a light on a corner of Italian underground cinema that was nearly lost to time. Blazing Skull’s assessment of Salerno is bold but fitting: they position him as the “missing link between Dario Argento and George & Mike Kuchar.”

In just over 15 minutes, Salerno’s short The Other Dimension (1987) explores the hubris of a man obsessed with the afterlife. Like a no-budget version of Flatliners, the protagonist seeks to pierce the veil by undergoing a temporary, controlled death. Obsessed with seeing the other side, he wants to link his mind with a dying man and follow him into the dimension of the dead. To achieve this, he identifies a target, a wicked man who is a thief or a drug user, believing this will lead him to the most interesting parts of Hell.

He finds the unconscious individual in a derelict building and uses a syringe to inject himself with a substance meant to induce a death-like trance. As the drug takes effect, he attempts to focus his mind on the dying stranger to bridge the gap between life and the beyond. He describes falling into a trance but finds that nothing served and realizes too late that the dose he took was bad stuff. There’s also a sink filled with worms that he eats out of, because of course he should.

Sadly, Saserno would die just six years after making this. He also made The Harpies, another movie even more indebted to Argento’s movies.

You can watch this on YouTube.