The 40 most popular italian fantasy movies, ranked. Click any film for ratings, reviews, trailers, and where to watch.


Carnal Sins
2024 · 1h 36m · AR
Fleeing homophobic attacks, Nino moves to a rural house amidst a forest haunted by Almamula, a monster that takes those who commit carnal sins. In a world of whispers, unspoken desires and prayers, Nino’s curiosity and impulses rise to the surface.


Tale of Tales
2015 · 2h 14m · UK
The Queen of Selvascura risks everything to be a mother; the King of Roccaforte falls in love with the voice of a mysterious girl; the King of Altomonte becomes obsessed with a flea and neglects his daughter.


Dante's Inferno
1911 · 1h 12m · IT
The classic tale of Dante's journey through hell, loosely adapted from the Divine Comedy and inspired by the illustrations of Gustav Doré. This historically important film stands as the first feature from Italy and the oldest fully-surviving feature in the world, and boasts beautiful sets and special effects that stand above other cinema of the era.


Ulysses
1954 · 1h 40m · IT
A retelling of Homer's The Odyssey, focusing on Ulysses's ten-year journey home to Ithaca following the Trojan War, where he faces various mythical challenges while his wife Penelope fends off suitors.


Pinocchio
2019 · 2h 4m · IT
Old woodcarver Geppetto fashions a wooden puppet, Pinocchio, who magically comes to life. Pinocchio longs for adventure and is easily led astray, encountering magical beasts, fantastical spectacles, while making friends and foes along his journey. However, his dream is to become a real boy, which can only come true if he finally changes his ways.


La Chimera
2023 · 2h 11m · IT
Everyone has their own Chimera, something they try to achieve but never manage to find. For Arthur, the Chimera looks like the woman he lost, Beniamina. In an adventurous journey between the living and the dead, between forests and cities, between celebrations and solitudes, the intertwined destinies of these characters unfold, all in search of the Chimera.


The Holy Boy
2025 · 2h 2m · IT
A PE teacher moves to a isolated mountain village where the people appear to live in unshakeable serenity, but soon stumbles across a disturbing ritual. Once a week, the locals are freed of their pain by a lonely boy born with the power to heal one's soul just by hugging them. Trying to rescue him from this madness, the man unleashes his dark side.


A Midsummer Night's Dream
1999 · 1h 56m · IT
Mistaken identity, unrequited love, and the supernatural are combined in Shakespeare's classic set in the woods of Greece on a moonlit night.


Winx Club: The Secret of the Lost Kingdom
2007 · 1h 25m · IT
Sixteen years ago the most powerful warrior wizards of the Magic Dimension sacrificed themselves to fight against absolute evil. Now the fate of a kingdom is in the hands of a young girl - Bloom, the fairy of the Dragon's flame. Accompanied by her Winx Club girlfriends, Bloom must overcome the greatest challenge of all: enter the depths of the obscure dimension, fight against evil to bring her parents back to life and reveal the mystery linked to her origins. The destiny of the entire Magic Dimension depends on the outcome of this conflict.


Shortcut
2020 · 1h 20m · DE
A group of five classmates is trapped inside their school bus after an encounter with a mysterious creature on the road. Amid constant threats from the creature, the teen's anxiety increases while their survival chances decrease.


Intolerance
2020 · 15m · IT
A deaf homeless man saves a defenceless girl from an attempted rape. Shocked and moved, the girl thanks him and asks if there is any way she can make it up to him. The homeless man asks for nothing in return, but then two wings incredibly emerge from the girl's back…


Dolls
1987 · 1h 17m · IT
A precocious girl, her nasty parents, two punk-rock losers and a weak-kneed salesman inadvertently become the guests of two ghoulish senior citizens in their dark, haunted mansion.


Pinocchio
2002 · 1h 50m · IT
Roberto Benigni adapts the classic children's tale by Carlo Collodi for the big-budget family-oriented comedy Pinocchio.


Ricky
2009 · 1h 30m · FR
When Katie meets Paco, they fall in love. From this an extraordinary child is born: Ricky, who quickly develops into something wonderful and not so normal.


