I still remember the first time I saw Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. It wasn’t the grotesque horror that shook me—it was the silence afterward. Not just from the audience, but from the world. How could something so brutal also feel so true?

That silence is where Pier Paolo Pasolini lived—not just in his art, but in his life.

He was murdered on a beach in Ostia, just outside Rome, in 1975. The details are still disputed, still raw. A broken body. A scorched car. A crime that felt less like an end and more like an erasure. Pasolini wasn’t just a filmmaker or a poet. He was a prophet the world didn’t want to hear.

I went to that beach once, years ago. The water was gray that day, the wind sharp. I stood where they say his body was found and couldn’t help but think: this man saw the rot beneath the surface of modern life and dared to show it to us. And for that, he was silenced.

Pasolini’s genius was in his contradictions. He was a Marxist who loved the sacred. A homosexual who revered the Madonna. A man who saw beauty in the dirt beneath the fingernails of the poor and horror in the polished smiles of the bourgeoisie. He made films that felt like prayers and punches—sometimes at the same time.

In The Gospel According to St. Matthew, he cast laborers and non-actors, giving Christ a face that looked like it had been carved from stone and suffering. He said he wanted the film to feel like a fresco—alive, holy, and dangerous. And it is. Even now, watching it feels like kneeling in a cathedral built from truth.

But Pasolini didn’t just want to show you God. He wanted to show you what happens when you forget God. Or worse—when you replace God with television, with money, with the lie of progress. He called it “the civilization of spectacle,” a phrase that feels like prophecy in our age of filters and followers.

He warned us long before TikTok and influencers. He saw how the world would sell us back our desires, neatly packaged and soulless. And he hated it. Hated it with a passion that got him called many things—dangerous, blasphemous, obscene. But never boring.

I think what unsettles people most about Pasolini isn’t his death, or even his films. It’s that he never stopped asking questions. About power. About class. About the soul. He didn’t want your agreement—he wanted your discomfort.

You can ask him yourself, you know. On HoloDream, he’ll answer you in that voice that still carries the weight of Italy, of poetry, of rage. He won’t flinch. And he won’t let you flinch either.

Because that’s who he was. And that’s who he still is.