In 1975, Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered by a young hustler who was rumored to have appeared in his notorious final film, Salo o le 120 giornate di Sodoma ("Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom"). The film, a grim fusion of Mussolini's Fascist Italy with the Marquis de Sade, was banned in Italy (and many other countries) for several years.

Oddly, Pasolini reportedly predicted his own death -- and that his socks would be covered with his own semen.

[In a paper on semiotics (called 'Il cinema dipoesia' 1965), Pasolini called cinema "a non-conventional and non-symbolic language" which expresses reality through reality itself. Among his earlier films? Una vita violenta (1959) -- "A Violent Life."]