Dardano Sacchetti

Dardano Sacchetti was born in Rome, Italy in 1944. At an early age, he became a film buff in watching several American horror film imports into his native Italy first with Them! (1954). By age 16, his favourite film was My Life to Live. In 1966, Sacchetti became friends with a group of young people in a local theater troupe and toured with them around Italy acting and writing plays for their acts. Here, he met a few prominent members of the Italian film industry and was introduced to some of them to write screenplays for their films. Sacchetti found work as a film critic for the periodical Cinema e Film newspaper, while theater and poetry continued to fill his interests.

In 1969, Sacchetti met a young Dario Argento who was directing his first movie which launched his career. Sacchetti and Argento first collaborated on a series of scripts that were never realized. After the box office success of Argento's Bird with the Crystal Plumage, the screen writing pair worked on the script for Argento's next feature film, Cat o Nine Tails. Sacchetti worked on the scripts for Argento's Inferno (1980), Demons (1985), and Demons 2 (1986). His work on Cat o Nine Tails attracted the attention of another Italian film maker, Mario Bava who hired him to write the script for Bay of Blood (1971). Sacchetti continued to work with Bava until the director's death in 1980. He also wrote the script for Shock (1977) and was working on another film titled Anomalia in 1979 which would have been produced by Roger Corman had Bava not died suddenly the following year.

Sacchetti is best known for writing the script for Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 (1979) (Zombie) along with his wife Elisa Briganti, although she is not credited alongside him. Fulci also hired Sacchetti to write other scripts for his films such as City of the Living Dead (1980), House by the Cemetary (1981), The Beyond (1981), The New York Ripper (1982) and Manhattan Baby (1982). In addition to Argento, Fulci, and the Bavas (the father Mario and son Lamberto) Sacchetti also penned the scripts for such directors as Umberto Lenzi, Ruggero Deodato, Stelvio Masso, Antonio Margheriti, Sergio Martino, and Damiano Damiani.

In recent years, Sacchetti's productivity has slowed with the decline of the Italian film industry. Today, while continuing to write scripts for Italian television and an occasional feature film, he also teaches a number of screen writing seminars at Florence's University's Faculty of Arts, and writing courses at other schools for future generation screenwriters.