Dante's Inferno
1911 · 15m · IT
A two-reel adaptation of Dante Alighieri's Inferno from the Divine Comedy by Helios Film. It is less well-known than the five-reel feature produced the same year by Milano Films, but it was released earlier in 1911.


Happy as Lazzaro
2018 · 2h 8m · FR
Purehearted teen Lazzaro is content living as a sharecropper in rural Italy, but an unlikely friendship with the marquise’s son will change his world.


Orfeo
2025 · 1h 14m · IT
Since he was a child, Orpheus has imagined stories about an abandoned villa across the street from his house. A solitary and visionary pianist, during an evening at the Polypus — the club where he plays — he meets Eura’s gaze. An unconditional love blossoms between them, but she’s concealing a secret. Then she disappears. One evening, Orpheus sees her enter a small door on Via Saterna, in front of the villa. He follows her. Before the threshold, he encounters the Green Man, an enigmatic figure who seems to know the mysteries of that passageway. Once through the door, Orpheus enters a visionary afterlife...


Once Upon a Time in Bethlehem
2019 · 1h 40m · IT
A thief and a priest end up magically transported in the year 0's Palestine, where they'll have to make sure that the Nativity will follow its course.


City of the Living Dead
1980 · 1h 33m · IT
A psychic seemingly dies of fright during a séance where she sees a vision of a Dunwich priest hanging himself in a church cemetery. New York City reporter Peter Bell investigates and learns that the priest's suicide has somehow opened a portal to Hell that must be sealed by All Saints Day, or else the dead will overtake humanity.


Arabian Nights
1974 · 2h 11m · FR
The final part of Pasolini's Trilogy of Life series is rich with exotic tales of slaves and kings, potions, betrayals, demons and, most of all, love and lovemaking in all its myriad forms. Mysterious and liberating, this is an exquisitely dreamlike and adult interpretation of the original folk tales.


Parsifal
1912 · 50m · IT
A fantasy film about the knight Parsifal, who has to protect the Holy Grail from wizards.


Etoile
1989 · 1h 41m · IT
An American ballerina arrives in Hungary to enroll in a ballet school and it soon becomes apparent that things are not what they seem.


Starcrash
1978 · 1h 32m · IT
A pair of smugglers manage to pick up a castaway while running from the authorities, who turns out to be the only survivor from a secret mission to destroy a mysterious superweapon designed by the evil Count Zartharn. The smugglers are soon recruited by the Emperor to complete the mission, as well as to rescue the Emperor's son, who has gone missing.


Tannhäuser
2000 · 3h 6m · US
A romantic opera in three acts with music and libretto by Richard Wagner, performed by the Orchestra of the Teatro di San Carlo. The original title, Tannhauser und der Sangerkrieg auf Wartburg, reveals the real nature of the opera, born by a fusion of two traditional sagas and dedicated to the dualism of spirituality and sensuality and the possibility of redemption through love. Composed between 1843 and 1845, Tannhauser has a tormented musical theme, made up of constant variations. It debuted in Dresden in 1845 when Wagner was just over 30.


L'Odissea
1911 · 44m · IT
Film adaptation of Homer's 'The Odyssey.'


Troll 2
1990 · 1h 35m · IT
When young Joshua learns that he will be going on vacation with his family to a small town called Nilbog, he protests adamantly. He is warned by the spirit of his deceased grandfather that goblins populate the town. His parents, Michael and Diana, dismiss his apprehensions, but soon learn to appreciate their son's warnings. Guided by his grandfather's ghost, will Joshua and his family stand a chance in fighting off these evil beings?


Super Fuzz
1980 · 1h 44m · ES
While delivering a parking ticket to a small village in the Florida everglades, Officer Dave Speed finds himself in the middle of a radiation experiment conducted by the American government and NASA, where a detonated nuclear missile gives him a multitude of superpowers.


Elf Me
2023 · 1h 39m · IT
A bumbling Christmas elf whose Santa's helper job is jeopardized by a complete inability in building toys teams up with a kid harassed by bullies.


Satyricon
1969 · 2h 9m · IT
After his young lover, Gitone, leaves him for another man, Encolpio decides to kill himself, but a sudden earthquake destroys his home before he has a chance to do so. Now wandering around Rome in the time of Nero, Encolpio encounters one bizarre and surreal scene after another.


