Episode 807: Massacre Time (1966)

Western month begins here. Lucio Fulci's Massacre Time (1966) arrived in the wake of Django riding a wave of Italian genre fever, and it announced something different lurking inside the spaghetti Western: a director with a genuine appetite for cruelty. Franco Nero plays Tom Corbett, a gold prospector summoned back to a hometown now wholly owned by the Scott family — their name on every building, their violence on every street corner. Waiting for him is his brother Jeff (George Hilton), drinking himself to death, and Junior Scott (Nino Castelnuovo), a white-suited sadist with a bullwhip and nowhere near enough supervision.

Mike White, Spencer Parsons, and Joe Odber dig into Fulci's pre-horror career, Fernando Di Leo's crime-inflected screenplay, the film's feudal vision of capitalism, and the charged dynamics of the Scott family — Oedipal, theatrical, and deeply strange. They also trace Junior's lineage forward to a certain plantation dandy in a white suit.