The Reptile (1966)
“Demented here with yet another savory serving of my “spaghetti pulp”. It’s really tough choosing which ones to reveal and which ones to hold back. Don’t wanna give away the farm. Gotta save some surprises for my upcoming book!
A few years into the peak of the genre’s popularity the morality police waged an attack on the publishers of the “sexy fumetti”. The publishers eventually won in court. But for a period of several months, in an act of self defense, publishers took it upon themselves to censor their new and re-issued editions. Publishers outside of Italy used photo modification to censor the covers. (Note the poor attempt to censor one of the books below.) But the Italian publishers, the very companies who created and held the original cover paintings, decided on a more distasteful approach. They censored their covers not through photographic modification but by painting underwear right on top of the original art! It makes no sense to me why they wouldn’t prefer to modify a photo or negative instead of altering the original cover art. It’s yet another example of how little respect publishers had for their cover art back in the day.
Though the erotic horror pulps were made in Italy, there were companies such as Elvifrance publishing translated versions for other European countries. So I’m including some Spanish and French printings below.”
