Fulci Lives!!!!!!
Im all about the brown...eh...I mean.....Fulci.
Zomie be his best followed by City of the Living Dead and The Beyond.

Argento placed second? Wow. Fulci can do Gore, but Argento's got the better eye and he knows how to set up a kill like nobody's business.

Argento, he's a great filmmaker, Fulci is a gore specialist. There is a huge difference, not that I don't like Fulci's stuff, it's just that he wasn't the artist that Argento is. Furthermore, Bava was better than both these guys anyhow, and just what the sam-hell were you thinking leaving Soavi off this list.

I love Argento's work.

Has anyone here seen "The House with Laughing Windows", directed by Pupi Avati?

Staci

Yes!...now there's a fucked up movie. Zeder, also by Pupi Avati, is pretty good too.

Martino has some good movies too.

And I disagree that Fulci is the gore specialist. There's more of it in his films, but some real stupid shit. Argento's films are very gory, but are so stylish that nobody seems to give him credit for just how much gore he splatters on the screen. Argento is the best Italian horror director, and one of the best horror directors, period.

How many times has he been ripped off by Depalma or Carpenter alone?

In Italy this film is a great cult, beacuse Pupi Avati is very famous filmaker...The house is near to Bologna...

The brutal New York Ripper aside, I find Argento's stabbing, slashing approach to gore far more rattling than Fulci's smashed heads and fantastic eye-puncturing.

Look at the amazing razorwire sequence in Suspria, and the gruesome fingernails bit in Sleepless.

However, Argento's stories can be just as convoluted and incoherent as Fulci's - Inferno and Trauma for example - and in fact Fulci was more than capable of coming up with a fine giallo/mystery (Don't Torture a Ducking, The Psychic, One on Top of the Other) before he was seduced by crumbling zombies.

Argento - by far - should be the winner.

The only close competition is Mario Bava. He made some great --and very influential -- films . But also he churned out so many movies, so fast, on such low budgets, that he made quite a few clunkers that bring his average down. (To be fair, Argento has lowered his own average score during the last ten to tweny years -- although SLEEPLESS showed that he could still make a good one now and then.)

I have a soft spot in my heart for Fulci (mostly becuase of ZOMBIE 2, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD and, especially, THE BEYOND) -- but he wasn't necessarily a great filmmaker.

As for other names in the "history lesson," I never understood what all the shouting was about in regards to Ricardo Freda. THE TERRIBLE SECRET OF DR. HITCHCOCK is good for a laugh (watching the titular doctor try to resist his necrophiliac impulses while examing a corpse, for example).

Margheriti is about on the level of Fulci: he made some good ones, but he's not really a consistently great filmmaker -- just a competent one whose work sometimes clicks. For you gore fans out there, you might be interested to know that he directed second unit, including the 3-D insert gore shots (e.g., entrails hanging into the camera), for ANDY WARHOL'S FRANKENSTEIN -- a film otherwise written and directed by Paul Morrisey.

Ricardo Freda was notable for inventing the Italian zombie/undead movie (along with Bava) in I, Vampiri.

He observed that Italian film fans stayed away in droves, disbelieving that any of their countrymen could make such a film - effectively, at least.

This later started the trend of Italians adopting English pseudonyms to sell their films at home.