Giallo films have a rich history. These Italian horror/exploitation flicks paved the way for slasher movies and combined sex and violence in a revolutionary way.
Giallo, in Italian, literally means “yellow”. The term refers to a series of pulp paperbacks which were first published by the Mondadori publishing house back in 1929. These books came in yellow covers. Over the years, the word has come to mean something quite significant to horror movie lovers the world over. Giallo films are horror-thriller films that are bloody, gory, sexy and a bit exploitative.
THE BIRTH OF GIALLO
Most experts agree that director Mario Bava is the first person to bring a giallo film to the silver-screen. The Girl Who Knew Too Much (La ragazza che sapeva troppo) is widely accepted as the first film released in this genre. A young woman, who reads yellow-jacket gialli by the way, arrives in Italy. She unwittingly pays witness to a murder and gets caught up in the investigation to apprehend the Alphabet Killer.
The most important thing about this film is that it has many characteristics that are common to gialli. Gialli tend to feature foreign or displaced protagonists who get into trouble as soon as they arrive at their new location. The murder scenes are violent, shocking and bloody. The police tend to be ineffective or nonexistent. The films themselves are highly stylized with eerie music, fantastic fashions and a focus on the erotic.
Another Bava release, 1964’s Blood and Black Lace (Sei donne per l'assassino) took the genre a step further. Bava introduced the masked killer, which became a trademark not just for gialli but also international slasher films. Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and Dario Argento cite this film as an inspiration.
Blood and Black Lace focuses on the gory murders of beautiful and often scantily-clad models. Bava was given free reign with this film and showed that he was bored with the classic whodunit film. He created a horror orgy that combined sex and violence in a way that had been rarely attempted before. The plot might be thin, but then again, the plot is not the thing in a classic gialli anyway.
GIALLO’S HEYDAY
If Bava is credited with giving birth to giallo, Dario Argento is considered to be the person who raised it and made it mainstream. Argento began his career in the film industry by working on the screenplay for Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in the West. Soon after that, he made his first film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo).
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which was released in 1970, is a thriller that’s loosely based on Frederic Brown’s novel, The Screaming Mimi. In the film, an American writer living in Rome with his model galpal witnesses an attack on a woman by a mysterious black-gloved assailant (Note: The killer with the black gloves is an Argento trademark. He usually portrays that character in his films.) The woman survives, but the writer can not leave the country as he planned because the police want his assistance. The writer and his girlfriend immediately become targets of the killer but miraculously survive.
DARIO’S MUSE
Dario Argento met his muse, Daria Nicolodi, soon after The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was released. In fact, the former fashion model was quite taken with the film and the filmmaker. The couple, who would eventually move in together and produce Italian actress Asia Argento, began a working relationship as well. It is with Daria that Dario made his best and perhaps most influential films, Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) and Sighs (Suspiria).
Deep Red is considered by many to be Dario’s masterpiece. Not only is it stylish and beautiful to behold, the film is a truly intelligent and interesting murder-mystery with some blood and gore thrown in. The killer is difficult if not impossible to determine upon first viewing.
A British pianist in Rome witnesses the murder of a psychic. When he enters the psychic’s hotel room, he sees a painting that haunts him. He insists it’s the key to solving the mystery but can’t remember why. He also hooks up with a reporter, played by Nicolodi, who is his love interest and partner on the case. The two remain a step behind the murderer until the shocking and extremely violent conclusion.
Later on, Sighs (Suspiria) took people’s breath away. It’s just exquisite while being so very gory. A lovely ballerina arrives in Germany. Her fellow dancers are being murdered. She must solve the mystery before she becomes a victim of a strange coven of witches who happen to run the school while practicing some serious black magic.
MODERN GIALLO
After the release of Sighs, Argento would slip in and out of the giallo genre it seemed. He paid homage to it from time to time in Tenebrae (1982), Opera (1987) and 2001’s Non Ho Sonno (I Can’t Sleep). Many speculate that the genre lost steam as American filmmakers began to take it over with slasher flicks. However, gialli never went away. They just became less successful.
Of course, that may change again with a bit of help from Argento. He is finally hard at work on the last chapter in his The Three Mothers trilogy (Sighs was the first; Inferno was the second). The Third Mother (La terza madre) is currently in production and due to be released in 2007.
CONCLUSION
Love it or hate it, giallo is a subset of the larger horror genre. It has helped bring sex and violence together in a way that filmmakers continue to explore. The great gialli films of the 60s, 70s and 80s inspired modern horror masters in ways that perhaps they aren’t even aware of. It’s a movement that continues to survive if not thrive and is worth a look for any true horror fan.
