12 Essential Italian Giallo Horror Films: Black Gloves And Knives

“Perfume of the Lady in Black” (Francseco Barilli, 1974)
This dreamy thriller, a melange of sleep-deprived hallucinations and post-Polanski impulses, falls just outside the confines of the central giallo spectrum, but its differences from the genre as a whole are part of what makes it a terrific diversion. “The Perfume of the Lady in Black” is an excellent, slow-burning paranoid breakdown. Mimsy Farmer, removed from American teen movies and imported to Italy thanks to a real-life love affair, plays Sylvia, a successful chemical engineer who offsets her professional capability with an emotionally stunted, even brutish relationship with a selfish, distant man. Sylvia’s life becomes more complicated when memories and dreams of her violently troubled childhood begin to intrude upon her everyday life. Barilli does well as he conveys Sylvia’s visions and unusual experiences, but soon pushes the film into weirdo overdrive with the suggestion that everyone in Sylvia’s life is part of an underground cabal organized around her destruction. Whether that’s part of any objective reality is open to question – one that the film’s bizarrely violent conclusion is not at all prepared to answer. In a set of films known for keeping audiences off-balance, Barilli’s movie has a particular talent for layering minor uncertainties and major shock sequences within an overarching vision of decaying city life. When many gialli have been rediscovered, revived, and thoroughly dissected, “Perfume of the Lady in Black” is probably the least-seen film on this list, and the most deserving of a second chance.

“All the Colors of the Dark” (Sergio Martino, 1972)
When therapy doesn’t work, try Satanism. That’s one lesson from director Sergio Martino (‘Your Vice Is a Locked Room’) who works once again with Edwige Fenech and George Hilton for a dive into full-on black magic. This time, the director thins the membrane between reality and hallucination to little more than a vague gauze. Fenech plays Jane, a woman whose young life was defined by her mother’s murder, and who is now struggling towards emotional recovery from a car accident that led to a miscarriage. Her traveling salesman husband and medical assistant sister are little help, as is a well-meaning therapist. But a stray encounter with a new neighbor leads to the ultimate in counterculture cures: a black mass that shreds Jane’s dignity but restores her sexual appetite and props up her sense of emotional independence. The benefits of the ritual are short-lived, however, and Jane finds no solace anywhere when she is followed by a man (Hilton) whose plastic-blue eyes look exactly like the eyes of a dream figure linked to dreams of her mother’s death. Martino works all the giallo tricks, using red herrings, suspect glances and an overwhelming aura of paranoia to dash realism and crush any sense that Jane might easily find refuge from either her bloody past or fraught present. Surprise twists surface late in the game, of course, but perhaps the most shocking elements are the stray wisps of optimism that prevent “All the Colors of the Dark” from being overwhelmingly bleak.

“Lizard in a Woman’s Skin” (Lucio Fulci, 1971)
In a genre dominated by men working to process and/or reject the rush of social changes in early ’70s Italy, the fantasist director Lucio Fulci often seemed least willing to deal with advances for women and youth culture even as he couldn’t turn away from the allure of new cultural influence. “Lizard in a Woman’s Skin” is a phantasmagoric vision of respectability colliding with hidden vice, where a desire to not be respectable can never quite be expressed, leading to degradation and violent death. Florinda Bolkan plays lawyer’s daughter Carol Hammond, whose upper-class apartment shares a wall with the counterculture pleasure den inhabited by Julia (Anita Strindberg). The rich woman suffers quietly and patiently through dinners colored by the sounds from drugged-out hippies and degenerate partygoers next door. Carol is haunted by dreams of Julia’s activities, and her life begins to unravel when her dream of murdering Julia is followed by the woman’s actual murder. The convoluted mystery that follows isn’t so much intriguing in its own right as it is a thinly-covered rumination on the collision of new cultural attitudes. Fulci is happy to look long and hard at images of writhing hippie parties, but he also scorns the participants as ineffective and small. Even so, there’s an understanding that the appeal of new youth culture could be more insidious than Fulci would like to admit, and the real horror of “Lizard in a Woman’s Skin” is that the hedonism of the far left could corrupt absolutely anyone, especially with the repressive old social order in place to keep everyone’s vices hidden away. Famously, a (possibly apocryphal) story claims that Fulci was taken to court on charges of animal cruelty for a scene in this film featuring vivisected dogs, which were in fact puppets created by Carlo Rambaldi, who would later create the ET puppet for Steven Spielberg. Rambaldi paraded the puppets before the court, says the story, and all parties went home chastened but happy.

“Deep Red” (Dario Argento, 1975)
After a brief break from giallo, Dario Argento crafted this gloriously impressionistic nightmare, which for those who want vicious sensory overload could be considered the height of the genre. “Deep Red” is certainly the aesthetic giallo ideal, with its setting in overwhelming architecture, first-person camera movements, unreliable perspectives, over-saturated colors, and lingering close-ups of stray objects. OK, sure, there’s a story, about an American pianist (David Hemmings) who witnesses a gruesome murder in his own apartment building, and spends the entire film in a staple-giallo pursuit of perception, chasing that one detail he can’t quite remember or put into context. The film is really about visions and textures, however, featuring characters dwarfed by columns and statues, virtually buried in concrete. The extreme close-ups of a parquet floor, knives, and a phono needle on a record precede David Fincher‘s macro work in “Fight Club,” and work in concert with the proggy and occasionally jarringly upbeat score from Goblin to establish this idiosyncratic vision. When he turns away from color and texture, Argento tries and mostly fails to come to terms with emerging social changes. The line “it seems that there are some things which you cannot do seriously with liberated women” is probably meant as a joke, but doesn’t land as such, and the film’s gay and trans characters, who play a significant role, are very much rooted in a society that wasn’t yet comfortable with a non-hetero norm. “Deep Red” exists in a few versions, with a longer cut released in Italy as “Profondo Rosso.” The longer version features more comedy, and extra dialogue scenes with the reporter played by Daria Nicolodi, but isn’t essential enough to be worth tracking down for casual viewing.