The Ideal Exploitation Family

Italian exploitation film makers certainly seemed to be in favour of the nuclear family.  Or so it occurred to me while I was watching Absurd again on American Horrors.  The victimised family have two kids, a boy and a girl and they seem absolutely typical of the kids depicted in these films - the boy is always younger, usually under ten, shrill, curly haired and something of a brat, while the girl is usually older, early to mid-teens, slightly more sensible and often has straight fair hair, (although Katya, the girl menaced by George Eastman in Absurd, is dark haired, but otherwise conforms to the stereotype).  I've observed similar set ups in films as diverse as Fulci's Manhattan Baby and Exorcist rip-off Beyond the Door.  Perhaps it represents some kind of Italian ideal when it comes to families.  Interestingly, in all of the family set ups of this kind I've seen the parents are depicted as middle class professionals, so perhaps it represents a reflection of perceived changes in Italian society, with a move away from the traditionally depicted huge and sprawling Italian families, predominantly in rural settings.  It does raise the question of whether, in order to maintain these idealised nuclear families of just two kids, the parents are using contraceptives - something surely not approved of in Catholic Italy?  Or maybe they just have a very good sense of rhythm.

It is worth noting though, that many of these films, although Italian produced and featuring mainly Italian casts, are actually filmed and set in the US.  Which allows the film-makes to invoke the loop hole that they aren't really depicting some modern vision of a new Italy with smaller families, but instead depicting those sinful contraceptive crazy protestant foreigners.  Indeed, all the trials and tribulations visited upon these families, from demonic possession to crazed serial killers could, arguably, be seen as some kind of punishment for not being good God-fearing Catholics.  ('Use a condom blasphemers and your teenage daughter will end up being chased around you mansion by an apparently unkillable bearded maniac!'  A maniac, incidentally, created by experimentation on the part of some kind of non-Catholic church, represented by Edmund Purdom with a bad Greek accent and his usual mortified expression).  Most likely, though, is that the depiction of these 'perfect' families had more to do with the fact that Italian exploitation film-makers were always seeking to down play the national origin of their products, see also in the Anglicisation of the names of both performers and production staff, in order to make he films more 'acceptable' to international audiences.  Whatever the reason, after you've seen enuogh of these films, you just can't help but notice the way the family unit is typically depicted, (although, as I'm sure others will point out, there are plenty of exceptions, with sometimes only one child - more often than not the curly haired irritating boy - being depicted, for instance, but those huge families with multiple sons and daughters are rare).