12 Essential Italian Giallo Horror Films: Black Gloves And Knives

THE LAST WAVE

“Dressed to Kill” (Brian De Palma, 1980)
Argue the purity of this thriller within the genre — maybe it isn’t true giallo, as it is not an Italian film—but if nothing else Brian De Palma’s 1980 release is an elegant giallo art installation. The opening alone is like the genre in miniature: the camera tracks through a well-to-do home into a spacious bathroom where a beautiful woman (Angie Dickinson) showers seductively, watching a man standing at the mirror, shaving with a straight razor. Close ups of her near-masturbatory activities turn horrific when she’s grabbed by a black-gloved hand, and threatened with a razor. De Palma’s own tendencies were well-developed as fetishistic gazes long before he made “Dressed to Kill;” this movie just provides the ideal framework for his voyeuristic and lurid proclivities. Dickinson’s character, a bored housewife whose work with a therapist (Michael Caine) doesn’t ameliorate her marital dissatisfaction, enjoys an afternoon affair but runs afoul of a killer. Her brainy son (Keith Gordon) teams with a plucky prostitute (Nancy Allen) who has seen the killer in action, employing the very tricks of cinema to learn the truth about the killer’s identity. The film is riddled with dualities, split-screen compositions, and mirror images — De Palma revels in pairing off themes and identities, to the degree that nearly any audience should be able to point out the killer right off the bat. But the mystery isn’t the point, as “Dressed to Kill” is far more interested in luxuriating in the pleasures of its own movement, and in mocking moralistic ideas about sex. Giallo took liberal inspiration from prior filmmakers, and this film, which comes five years after the movement began to wind down in Italy, shows how effective the genre’s ideas could be when traded back to an American filmmaker reaching the height of his game.

“Tenebrae” aka: “Tenebre” (Dario Argento, 1982)
Dario Argento all but defined the giallo subset in 1970, and he very nearly closed it out when he returned to thrillers after a detour into witchcraft with “Suspiria” and “Inferno.” While “Tenebrae” lacks the overblown style of Argento’s “Deep Red,” this film has something few gialli can boast: a point. “Tenebrae” is the first Argento film that seems to have real meaning for the director, rooted as it is in criticism of his films, with a plot inspired by death threats Argento himself received. An American thriller novelist — i.e., a giallo author — travels to Italy to promote his latest chart-topping novel, Tenebrae. There he faces criticism for the way his novels deal with women and morality, and is visited by police after a young woman is murdered, pages from his novel stuffed in her mouth to finish the job. The plot is meta, but not excessively so, and the story holds together in a way many other Argento films don’t bother to attempt. Murders multiply, with Argento and cameraman Luciano Tavoli going to extraordinary lengths to create a long-take exploration of the apartment in which a lesbian couple falls victim to the knife. It’s a sequence every bit as lurid as those that led to criticism of previous Argento films, and in the context of “Tenebrae” plays as a decisive “fuck you.” Early ’70s gialli featured social issues infringing on an old male-dominated order, and those issues are more formally integrated into “Tenebrae,” which treats gay rights as a foregone conclusion. (The film does feature a trans actress in one small role, and despite the fact that the character is both a tormentor and victim, those qualities are not linked to her gender.) For a genre inspired by Hitchcock, many gialli are not particularly suspenseful, trafficking in the horror of inevitable violence rather than the tense potential to escape unharmed. “Tenebrae,” however, is among the few to skillfully employ classic suspense, and a mid-film encounter, which begins as a young woman evades the most athletic doberman ever captured on film, is executed with wicked control to induce the sort of gut-level discomfort that is rare even in this genre of perverse pleasures.

EXTRA NOTES
A note about Dario Argento’s “Suspiria:” it’s an excellent film, and deservedly his most famous, but not giallo. The film puts its own spin on some of the giallo concepts Argento has worked so well in other movies, but “Suspiria” is a supernatural film. That said, don’t overlook Dario Argento’s “Cat o’ Nine Tails,” with Karl Malden as a blind man who tracks a murderer, or “Four Flies on Grey Velvet,” which is centered around an American rock drummer in Rome who is drawn into a blackmail and murder plot. His 1987 film “Opera” is a mean and capable shocker too.

“Black Belly of the Tarantula” had fallen out of fashion for a while, but its terrific name — one of the few great things about the film, to be honest, along with the Ennio Morricone score — helped bring it back into giallo watch lists. It’s a choice for completists, though its lead character, a reluctant cop played by Giancarlo Giannini, is one of the more interesting lawmen in the giallo canon. See “The House With the Laughing Windows” or perhaps “Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion” first.

Umberto Lenzi, perhaps more known in Italy for his cop movies and more known abroad for crazed shockers like “Cannibal Ferox,” made several gialli, among which a few are often referenced as canonical. “Seven Blood-Stained Orchids” is a sturdy, middle-of-the-road effort that will satisfy basic genre cravings, while “Eyeball” fuses Lenzi’s own weirdness with one of Fulci’s chief preoccupations. Finally, “Spasmo” is a total whackadoo movie that steadfastly refuses to make sense for an hour, then blossoms into real weirdness. That one is really for deep genre devotees, or perhaps for those who think they’ve seen everything.

You’ll even find some hardcore purists listing the 1971 Best Foreign Film Oscar winner “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion” among their favorite gialli, and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 film “Frenzy” features many giallo elements. A set of recent films, from Peter Strickland‘s “Berberian Sound Studio” to Ryan Gosling‘s “Lost River” also use giallo influence in major and minor ways, while the directorial duo of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani has created their own nouveau giallo revival with “Amer” and “The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears,” which push the genre into the realm of pure abstract art.

While gialli were once difficult to source in the U.S., many titles are now available on DVD and Blu-ray, in restored and often uncut versions. Films on this list are or will shortly be available from Arrow Video (“Blood and Black Lace,” “Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key”), Blue Underground (“Deep Red,” “Short Night of Glass Dolls”), Kino Lorber (“The Girl Who Knew Too Much,” “A Bay of Blood,” “The Perfume of the Lady in Black”), and the Criterion Collection (“Dressed to Kill”). There is no current U.S. disc release of “All the Colors of the Dark,” which we hope will be rectified immediately. While Netflix has a paltry catalog of giallo streaming at press time, Amazon Prime and the curated horror streaming service Shudder feature many titles. Any favorites of yours we’ve missed out? Let us know in the comments.