Juliet of the Spirits
1965 · 2h 28m · IT
Middle-aged Giulietta grows suspicious of her husband, Giorgio, when his behavior grows increasingly questionable. One night when Giorgio initiates a seance amongst his friends, Giulietta gets in touch with spirits and learns more about herself and her painful past. Slightly skeptical, but intrigued, she visits a mystic who gives her more information -- and nudges her toward the realization that her husband is indeed a philanderer.


The Minotaur Mask
1971 · 11m · IT
A man wearing a mask of King Kong walks through a maze unrolling a ball of thread. Franco Brocani renewes his interest in the dens of perdition providing a free vision of the classic myth of the Minotaur. Shot in an art gallery in Rome and adapted from a story by Jorge L. Borges.


Melancholie der Engel
2009 · 2h 44m · DE
Upon learning that his days are numbered, a man and an old friend return to an old house that connects them by a dark secret. Along with three women and a mysterious old man, the group journeys into a horrifying abyss of debauchery and moral mayhem, leading to a fatal turn of events, during which the darkest human depths are revealed.


Dampyr
2022 · 1h 49m · IT
In war-torn Balkans, bogus monster hunter Harlan Draka is hired by soldiers who happen to be under attack by an army of actual vampires, uncovering the hidden truth about his past in the process: he is half-human and half-vampire... a Dampyr.


City of Women
1980 · 2h 20m · FR
The charismatic Snaporaz encounters an alluring woman on a train and pursues her through a forest. He ends up at a hotel populated by women gathered for a feminist conference, where he is an unwanted presence. Snaporaz soon discovers he’s entered a phantasmagoric world where women have taken power.


The Cave of the Golden Rose 5
1996 · 3h 20m · IT
In this last film princess Fantaghirò ends up in a parallel dimension fairy land full of kids. Here the princess must fight against a villain called "Nameless".


Miracle in Milan
1951 · 1h 37m · IT
Once upon a time a wise and kind old woman discovers a baby in her cabbage patch. She brings up the child and, when she dies, the boy, Totò, enters an orphanage. Totò leaves the orphanage a happy young man, and looks for work in post-war Milan. He ends up with the homeless and organizes them to build a shanty town in a vacant lot. But when greedy developers threaten the community’s land, Totò will need all the help he can get in order to find an impossible way out.


Feeling Better
2025 · 1h 33m · IT
A man spends peacefully his days in hospital without too many worries. He has been hospitalized for a while but that condition seems like the best way to live his life, safe from everything and everyone, without responsibilities and problems of any kind. It feels really good in there and even if some of his ward companions feel trapped, for them he can also feel free like nowhere else. That precious routine runs smoothly until a new person is admitted to the same ward. She is a restless, angry companion, she accepts nothing of that condition, especially the unwritten rules. She is not willing to wait, she wants to leave that place better or even worse. She wants to live as she should or die, as happens to those who end up in there. He is overwhelmed by that fury, first trying to defend himself and then accepting something incomprehensible. That encounter will help him accept that if you choose to truly face your heart and your emotions, there is no possible repair.


Freaks Out
2021 · 2h 21m · BE
Four super-powered circus freaks find themselves trapped in war-torn Rome after their foster father is captured by the Nazis.


When Women Had Tails
1970 · 1h 45m · IT
Seven orphan cavemen grow up on a little island all by themselves. After a fire burns all vegetation they set out to find a new place to live.


The Invisible Boy
2014 · 1h 40m · FR
Michele is thirteen year old, shy, unpopular at school, and in love with Stella. After wearing a costume for a Halloween party, he finds out that he's invisible.
Italian cinema runs from the neorealists working in bombed-out postwar streets to Fellini's spectacle, the Spaghetti Western, and the lurid giallo thrillers that shaped modern horror. Few national cinemas have exported this many distinct genres.
Fantasy builds worlds with their own rules — myth, magic, and invented history rendered with enough conviction to carry a story. The genre's modern shape owes much to Tolkien adaptations, but its roots run through folklore from every filmmaking tradition.