How Did Critics Respond To Salò, Or The 120 Days Of S*** At Release?

When 'Salò, or the 120 Days of S' first circulated, critics were basically split into two camps and I can still picture the tone of the debates. One camp reacted viscerally: headlines screaming censorship, calls for bans, and moral condemnation were common. Reviews in that vein treated the film as obscene and dangerous, and those critics often urged authorities to intervene. That public uproar fed legal actions and prevented screenings in a number of places, so the film’s early life was punctuated by court battles and festival refusals.

The other camp read the picture as a savage political allegory. Those reviewers emphasized Pasolini’s intent to indict authoritarianism and social decay, noting the film’s formal discipline and symbolic cruelty. They didn’t necessarily endorse the content emotionally, but they defended it as art that forces confrontation with power’s worst face. Over the decades, academic reassessment has leaned more toward that second interpretation, though the initial critical storm remains a major part of the film’s story — and I still find the whole saga oddly compelling and uneasy to unpack.

The release of 'Salò, or the 120 Days of S' hit like a lightning bolt — critics didn't line up politely to react, they exploded. I remember first reading old press coverage and feeling dizzy: outrage, moral panic, and legal threats dominated the headlines. Many critics at the time called the film obscene, pornographic, and an assault on decency; newspapers and reviewers often led with shock rather than nuanced reading. That reaction fed into bans, police seizures, and festival rows in several countries. Pasolini's brutal murder a few months before the film reached wider audiences only intensified the drama; reviewers couldn't separate the film from the tragedy surrounding its creator, which pushed reviews into a charged, almost forensic tone.

On the defensive side, though, some critics and intellectuals insisted the film was a deliberate, political allegory — an uncompromising portrait of power, cruelty, and the mechanisms of fascism. These defenders argued that the imagery was not gratuitous but purposeful: the extreme acts serve as a metaphor for state violence, humiliation, and consumerized corruption. Others pointed out the film's formal rigor — its classical framing, austere editing, and ritualized structure — and argued that those formal choices made the violence readable as metaphor rather than mere spectacle. Still, even many of these sympathetic readers admitted discomfort; praise was often cautious, framed as admiration for artistic courage rather than blanket approval.

What fascinates me is how polarized the discourse was and how that polarization forced a new kind of criticism into public view. Reviews became battlegrounds for arguments about censorship, artistic freedom, and whether art has limits. Over time, scholarly re-evaluations softened the initial knee-jerk condemnations: historians and film theorists began to situate the film within Pasolini's political thought and within traditions of transgressive art that aim to shock viewers into moral reflection. That doesn't make the film easy to like — it remains profoundly difficult — but it does explain why the immediate critical reception was so fractured. For me, revisiting those early reviews is like watching a culture writhing with its own conscience; it makes the film's controversy almost as revealing as the film itself, and I still feel unsettled every time I think about it.