Though it was barely screened outside Italy for years following its modest local release, the terrifying rural thriller The House with Laughing Windows has made tremendous strides since the late '90s to take its place as one of the most masterful golden era gialli. Part of a strain of horror-heavy mysteries set far outside Italy's big cities (a la Don't Torture a Duckling and The Bloodstained Shadow), the film gradually earned a reputation for Pupi Avati, better known to international audiences for prestige fare like The Story of Boys and Girls, as a major horror filmmaker with his other genre titles like Zeder, The Arcane Enchanter, and more recently Mr. Devil showing a remarkable consistency of vision. House remains at the top of them all though, a masterful demonstration of creeping dread with a jaw-dropping final act that doesn't diminish on repeated viewings.

Summoned under mysterious circumstances by a colleague, Stefano (Capolicchio) arrives at a small town where the colorful local priest (Walter) shows him his big project: the restoration of an important, deeply chilling fresco showing St. Sebastian being stabbed to death. Strange, violent stories swirl around its late artist, Legnani, who lived with two mysterious sisters, and as Stefano begins his work, he receives threatening phone calls and locals begin to die. He also begins a tentative romance with the new schoolteacher, Francesca (Marciano), who abruptly steps in for her more sexually adventurous predecessor, and eventually a horrifying secret about the fresco and the entire town is soon exposed.

Everything about this film clicks together beautifully from Capolicchio's study central performance to the unnerving sound design featuring a deeply creepy score by frequent Avati collaborator Amedeo Tommassi. The film shows little debt to the gialli that came before it (including its most obvious immediate predecessor, Deep Red), geared here more to domestic audiences since it was shot in Italian with few cast members who would make it marketable on a global scale. Originally it was intended to be a more commercial, English-friendly project, but the direction it took ultimately proved to be in the film's favor as its decrepit, perverse atmosphere benefits greatly from the strong sense of environment and a populace tortured by traumas that have been festering since World War II.

Thanks to enthusiastic write-ups including a major one in Phil Hardy's Overlook Encyclopedia of Horror, demand grew for the film to be seen by horror fans hungry for unique international fare that had largely gone under the radar before home video really took off. In 2002, an Italian DVD with English subtitles appeared from Fox, followed by a 2003 DVD from Image Entertainment taken from the same master here with 2.0 mono and newly created 5.1 options with English subtitles. Extras on that disc included a "restoration featurette" (16m2s) with Pupi and Antonio Avati talking about the film's creation, a trailer, and a lobby card gallery. In 2012, Shameless Screen Entertainment released a U.K. DVD with 5.1 and 2.0 mono Italian options with subs plus a different Avati interview (20m25s) about the film's genesis and creation. All of the DVD editions are interlaced and run fast at PAL speed coming in at 106 minutes, though the Shameless tweaks the color grading significantly in a greener, less saturated direction.

After that it was a long stretch of unavailability for the film with fans clamoring for ages for an HD upgrade. In 2024, a restoration was finally undertaken and debuted on 4K UHD and Blu-ray in France from Le Chat Qui Fume (with the former two-format combo option selling out almost immediately) with no English-friendly options. Extras on that release include interviews with Capolicchio (49m46s), Marciano (14m25s), Pupi Avati (31m), and Antonio Avati (32m32s).

A year later in 2025, Arrow Video issued its own U.S. UHD and Blu-ray separate options derived from the same 4K scan, which leaves us with the fact that we now have quite a few home video options that all look radically different from each other. The initial restoration by the dreaded color-blind folks at L'Immagine Ritrovata was presented on the French release as being produced by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and SND with color timing by assistant director Cesare Bastelli, which bears the lab's usual hallmarks of lime-aqua skewing in the colors and murky blacks. What's bizarre is that the French UHD and Blu-ray look very different from each other, with the former's extremely aggressive HDR grade looking saturated to the point of bleeding off the screen. On the other hand, the French Blu-ray is very desaturated with terrible contrast, as you can see from the comparisons below; it's easily the weakest presentation of the film in any format. The Arrow goes in a more natural direction with a soft creamy tone to the whites and much more satisfying black levels, cited here as a color grade by 3RStore Studios in London supervised by Arrow's James Pearcey and James White. (Complicating things further, a U.K. UHD and Blu-ray edition from Shameless was also released with its own exclusive color grading but is not yet available for comparison.)

One exceptional factor in the Arrow release is its radically improved English subtitles, which are much, much more accurate and coherent than the ones we've been stuck with from the DVD releases. That earlier translation was outrageously inaccurate in many scenes, often completely contradicting the dialogue and fabricated entirely by the translator. Particularly jarring are the prelude to a horrifying attempted sexual assault and an account of Legnani and his sisters' trip abroad, as well as numerous nuances and historical references peppered through the dialogue throughout the film. Even if you've seen the film multiple times, it'll be a very fresh experience here if you don't speak Italian. You also get two new substantial audio commentaries here; the first with Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson enthuses about their love of the film and their first encounters with it as well as connections they find with other gialli and horror films from around the same time. The second with Eugenio Ercolani and Troy Howarth focuses a great deal on Avati's career and artistic traits as well as the somewhat complex evolution of getting this film to the screen as well as its provincial giallo aspects.

The feature-length "Painted Screams" (94m30s) compiles footage from the Capolicchio, Marciano, and Avatis seen on the French release while adding interviews with co-writer Antonio Avati, Bastelli, actors Giulio Pizzirani and Pietro Brambilla, production designer Luciana Morosetti, assistant camera operation Toni Scaramuzza, sound mixer Enrico Blasi, and Emanuele Taglietti (son of assistant production designer Otello Taglietti) for the most thorough account yet of the film's creation -- from Avati's often cursed projects before this to the development of key concepts in the plot and anecdotes from the set (including a highly comfortable first scene for two of the actors) and wrangling over the last few seconds before the end credits roll. The breathless visual essay "La Casa e Sola" (19m12s) by critic Chris Alexander focuses on frescoes, phone colors, and the main titles as compared to Psycho, while the intriguing "The Art of Suffering: Apollonian Rationality and Pagan Chaos in The House with Laughing Windows" (14m59s) by Kat Ellinger examines the film's fusion of uncanny elements and artwork to create a unique work of surrealism with dark mythical elements present in both its backstory and on-screen action. A subtitled theatrical trailer is also included in quality very similar to the French Blu-ray, and the limited edition comes with a double-sided foldout poster (original art plus a new design by Peter Strain) and a 57-page booklet featuring "A Window onto Pain: Fascism, Hegemony, and the Paradox of Memory in Pupi Avati's The House with Laughing Windows" by Matt Rogerson, "Queer Unmasking: Defilement as an Act of Baptism in The House with Laughing Windows" by Willow Maclay, "Smooth Like Syphilis, Hot Like Blood" by Alexia Kannas, "The Resurrection of Saint Sebastian: Suffering, Sacrifice and Secrecy in Pupi Avati's Restoration Comedy The House with Laughing Windows" by Anton Bitel, and "Outside of Modernity, Outside of History: The Home in The House with Laughing Windows" by Stefano Baschiera. In addition to their very long titles, all are worth reading as they explore the intersection of sadism, religion, fascism, and sexuality in one deeply nightmarish masterpiece.

ARROW VIDEO (UHD)

LE CHAT QUI FUME (UHD)

LE CHAT QUI FUME (Blu-ray)

SHAMELESS (DVD)

IMAGE ENTERTAINMENT (DVD)

Reviewed on December 6, 2025