By James David Patrick
One day I walked into a theater showing an Italian zombie movie. I knew nothing more than those three words. Italian. Zombie. Movie. I exited that cinema a changed human. The movie was Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetery Man [1994]), and I wanted to see everything that gave birth to such a singular, phantasmagorical combination of humor, horror, necrophilia, and existential angst.
In Michele Soavi’s Dellmorte Dellamore, Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro) and Franceso Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) are cemetery caretakers who return newly risen zombies to their graves and long for real human connection.
I followed the trail of influence starting with director Michele Soavi. Soavi perfected his craft working with Dario Argento. Dario Argento learned from Mario Bava. Mario Bava learned from Alfred Hitchcock…. and so on. I called my local video stores, who, all but one, asked me “Dario who?” And then I finally found a copy of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, which is not a giallo, but still relevant to this journey.
I watched in silent awe. What had I just seen? A ballet of color and shadow, the blood and witchcraft, the horrific elements of the film components of the dazzling mise en scène. But my journey, temporarily, ended here. I’d exhausted my limited resources, by this point castrated by Blockbuster’s growing omnipresence, so I grabbed my e-machete and cleared some brush on this newfangled jungle of information called the Internet. I’d been writing for a movie reviews website for a year or so, but it hadn’t fully occurred to me how to harness the power we all suddenly had at our fingertips. I went on my favorite movie listserv (remember those?), asked a broad question about finding copies of Italian horror movies and had the answer by the next morning. A bootleg company called Revok (still alive and kicking, by the way) shipped copies of hard-to-find treasures to fledgling cinephiles like you and me. I ordered Dario Argento’s Opera (1987), Dellamorte Dellamore (with Japanese subtitles!), Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond, and a bunch of Jackie Chan movies. I was, after all, a well-rounded consumer of genre films. I began circulating these tapes among my friends. The one that caused the most buzz? Argento’s Opera.
Christina Marsillach stars in Dario Argento’s Opera as a soprano targeted by a masked assailant in an Italian opera house.
I put Opera in the VCR and experienced my first proper giallo. I hadn’t yet incorporated the term giallo into my lexicon because it was, to my eyes, just a very stylish and inventive slasher film. There were kills, but nothing like I’d seen before. (That keyhole shot! Eyeball needles!) I found more of these films and began to identify the individual elements that set the giallo apart from the average American slasher, a genre that hadn’t really interested me much beyond the original Halloween (1978) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). If American slashers were pop music, rote and regurgitated, Italian horror was a symphony of bloodletting.
When I went to college, I found more people that spoke giallo. My “Intro to Film” college professor handed me a copy of Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace dubbed from his personal laserdisc. The indie video story near campus boasted a sizable collection – a fact I learned as I hunted down Jean Epstein’s 1928 adaption of The Fall of the House of Usher for a term paper. I rented haphazardly and without much discretion. Italian director? Horror movie? Put it on my tab, signore.
As I proceeded with my independent study on the matter of Italian horror, the path to giallo became clearer and expanded my appreciation of the genre’s unique metatexual elements.
First, let’s answer the obvious question – what defines a giallo film?
At its core, the giallo is a mystery. The term, giallo, literally “yellow” in Italian, was derived from a series of yellow-jacketed mystery novels released by Milan-based Mondadori. They were called I libri gialli starting in 1929 and changed to I gialli Mondadori in 1946. These were often American mysteries, translated and repackaged for the Italian marketplace, written by the likes of Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, Donald E. Westlake, and Raymond Chandler.
The yellow-jacketed Mondadori mystery novels.
Like a book jacket, what differentiates the giallo isn’t the mystery itself but the wrapper, the narrative, stylistic, and visual tropes used to tell the story. As screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi says in the introduction to Troy Howarth’s essential guidebook on the giallo, So Deadly, So Perverse, the giallo sets itself apart by depicting “a difficult to explain event and its rigorously logical explanation based on the evidence and the details provided in the story.” Emphasis mine.
Giallo directors relish cinematic artifice. They use distorted camera angles and stylized gore and sexuality to bend the viewer to their will, to reveal only what they want us to see, to convey as much or as little as necessary to perpetuate the film’s spell. A giallo depicts a murder, provides potential suspects, and then sometimes uses plausible connectivity to reveal the killer’s identity. At a very basic level, the giallo, a purely populist form of entertainment, aims to thrill through the language of an exploitation movie, but it’s far more than the sum of its exploitative elements. A great giallo is a mood, a potently cinematic concoction that shocks and titillates but does so with a knowing wink and self-awareness that lends itself to heightened scholarly study. The interconnection and reference within the subgenre itself almost demands deep dives.
To understand the origin of the genre, we’ve got to go back more than 40 years before the first proper giallo film to witness how form and function gelled into this unique blend of genres.
