What are giallo movies? The melancholic genre of horror, explained

Although Edgar Wright’s new thriller Last night in Soho Set partly in modern times and partly in 1966’s “swingin ‘London,” the film’s style combines the colorful flash of 1960s Eurohorror with the chilling chill of 1970s art movies. Last night in Soho It has been specifically compared to the work of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, two Italian filmmakers who helped codify the look, tone, and themes of giallo, the cult horror genre in which killers crawl at night in places exclusive, mainly aimed at glamorous women. These movies have had a great influence over the decades. The mysterious and joyous horror mystery of James Wan Evil one – with its own story about a dark maniac wielding a knife – it was one of the most recent films to bear a strong giallo stamp.

Or was it? The definition of giallo, or even “giallo-inspired”, has been controversial among moviegoers over the years. So it’s probably a good idea to break down the history and meaning of the term, to consider what fans and critics mean when they pitch in … and if they do so too freely.

The strictest devotees of giallo treat the term the same way that oenophiles treat “champagne”, as a very specific term that only really applies to products from a specific region of Europe. For some fans of cult cinema, the giallo is, by definition, Italian. From the 1960s to the 1980s (and especially the 1970s), a handful of Italian filmmakers produced horror and suspense films that nodded to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, but were generally creepier, increasing the blood levels and nudity. “Giallo” literally means “yellow,” referring to the yellow covers common to tabloid Italian pulp novels these films clearly resemble.

But the giallo was never an organized movement per se. Unlike the internationally acclaimed Italian filmmakers Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, directors such as Argento, Bava, Lucio Fulci, and Sergio Martino emerged from the commercial side of Italian cinema, which had a long history of imitating popular Hollywood genres such as westerns, crime movies. , and sword and sandal epics, but making them cheaper and bloodier.

Bava, in fact, first rose to fame as a horror director, landing a hit with the gothic surprise of the sixties. Black sunday and the ghastly 1963 anthology film Black sabbath. He then helped pioneer the giallo genre with the outspoken 1963 Hitchcockian play. the girl who knew too much and 1964 Blood and black lace. The latter established some of giallo’s visual motifs, including masked killers, scantily clad female victims, lavish locations, and striking pops of color.

Argento made this style a sensation with his popular 1970 debut feature. The bird with the crystal plumage, a thriller about an American tourist investigating a murder he witnessed, and is later accused of committing, in a Roman art gallery. With its clean and colorful look, richly orchestrated score, and twisted mystery, Argento’s film played as a fancier, more elegant version of a trashy B-picture. Its success at the global box office inspired the ever-opportunistic Italian producers to start commissioning imitators. In the early 1970s, there was a flood of exciting movies with wacky titles: A lizard with a woman’s skin, The short night of the glass dolls, Undressing for your killer, Your vice is a locked room and only I have the keyand easily a hundred more.

Some of the directors who made these films in bulk occasionally used the genre intelligently and defiantly, captivating audiences while making them increasingly uncomfortable. Martino’s 1973 film TorsoFor example, it features many early scenes of attractive young men and women groping each other in a spectacular country villa. But as these children begin to be killed, Martino interrogates the murderer’s deep misogyny and warped sexual desires. Similarly, Fulci’s ultraviolent 1982 police film The New York Ripper it is a nightmare vision of a world rotten, lousy with decay and depravity. The movie is so extreme that it has been completely banned or censored in some places. Many critics consider it vile, but few of those who have seen it would call it forgettable.

The filmmaker who took the giallo in the most fascinating directions in the 1970s and 1980s was Argento, who practically perfected the form by the 1975. Dark red color before switching to semi-surreal supernatural thrillers like Suspiria and Hell. He carried the lessons he learned from making those two images, namely that plots didn’t always have to make sense, back to the 1982s. Tenebrae and 1985’s Phenomena, which are both visually stunning, almost abstract murder mysteries that deliver sheer jolts of cinematic feel.

To some extent, many of these movies, even The New York Ripper – they are exclusively Italian. Although most of the best-known giallo films of the 1970s imported American or British stars, and although they were dubbed into English when screened in Britain or the United States, many of them had a political edge. Sometimes subtly and sometimes openly, they accused a culture of collusion, where well-connected aristocrats and criminal networks conspired to bury the average citizen and get away with it… quite literally, in both cases.

But these movies also relied heavily on formulas. Beyond the recurrence of secret societies and assassins in disguise and armed with knives, there was a well-established visual grammar in the classic giallo, with bright colors playing against inky black shadows, while the camera often took the point of view of the assassin.

In other words, giallo had many replicable elements, ready to be used by non-Italian genre filmmakers looking to use its effects on an audience. It’s easy to draw a short line between the giallo of the 1970s and the first wave of American slasher movies, led by Hallowe’en and Friday the 13th. Those first slashers … Hallowe’en In particular, he was inspired not only by giallo’s basic plots, but also by the way they looked and moved, with its subtly dynamic camera work and hauntingly polished surfaces.

When slashers fell out of favor, the erotic thriller boom of the early 1990s continued the giallo tradition of eroticism mixed with splatter. Influenced to a large extent by the films of Brian De Palma, whose films Sisters, Burst, Double Body, and especially Dressed to kill drew heavily on the Hitchcockian side of giallo – movies like Basic instinct and Splinter It emphasized the voyeuristic elements of the genre, while also bringing back some of the luxurious places that American slashers abandoned.

All that said, it is possible to downgrade the meaning of giallo by connecting it back to each movie about a serial killer. The reasons Last night in Soho and Evil one The comparisons Giallo has earned have more to do with his visual style than with his plots. Both films are equally influenced by European filmmakers such as Roman Polanski and Nicolas Roeg, whose work was sometimes similar to giallo, but who otherwise had little to do with the genre.

One of the best ways to “get” giallo is to see some of the tributes and remixes that have been released in recent years, such as the 2009 cutting-edge film by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Amer, or your 2013 follow-up The strange color of the tears on your body, who more or less avoid storytelling altogether and just laugh at giallo’s themes and images. Or there’s Peter Strickland’s brilliant 2012 psychodrama Berber sound studio, which has Toby Jones playing a 1970s sound engineer working on Italian thrillers slowly going insane as he spends his days creating the effect of skin-ripping blades.

The only problem with these films is that they are too high. The classic photos of giallo I look quirky, but most were made quickly and cheaply, as Italian studios made them on an assembly line. Part of the fun of being a giallo fan is sifting through all the bullshit for movies that are uniquely weird and inspired. The latest wave of giallo-influenced movies comes pre-rated for fans, taking the aesthetically impressive parts of the genre and leaving the exploitative garbage aside.

That’s potentially a good thing for modern movie fans, who don’t have to go through hours of tedious and repetitive movies to come up with a ridiculous but memorable movie like Evil one. But as Argento and Fulci knew, there is so much appeal to that creepy, self-indulgent shit sometimes. That’s what turns audiences on … and what makes them feel uneasy and amused about a genre that feeds them all the dark and unpleasant fantasies they could wish for.