Berberian Sound Studio – Peter Strickland’s Postmodern Pastiche Ioana Stamatescu | December 2020 Peter Strickland intended Berberian Sound Studio (2012) as a film tribute to the way analogue sound was created in the 1970s giallo movies while eschewing a too retro or faithful rendition of the original [1]. Starting from Strickland’s stated intention, I will explore the ways in which the film qualifies as an affectionate pastiche. I will also take a look at the critique of the genre, triggered by the distance from the original that the pastiche takes. Strickland’s film, recently adapted for a theatrical representation in London [2], is about foley artist Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a middle-aged reserved and timid Englishman, who goes to Italy to make the sound effects for a film at a post-production company called Berberian Sound Studio. He soon learns to his dismay that the work he was commissioned to do has nothing in common with the nature documentaries he used to work on back home in Dorking, as it involves a much less innocuous type of sounds and cinematography: it is a horror movie of a genre very popular in Italy during that time, in the seventies, called