The House with Laughing Windows

• Director Pupi Avati shot the film on location in the Valli di Comacchio and Lido degli Scacchi, in the Ferrara province of Emilia-Romagna — the flat, foggy region he grew up in, which gives the movie its real rural dread rather than a studio-built one.
• The screenplay was co-written by Pupi Avati with his brother Antonio Avati (who also produced), journalist Maurizio Costanzo, and actor Gianni Cavina; it was made through the Avatis' own production company A.M.A. Film, this film being its first release.
• The eerie score was composed by Amedeo Tommasi, an Italian jazz pianist and longtime Avati collaborator who scored several of the director's films — not a rock or pop musician moonlighting in horror.
• Avati has said the idea came from a story he heard as a child about a priest's body being exhumed in a village near Bologna (Sasso Marconi), which he later twisted into the film's fiction.
• The film had no official U.S. release for decades — it first reached Region 1 DVD via Image Entertainment in 2003, nearly 30 years after its 1976 Italian debut, and didn't get a North American 4K UHD restoration until Arrow Video's release in December 2025.

The fresco functions as the village's confession — the parts painted over are literally evidence of murder, suggesting the whole town has been complicit for generations in violence dressed up as religious art.

The two sisters aren't just preserving their brother's legacy but continuing his work, using the restorer's obsessive focus on the surface painting to prepare him as the next subject — making the restoration itself the trap.

The film reads as an argument that rural folk Catholicism and older, darker local practices aren't as separate as the village pretends — St. Sebastian's martyrdom giving religious cover to something the town never actually let go of.

A restorer named Stefano arrives in a decaying village in Emilia-Romagna's Valli di Comacchio, hired to clean a grotesque fresco of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian inside the local church — painted by a long-dead artist, Legnani, whose depictions of agony were always taken from life. The townspeople watch him work with a silence that curdles into menace. As he strips away paint that was used to obscure parts of the fresco, he uncovers hidden figures flanking the saint — and starts piecing together a pattern of disappearances stretching back decades. The artist's sisters are never far from the house with the laughing windows, and they have very specific ideas about what makes a beautiful death.