A Quick & Dirty Giallo Intro [for the newbies]

I.

Giallo is Italian for “yellow” and refers broadly to bright yellow paperbacks released by Italian publisher Mondadori. Starting in 1929, they published translations of world-famous crime writers — from Agatha Christie to Rex Stout, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Cornell Woolrich. The garish yellow covers became the company’s calling card, making their books instantly recognizable to a growing audience of Italian fans. And, as the 1960s dawned, filmmakers began to translate these mysteries to film.

Italian popular cinema has always been a “trend cinema,” with producers more than willing to riff on (some would stay, “steal from”) whatever movies were doing best at box offices around the world. U.S. film fans probably know this trend in the form of the “Spaghetti Western,” which surged to worldwide popularity with Sergio Leone’s DOLLARS TRILOGY starring Clint Eastwood.

What stateside fans may not know, though, is that Italian producers didn’t stop with Leone; during the life of the genre nearly 700 such Westerns were produced. And not just in Italy. The material reality of European film production meant that financing came from several countries at once, creating “Europudding” productions that were equal parts German, French, Spanish and Italian.

And this trend-chasing didn’t begin or end with the Western.

First there was a sustained wave of “Sword and Sandal” epics (think HERCULES films), as well as a raft of Italian Gothics (if you’ve ever seen the inimitable Barbara Steele in 1960’s BLACK SUNDAY you know what I’m talking about). And in their wake came the Poliziotteschi, or Eurocrime, which rushed to model itself after the vulgar trinity of DIRTY HARRY, DEATH WISH and THE FRENCH CONNECTION.

Most film historians agree that the first true Giallo arrived in 1963 with Mario Bava’s THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. As should be obvious from the title, the Giallo owed as much to the work of Alfred Hitchcock as to its Mondadori past.

And, as the genre cohered, so too did its cinematic influences — German expressionism, Film Noir and, perhaps most unacknowledged of all today, the German Krimi (a genre literally awash in proto-Gialli, whose iconography, stock plots & characters, and stylized set-pieces literally built the blueprint for the later, “yellow” version in Italy ... Argento’s first film was, after all, co-financed by Krimi producers).

As the genre matured into the 1970s, it produced one of its most enduring and iconic hits: Dario Argento’s THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. With this film Argento took Bava’s template, which was the Krimi template, and made it his own, perfecting characteristics that would come to define the genre’s golden age:

1. Horror-mystery thrillers focused on, not only an unreliable protagonist, but the very unreliable nature of perception and memory themselves. Often the film’s main character, an amateur detective, has seen or heard something inexplicable (usually while witnessing a crime). These lead characters then spend the runtime of the movie trying to solve this mystery. The solution is often only a solution in name, failing to restore narrative order and only underlining the inherent instability of our narrated world.
2. Films that featured long-winded titles — often lurid, pulpy combinations of animals and adjectives. Titles like A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN, FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, A DRAGONFLY FOR EACH CORPSE, THE BLACK BELLY OF THE TARANTULA, THE CASE OF THE SCORPION’S TAIL, DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING, THE IGUANA WITH THE TONGUE OF FIRE, YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY, THE RED QUEEN KILLS SEVEN TIMES, DEATH WALKS ON HIGH HEELS, DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT, etc. etc.).
3. Films that used a “set-piece structure” — i.e., movies divided into standalone scenes of highly stylized and theatrical crimes, with these scenes serving as the main draw for the audience, scenes that often stop narrative time in order to deliver ornate, elaborately choreographed scenes of sex and violence.
4. Not to mention: Unforgettable soundtracks!

II.

So, that’s one way to define it. Here’s another:

If I was gonna define the Giallo to a new viewer, a definition that expanded beyond “a horror-mystery-thriller that involves a black-gloved killer, funky music, and stylized set-pieces that include people getting murdered,” I’d say this:

At its core, the Giallo is a movie about past ruptures, past traumas, and how those past traumas return, intruding on the present day and overwriting (in a catastrophic way) reality.

The reality of the lead character, a cast of characters, the current life of a city — in this way, past traumas can be political (eg, fascism) as well as personal, sexual, criminal, etc. 

So the “mystery” of the movie, which its plot and forward progress are theoretically supposed to “solve,” does usually involve gory murders, but can also include simultaneous, additional layers of trauma. Trauma being expressed as visual metaphor, as “dream logic” — both in the form of something atypical in the genre like FOOTPRINTS ON THE MOON and in a “standard” example like Fulci or Argento — and as a murder mystery that is also trying to solve a mystery that calls into question the very nature of reality.

Critic David Sanjek further argues that a hallmark of the Giallo is that this returning trauma/rupture — which calls into question the stability, safety, and truth of both the character’s worldview and sense of identity — often never gets solved. Or, more often, the solution is as traumatic and unsettling as the original rupture.

Think, eg, the difference between the jokey, matrimonial ending of REAR WINDOW, where all the terrible trauma of a glaring Raymond Burr is “fixed” by a gorgeous Grace Kelly agreeing to accommodate herself to Jimmy Stewart’s not-so-high-society life (and Jimmy finally agreeing to stop using that as an excuse to stall marriage). The difference between that and PSYCHO’s ending, where Janet Leigh is irretrievably and irrationally lost to her loved ones, who find the “solution” to her disappearance as disturbing/traumatic as the disappearance itself. This is the core meaning, and mechanic, of any Giallo, whether it wraps itself in black gloves or arty, experimental stories of “a woman in trouble.”

Leonard Jacobs

January 2020