GIALLO IDENTIKIT [What Makes a Giallo?]

I know a lot of people (myself included) debate minutiae when it comes to whether or not a given Italian genre movie is a Giallo. Esp. when it comes to the more obscure, lesser-seen examples out there. 

Some people limit the genre very strictly, arguing that there are no more than 60 or 70 Giallo films in existence. Or that only films in the “Golden Age” of Gialli (often considered 1970-1975, begun and ended by the Argento bookends of BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and DEEP RED) count as bona fide entries in the genre. 

Some people hold that a film *must* be made in Italy (or by Italian hands) to be counted as part of the genre (this argument completely ignores, of course, the fact that most of Argento’s early Gialli were nothing but “Euro-pudding” co-productions, with as much production money and writing and acting talent coming from outside of Italy as in).

That is, some people take a very conservative, even anemic, approach to “what makes a Giallo”.

I’m not one of those people.

I’ve been watching films in the genre—also reading, researching, tracking down, being *absolutely* compelled by these films—for nearly a decade now. I’m aware of the genre’s literary origins—the Il Giallo Mondadori, the Mondadori “yellow” paperbacks that translated into Italian the mysteries of Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Cornell Woolrich, Fredric Brown, John D. MacDonald, etc. And the way that these books served as the jumping-off point for (also, often, the winking, meta-textual nod to) the cinematic genre that would come.

(As early as Mario Bava’s THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH [1963], we have the protagonist reading passages from a Giallo paperback, which goes on to color her perception of the real-life mystery that’s building all around her.)

I’m also aware of the Giallo’s extensive connection to previous cinematic traditions—German Expressionism, Film Noir, the German Krimi. And I’ve now seen the vast majority of English-friendly home-video releases in the genre … 327 films and counting ...

And the sum total of my appreciation is that, like probably all Italian genres of a certain era, the Giallo was, above all, *porous* when it came to its borders. That it was, above all, *plastic* in the ways it could be stretched, twisted—retrofitted and reborn—to absorb and rework other, competing genres of the day. It’s common knowledge, for instance, that the definition of a Giallo inside Italy can include very nearly any thriller ever made.

As Michael Mackenzie has pointed out on the Movie Matters Podcast, the notion that the Giallo includes a very specific, prescribed set of film conventions (represented by the work of Argento, Bava, Fulci, Martino, Lado, Ercoli, Miraglia, etc.) is a very non-Italian one, and has grown from the increasing cult embrace of these films outside of their homeland. 

One only has to look at Claudio Simonetti’s “Top Gialli” list, as submitted for the Movie Matters Giallo Special, to see how true this is. Simonetti is one of *the* architects of the Italian Giallo, through his revolutionary soundtrack work (both with and without the band Goblin) on film’s like DEEP RED (1975), OPERA (1987), and TENEBRAE (1982). And one of his top-three, all-time “Gialli” is Ridley Scott’s 2001 film, HANNIBAL ... a film that many Giallo fans wouldn’t recognize as part of the genre. 

Further, as often as not, market forces have had as much to do with the genre’s elasticity as anything. As David Sanjek points out, in his seminal article, “Foreign Detection: The West German Krimi and the Italian Giallo”:

“… the production practices of the commercial cinema in Italy led producers to seize upon whatever genre attracted the greatest immediate consumer interest … what sets Italy apart is its filmmakers’ readiness not only to mix together seemingly disparate genres, but also their … invention of ever more outrageous plots designed to fulfill consumer demand.”  

So where do you put your stakes down, re: the boundaries of the genre? I don’t go so far as to embrace the Italian notion of nearly *any* thriller being classifiable as a Giallo, but I do argue (and remain ever open) to the notion that the genre did not remain static at any point in its life. It may be true that the genre found its most compelling form in the by-now-iconic “black-gloved killer,” but even this seemingly inviolable Giallo convention didn’t stand still.

The first complete iteration of the black-gloved killer—widely acknowledged as Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964)—was, after all, a reaction to (and a porting over of) ideas and images from the German Krimi. (As I’ve already demonstrated, key Krimis from the same time period featured identical iconography and visual cues as the ones found in Bava’s cornerstone work, including MONSTER OF LONDON CITY, ROOM 13, and PHANTOM OF SOHO).

Also in terms of the black-gloved killer’s plot. Though what people most often take away from BLOOD AND BLACK LACE now is the still-shocking brutality of the violence (and the template it helps lay for the body-count movie), they mostly forget that the killer’s motivation is as old-fashioned (and Krimi) as it gets: It’s all down to an inheritance scheme.

