Belfagor: The French TV Series That Terrified Every Italian Child in the 1960s

If you ask an Italian over 55 what gave them childhood nightmares, there is a good chance the answer will be Belfagor. Not a horror film, not a book — a French television serial from 1965, broadcast in Italy on RAI in 1966. It told the story of a mysterious masked figure who haunts the Louvre museum in Paris. The images were black and white. The budget was minimal. The special effects were crude. And it terrified an entire generation of Italian children so effectively that the memory has never faded.

Belfagor — Il Fantasma del Louvre was directed by Claude Barma and starred Juliette Gréco as a young woman possessed by the spirit of Belfagor, a demon from the museum's depths. The four-episode serial played with shadows, silence, and sudden appearances in a way that felt genuinely uncanny, particularly on the small black-and-white television sets of mid-1960s Italian homes. The Belfagor mask — a featureless black oval with no discernible eyes — became one of the most iconic images of Italian television history. Parents used it to frighten children into behaving: 'Se non stai buono, arriva Belfagor.' (If you don't behave, Belfagor will come.)

What Belfagor reveals about Italian television culture is how formative those early RAI broadcasts were. Italian state television in the 1960s was the only television — there was nothing else — and what it broadcast shaped the entire nation's collective imagination. The RAI of the 1960s broadcast a wide range of foreign content alongside Italian productions, and the French and Italian co-productions of the era created shared cultural references across Southern Europe. Belfagor was Italian in the same way Goldrake was Italian: adopted, absorbed, made part of the collective memory through the sheer power of broadcast culture.

The name Belfagor itself has a long history. Belfagor (or Belphegor) appears in demonology as one of the princes of Hell — a demon of sloth and idleness who tempts people through laziness. Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a novella in the early sixteenth century called 'Belfagor arcidiavolo', in which the devil sends Belfagor to Earth in human form to investigate whether women truly make men's lives miserable (the answer, in Machiavelli's darkly comic version, is yes). The French series borrowed the name for its phantom, adding a layer of Italian literary resonance that Italian audiences may not have consciously recognised but certainly felt.