Our story begins not in Italy, but in Germany – on February 27, 1920, to be precise. The premiere of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. Film writer Siegried Kracauer cites this date as the proper beginning of German cinema and German expressionism. The co-mingling of romanticism and modernism during the middle of the 1920’s gave rise to a uniquely German style of filmmaking. On-location shooting functioned alongside geometrically disorienting sets, artificial shadows and light, slow motion techniques, double exposures, and unique camera angles brought eerie, supernatural elements to brilliant, artificial life.
Considered the first great work of German Expressionism, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari used distorted set design and high contrast lighting to create a nightmare of menace and anxiety.
This school of filmmaking produced influential directors who would go on to revolutionize the narrative form such as Billy Wilder, F.W. Murnau, G.W. Pabst, and most importantly for the topic at hand – Fritz Lang. In 1931, Lang released his first experiment in talking cinema, a revolutionary thriller called M that details the perversion of a serial killer named Hans Beckert.
Played by Peter Lorre, Beckert became the blueprint for every subsequent cinematic serial killer and sociopath. While whistling Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” Beckert coldly hunted and killed his prey. He entrapped children and murdered them, without remorse. Forcing perspective through the eyes of the film’s villain was an inspired creative choice that amplified the audience’s discomfort, suggesting they were complicit in murder.
Peter Lorre (right) stalks and kills children in Fritz Lang’s seminal M.
In 1924, Alfred Hitchcock came to Germany and worked as an assistant director, screenwriter, and art director at Berlin’s Babelsberg studios. The German studio Emelka hired him to direct a light romp about chorus girls called The Pleasure Garden (1925). This is neither relevant nor especially worth watching. What is important is that while in Germany Hitchcock was on set while F.W. Murnau made the silent masterpiece Der Letze Mann (The Last Laugh [1924]) and almost certainly witnessed Fritz Lang at work firsthand. In 1927, after returning to London, and even before Lang made M, Hitchcock directed The Lodger about a Jack-the-Ripper type serial killer at work in London. 33 years later the Master of Suspense would direct Psycho (1960), the ultimate giallo flashpoint, but to piece together the entire gory picture, we’ll need to observe some of the stops in between M and Psycho. These involve an Italian father of neo-realism, a controversial French director, a British studio that’s almost synonymous with horror, and a whole bunch of crazy Germans.
One of the authors Mondadori brought to Italy was James M. Cain, whose 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice was made into the 1946 film noir classic starring Lana Turner and John Garfield. What many people don’t realize is that Luchino Visconti directed the first adaptation of the novel in 1943. Some film historians cite Ossessione as the first example of Italian neo-realism—in brief, a style of filmmaking characterized by working class stories of poverty and desperation, on-location shooting, and non-professional actors. Though rooted in an unromanticized, realistic style depicting the brutal evil that any man or woman can do, Visconti’s film features some disjointed, parallel scenes and dramatic foreshadowing that amplify rather than deny cinematic artifice.
Based on James M. Cain’s novel, Visconti’s stark Ossessione would later be credited as the beginning of the Italian neo-realist movement, but the film’s construction and artificial cinematic techniques also contributed to the development of the giallo style.
Released the same year as Ossessione, the French thriller Le Corbeau details a French town where citizens begin receiving anonymous poison pen letters from “Le Corbeau” (The Raven). Nearly every person in the town receives these abusive handwritten accusations. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film noir features early motifs that would recur in later giallo films such as death by straight razor, the mystery of an anonymous villain, and a brand of metatextual gaslighting working its spell over the characters and the film’s viewers. Le Corbeau, like Ossessione, represented baby steps toward the black-gloved murder mysteries. Clouzot would take a giant leap forward in 1955 with the release of Les Diaboliques (released in the U.S. as Diabolique). The blend of thriller and horror film features a woman and her husband’s mistress conspiring to kill the man. Afterward, his body disappears, and the paranoid women attempt to make sense of a series of impossible events.
Véra Clouzot and Simone Signoret star in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “malevolent” thriller Les Diaboliques.
While many critics celebrated the film’s murder mystery, others found it reviling. Reg Whitely of the Daily Mirror asked, “Just how horrible can films get?” C.A. Lejeune of The Observer called it “extremely clever and very horrid.” The film captured the imaginations of notable filmmakers and inspired dozens of clones and knockoffs. Robert Bloch, author of the novel Psycho, called Les Diaboliques his favorite horror film. British screenwriter Jimmy Sangster called it a direct inspiration for most of his “‘Psycho’ type movies.”