Fast-forward to Argento’s appropriation of the same black-gloved imagery in BIRD: Though the killer, on the surface, looks like a redo of BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, the rationality of that film’s money plot is gone—replaced with a complicated and threatening reaction to trauma. Psychosexual entanglements and angst. Suddenly the personage of the black-gloved killer (and the genre at large) is about the limits of perception, the traditions of violence against women, the changing role of gender in society, the limits of the male gaze, the violence inherent in art.
  
And the genre’s fundamental, periodic overwriting of itself didn't end there:

Any number of “movements” bent, tweaked, wrenched-on what the Giallo was and could be. Argento’s obsession with the nature of seeing—centering the mystery around amateur (often ineffectual) detectives who have seen something they can’t understand, mis-seen something their mind can’t  *allow* them to understand, because it will wreck their orderly worldview—did eventually give way.

When the Eurocrime (Poliziottesco) genre started to threaten the Giallo’s box-office receipts, a spate of Eurocrime/Giallo Hybrids hit market—films like Dallamano’s disturbing WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS?, Mario Caiano’s WITHOUT TRACE (aka, CALLING ALL POLICE CARS), Sergio Martino’s SUSPICIOUS DEATH OF A MINOR, Paolo Cavara’s PLOT OF FEAR, Duccio Tessari’s PUZZLE. Etc.

Even before that, the ascendancy of the Gothic genre in the 1960s required that one part of the transition to box-office prominence for the Giallo was any number of Giallo/Gothic Hybrids—stuff like Ernesto Gastaldi’s LIBIDO, Elio Scardamaglia’s MURDER CLINIC, Mario Bava’s HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON, Martino’s YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY, Antonio Margheriti’s SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CAT’S EYE, Giuseppe Bennati’s THE KILLER RESERVED NINE SEATS. Etc.

And the longer into the 1990s that the Giallo lingered, the more it was made to conform to what was popular in both US cinema and TV. Sergio Martino’s 1993 Giallo TV miniseries PRIVATE CRIMES plays, esp. in its early episodes, as nothing but a less-stylish, less-weird version of the mystery of Laura Palmer’s death in David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS. And any number of Giallo films produced in the ’90s—Martino’s CRAVING DESIRE, Antonio Bonifacio’s BLIND DATE (aka, APPUNTAMENTO IN NERO), Ruggero Deodato’s THE WASHING MACHINE—unabashedly shift the Giallo needle to full-on Cinemax-style softcore.
 
Or you can look at the deforming pressure of the genre’s influence as it expanded, in its earlier phases, outside of Italy: 

In Spain (BLUE EYES OF THE BROKEN DOLL, THE CORRUPTION OF CHRIS MILLER). 

In Germany (not only the co-production of Argento’s early films, but also the reciprocal influence of the Giallo on Krimis like Alfred Vohrer's near-masterpiece SCHOOL OF FEAR; also other truly revelatory films like 1975’s DAS NETZ).

British Gialli like CRESCENDO and ASSAULT.  

American Gialli by the likes of Brian De Palma (BLOW OUT, DRESSED TO KILL).

Or, perhaps most famously, how the Giallo strain mutated once out in the wild, and became what we now call the Slasher (whole sections of the early FRIDAY THE 13TH films, their murder set-pieces, wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t first existed in Mario Bava’s seminal body-count Giallo, A BAY OF BLOOD).

Or, perhaps less famously, the way the Giallo tradition influenced filmmakers as far afield as the mammoth cinematic institution that is anime in Japan—Satoshi Kon’s sublimely weird, sublimely executed PERFECT BLUE being the best example. 

So that’s why you’ll find so many films that a Giallo purist might balk at in my growing MASTER LIST catalog. That’s why you’ll see me identify (as I have in three separate Letterboxd lists) ~600 films that can conceivably belong as part of the genre. And that’s why you’ll find me, on this site and elsewhere, trying to do whatever I can to raise awareness of the Giallo as an integral and ever-present entity in the history of film. From German Expressionism. To Film Noir. To the German Krimi. To the Giallo, in all its many-splendored forms:

It is a genre, a cinematic tradition, that’s as important, as far-reaching, as intricately networked as any other I’d care to explore.

Leonard Jacobs

January, 2016

ps. In addition to the criteria above, I've also worked out six key characteristics that exist, in greater or lesser strengths, in all films I identify as Gialli. These characteristics are: 

1. TRAUMA (childhood and/or sexual and/or historical),  
2. DREAM LOGIC (esp. at the expense of narrative sense),  
3. EXCESSIVE STYLE AND SET PIECES,  
4. TRANSGRESSIVE OR TABOO SEXUALITY,  
5. DETECTIVE FICTION CONVENTIONS (esp. Hard-boiled, Film Noir, and Krimi), and  
6. DISTINCTIVE SOUNDTRACKS 

They are explored in more depth in the MASTER LIST INTRODUCTION.