Fulvio Lucisano, Producer of 'Planet of the Vampires' and 'Solange', Dies at 98
Italian film producer Fulvio Lucisano, whose seven-decade career spanned more than 150 projects from cult horror to art-house drama, has died in Rome at the age of 98. His daughter Paola confirmed the death on Tuesday in a statement to Italian news agency ANSA, which reported the announcement on 18 August 2026 ANSA.
Born on 1 August 1928, Lucisano set up his production company, Italian International Film (IIF), in 1958. He remained active from 1954 through this year — a run of 72 years behind the credits Variety.
Among the titles that secured his reputation far beyond Italy's borders were two films now regarded as cult touchstones. The first was Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires (1965), a science-fiction horror co-production with American International Pictures. The second was What Have You Done to Solange? (1972), a giallo — the Italian thriller genre named for the yellow covers of the pulp novels that inspired it — directed by Massimo Dallamano and scored by Ennio Morricone. Its plot centres on a string of murders at a Catholic girls' school Variety.
Lucisano also maintained a close working relationship with American producer Roger Corman, the prolific independent whose low-budget operation fed US screens for decades. The partnership between the two men was one of the practical bridges connecting Italian and American genre cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, when co-productions allowed studios to share costs across territories Variety.
In 2005, the Venice Film Festival devoted a special "Fulvio Lucisano Day" to him as part of its Secret History of Italian Cinema retrospective — a recognition of a producer whose commercial output sat outside the art-house canon that typically defines Italian film abroad Variety. Restored prints of both Planet of the Vampires and What Have You Done to Solange? were produced, keeping the films in circulation for new audiences Variety.
For genre fans, Lucisano's legacy is the kind that endures quietly: not a household name, but a producer whose films kept turning up on late-night television and repertory screens, passed from one generation of viewers to the next. One hundred and fifty projects, seven decades, and a company he built from scratch — the numbers alone tell the story of a life spent entirely in the projection light.
