12 Essential Italian Giallo Horror Films: Black Gloves And Knives

It’s the season for blood and gore and unhealthy, possibly psychotic fixations, and few subgenres inspire obsession quite like “giallo” thrillers. But perhaps a detail-oriented, focused audience is appropriate for these particularly fetishistic films, as giallo is defined by outrageous production design, bold close-ups, intense color, memorable scores filled with sighs and shards of sound, and strange, gruesome murders performed by a very particular type of villain. With bizarre titles like “A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin” and “Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key,” they won’t be slipping our minds anytime soon.

Nightmarish but enthralling male-fantasy thrillers, tuned to a sexuality shaped by pin-up magazines, rock and roll, and the heightened, aestheticized world of movies and advertising, these bizarre spaces in which an urbane bourgeoisie reckons anxiously with social issues that were new and raw in the ’70s — they heyday of giallo. Themes such as feminism, civil rights, and emerging counterculture ideals were often expressed through monstrous violence. They’re films about obsessions and sublimated desires, fetishistically detailed with black gloves, lacquered nails, shining knives, and opulent interiors. Imagine Playboy magazines from the ’70s come to jerky life, animated by madmen whose process perverts desires, corrupts inhibitions, and renders morals flimsy and two-dimensional, and you get close to the splashy, salacious appeal of giallo.

It does have roots in a few other more respectable creative areas, with the movies of Alfred Hitchcock being visually evident touchstones, if not the most important antecedents. The term “giallo,” which translates literally to “yellow” but in Italy tends to mean simply “thriller” when talking about fiction, comes from the cheap, yellow-covered thriller novels published in Italy in the ’50s and ’60s. A specific subset of thriller films, however, made by directors such as Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Sergio Martino, overflowing with the currents described above, are called “giallo” outside Italy — and it’s in that context we use it here.

The earliest giallo efforts grew out of the “krimi” (crime) films out of Denmark and Germany, many of which were based on novels by “King Kong” screenwriter Edgar Wallace, whose books were also published as yellow-covered gialli. Mario Bava made arguably the first giallo film in 1963, “The Girl Who Knew Too Much,” but the specifics of the genre were formalized in 1970 through Dario Argento’s directorial debut “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage.” The subgenre thrived until 1975, after which it gave way to rough-edged “poliziotescchi” police action films in Italy, with a more sporadic output continuing the giallo influence even through today, in films like “Berberian Sound Studio” and “The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears.” Here are a dozen key gialli out of the many dozens produced in the ’60s, ’70s, and beyond — a perfect starter pack selection for anyone who wants to spend time this Halloween season exploring something a little more off the beaten track.

THE FORMATIVE FILMS

“The Girl Who Knew Too Much”  (Mario Bava, 1963)
Mario Bava’s black-and-white thriller is called the first giallo movie, and as a nexus point between Hitchcock, paperback thrillers and emerging Italian sensibilities, it makes a perfect starting point. Letícia Román stars as Nora Davis, a young American woman obsessed with paperback giallo thrillers who heads to Italy for a relaxing stay with her aunt. But auntie is ill, and despite the ministrations of an attractive young doctor (John Saxon, in his male model era) dies shortly after Nora’s arrival. Panicking after the old woman’s expiration, Nora flees into a nearby plaza, is mugged, and passes out. Upon waking, she witnesses a murder — or is it a dream of one of a string of serial killings that took place years earlier?

The story is a daft yarn in which Nora puts her thriller knowledge to use as she assembles clues about multiple killings, and fields threats to her own life. Nora fights to provide proof of her experiences, expressing a theme that will be a giallo staple — the woman who knows what she’s seen, but is pressured to believe she might be losing her mind. Bava shoots all the action in gorgeous high-contrast black and white that provides such rich atmosphere and storytelling that “The Girl Who Knew Too Much” could almost work as a silent film. Nora’s personal terrors come to life in a grand old apartment, where she faces phantoms in deep shadow, glinting knives, and the real killer. As Nora finds herself in stark, broken-down buildings and public spaces, another major undercurrent of gialli is born — the alienation of urban spaces.

The film exists in two major versions. The actors primarily perform in English, but the Italian-dubbed “The Girl Who Knew Too Much” is the superior cut. It is shorter and more finely honed as a thriller, with voiceover that complements the paperback thriller plot device. The english-language version, called “The Evil Eye,” features more humor, little of which is particularly effective, a more indulgent voiceover, and a new score that poorly complements the intense chiaroscuro cinematography.

“Blood and Black Lace” (Mario Bava, 1964)
Made just one year after “The Girl Who Knew Too Much,” Bava’s next thriller is a colorful but madly bleak whirl of violence and suspense in which a masked killer in raincoat and hat, looking like a pulp hero with a demonic twist, rips through the lives of the employees (particularly the gorgeous female employees) of a small design house. The atmosphere is a riot of fashion magazine imagery lit with primary-colored light that competes with inky shadow. It all coheres into just enough of a plot – a murdered woman’s diary threatens to expose the secrets of a small group of people – to keep things going as Bava stages a minor ballet of glances and objects in which everyone is suspect to the very end. Everyone still alive, that is. “Blood and Black Lace” proves the maxim that says process, rather than plot, can be the thing that really enthralls, and indeed the primary pleasure of this film lies not in trying to figure out whodunnit, because that really doesn’t matter, but in watching how they do it, and where, and in what light. Few gialli are as visually accomplished as this, which marks a high bar for the genre that wasn’t matched, much less exceeded, until the release of Dario Argento’s “Deep Red.” Despite the fact that this effort was crafted before the “giallo” was even fully defined, it is among the best the genre has to offer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UMNNQqurwc