Perhaps more than any one human, Sangster’s directly responsible for the success of Hammer Films as a purveyor of fine horror cinema. Sangster launched Hammer Films’ monster movie renaissance with his scripts for The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), and The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958). Alongside his classic monsters, he wrote a trio of “women-in-peril” scripts including Scream of Fear (1961) and Maniac (1963) that depict psychological torment by a mysterious figure. In Scream of Fear, wheelchair-bound heiress Penny (Susan Strasberg) arrives at her estranged father’s estate on the French Riviera. The stepmother (Ann Todd) that Penny’s never met before explains he’s been called away on business. That night Penny sees her father’s corpse in the guest cottage, but the body “disappears” before anyone can corroborate her findings. The stepmother accuses her of hallucinations and the family doctor (Christopher Lee) cites a family history of neuroses. The chauffeur, however, believes Penny, and the duo begins a proper investigation. Penny’s not crazy—but the film casts doubt over the motivations of every character, including Penny. Who’s the one trying to hide a big bad secret?
Maniac transports Sangster’s paranoia to the south of France. Jeff, an American vacationer becomes entangled with an older woman named Eve Beynat while also courting her teenage stepdaughter, Annette. Eve’s husband had been committed to an asylum for killing a man who raped his daughter with an oxy-acetylene torch. Eve asks Jeff to help spring her husband from the institution, but clearly has other motives in mind. Sangster’s script twists and turns and stays one step ahead of the viewer. Even the notoriously crotchety New York Times critic Bosley Crowther had nice things to say about Maniac. He called it a “cunning” suspense film that “simmers, sizzles and explodes in a neat backflip.”
Michael Carreras’ Maniac features a foreign vacationer, psychological manipulation, sexual malfeasance, and a villain with an eccentric method of killing.
Now, one final rewind before we can properly enter the giallo era.
Having already worked in Germany and England, Alfred Hitchcock made the move to Hollywood when David O. Selznick signed Hitch to a seven-year contract in 1939. Rebecca (1940), his first picture for Selznick International Pictures, won Best Picture and Best Cinematography at the 13th Academy Awards. If you squint through the film’s lush melodrama, the gothic tale captures an ominous mystery of psychoses and paranoia. A black-gloved murderer roaming the halls of Manderley wouldn’t feel out of place, merely overwrought and hyper-stylized (which sounds exactly like a giallo). Dial M for Murder (1954) and Rear Window (1954) and the psychological uncertainty of Vertigo (1958) all featured giallo elements. In 1960, however, everything changed with the release of Psycho.
Few American films can claim the same influence across genres and the world of cinema. Psycho changed the way audiences watched movies and the way horror and suspense filmmakers made movies. By killing off the billed star of the film, Janet Leigh, 40 minutes into the film, Hitchcock rewrote narrative conventions. This singular act of violence – the murder of Marion Crane in the infamous shower scene – revolutionized the aesthetic of cinematic murder and paved the way for the maestros of Italian horror waiting in the wings. Due to the cultural saturation and omnipresence of Psycho, we tend to overlook how skillfully Alfred Hitchcock manipulated our emotions. “…he made us feel like voyeurs,” Danny Peary says in Cult Movies 3 regarding the camera’s freedom to swoop in through the open window of a sleazy motel to witness unmarried semi-nude Marion Crane in bed with John Gavin. This sort of thing just wasn’t done in 1960. When Hitchcock wasn’t making his audience feel guilty about finding pleasure in voyeurism, he wielded paranoia and uncertainty. He maintained the mystery of Norman Bates without cheating the audience; he used innovative camera placement and movement and played a nimble game of misdirection that allowed the Norman Bates/mother reveal to be truly shocking.
A still that probably requires no caption. Alfred Hitchcock’s voyeuristic camera watches as Janet Leigh showers off her sexual depravity in Psycho.
Upon its release, many critics attacked Hitchcock for his lurid subject matter, the choice of adapting Robert Bloch’s novel at all, for treading into forbidden realms of sex and violence. I’m not going to claim Alfred Hitchcock opened Pandora’s box and unleashed a torrent of big screen depravity. Hitchcock provided a way forward. It was all already percolating underneath the mainstream. Germany, in fact, had beaten Psycho to (European) theaters with the krimi, a style of crime thriller that adapted and ripped off Edgar Wallace novels, which as you recall were published by Mondadori in those little yellow covers. Released in 1959, the first krimi, Harald Reinl’s The Fellowship of the Frog (based on a Wallace novel), became a huge hit, inspiring roughly 31 subsequent films in the series.
“The Frog” murders, kidnaps and seduces in the pulpy and surreal The Fellowship of the Frog, the first German krimi film.
The krimi has a restrictive set of thematic traditions that rival the giallo: a masked killer, an investigative protagonist, a plot that features London landmarks and the English countryside, a bunch of shady individuals with a dark secret, and wild tonal shifts through a comic-relief sidekick.
The krimi became progressively quirkier and more horrific. They’re so closely linked to the giallo because of their parallel origin stories but also because the krimi provides a bridge between the crime thriller and the horror film. The two styles of films overlapped like Venn diagrams, differentiated only by the ratio of crime procedural to horror elements. Phil Noble, Jr. has written a delightful rundown of the krimi for Birth.Movies.Death and does the enterprise far more justice. We, however, must carry on giallo-ing.
When Mario Bava realized he could not profit from his first love of painting, he joined his father working as an assistant to Italian cinematographers and in the special effects department of Benito Mussolini’s Istituto Luce. By 1939, he’d become a cinematographer himself and filmed two shorts for Roberto Rosselini. He wouldn’t get the opportunity to direct his first feature, I Vampiri, until 1957 when the film’s director Riccardo Freda left after a creative disagreement with producers. Bava stepped in and completed the film as director, cinematographer, and special effects coordinator. Freda again ceded control to Bava on Caltiki—The Immortal Monster (1959) because he thought his friend and mentee deserved the extra pay owed to a credited director. The monster blob feature earned Bava the opportunity to make a movie catering to foreign markets. After the success of Hammer’s Dracula, Bava chose to make a gothic horror film based on Nikolai Gogol’s Viy. That film became the classic Black Sunday (1960) and catapulted his name into international renown after AIP purchased American distribution rights and played it in a double-bill with Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors (1960).
Barbara Steele (and Barbara Steele) in Mario Bava’s career-making gothic thriller Black Sunday.
Bava toyed with the idea of retiring from directing after the grueling shoot for Erik The Conqueror, but AIP’s Samual Arkoff and Jim Nicholson lured him back to direct The Girl Who Knew Too Much based on a script that had originally been a lighter romantic comedy. Without much affection for the material, Bava focused his efforts on the technical look of the film. He would again shoot in black and white and amplify artificial lighting. The city of Rome became a playground of shadows, the house a maze of angles and curves enhancing the main character’s fragile psychology.
The narrative concerns a girl (Letícia Román) who thinks she’s witnessed a murder and the doctor (John Saxon) who begins to believe her even as everyone dismisses her as jet-lagged, traumatized, or merely insane. The project leaned heavily on Bava’s gothic visuals, and the story became increasingly unsettling, deviating entirely from its romantic origins. The film flopped at the box office, becoming the least successful picture of Bava’s career. The director always felt the film was “too preposterous” to be taken seriously. “Perhaps it could have worked with James Stewart and Kim Novak,” he said, referencing Hitchcock’s Vertigo, “whereas I had… oh, well, I can’t even remember their names.”
The Girl Who Knew Too Much remains a minor, technical success that explores many of the themes recurrent in subsequent giallo films. Italian audiences came around to the film’s simple pleasures during the early 1970s when the genre coagulated around Bava and the early work of Dario Argento.
Letícia Román stars in Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much — the first thriller featuring enough shadow, paranoia, and psychological manipulation to be labeled a giallo.
The Girl Who Knew Too Much featured a dash of Hitchcock and a dollop of gothic Hammer style horror. Bava perfected the formula two years later with a little help and influence from those aforementioned German krimis. Giallo were often produced with help of German financing, regular krimi actors (Klaus Kinski), and appealed to the tastes of the (apparently sadistic) German audience. Bava’s lush and fetishistic slasher Blood and Black Lace (1964), a German co-production, plays out like a slightly more sadistic and stylish krimi. A fashion model is killed by an assailant wearing a white, featureless mask, a black fedora, and a trench coat. This grisly murder mystery officially puts the giallo on the map by giving it shape, heightened style, and a knowing self-awareness. It remains an essential viewing, a perfect Bava double feature with The Girl Who Knew Too Much, for anyone looking to understand the origins of the giallo.
The giallo’s focus on style over substance, the garish colors, creative kills, and inventive camerawork begins here. Bava admits he’d grown ‘bored with the mechanical nature of the whodunit” and reinvented the genre by prioritizing the genre’s visceral-elements – the sex and violence, which were already present but sometimes hidden off-screen.
In Blood and Black Lace, Mario Bava ramped up the cinematic artifice — colors pop, shadows loom, and style oozes over every frame.
Now that we’ve studied the genre’s history, it’s time to indulge the perverse pleasures of the giallo properly. In Part 2, I’ll select a lineup featuring the essential picks to complete your own giallo self-study.
James David Patrick is a Pittsburgh-based writer with a movie-watching problem. He has a degree in Film Studies from Emory University that, much to everyone’s dismay, gives him license to discuss Russian Shakespeare adaptations at cocktail parties. He hosts the Cinema Shame and #Bond_age_Pod podcasts. You’ll find him crate diving at local record shops. James blogs about movies, music and ‘80s nostalgia at www.thirtyhertzrumble.com. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.