The term refers to books as the murder mysteries that typify the genre were first introduced in small pulp fiction novels with yellow covers, giallo being the Italian for yellow. The first film to follow the pattern established in the books was Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and Bava made several excellent gialli, particularly Blood and Black Lace a year later. These films involved a masked or disguised killer, normally wearing black leather gloves and dispatching their victims in elaborate and usually quite gory ways with a personal favourite of mine being in Watch Me When I Kill (1977) where a woman is killed by having her head shoved into a preheated oven!
There were many directors who made giallo films, most notably Dario Argento who began with his ‘Animals trilogy’ (The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Cat O’ Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet) before making genre classics such as Suspiria (1977), Tenebre (1982) and the aforementioned Deep Red. Argento’s star may have fallen a bit in recent years with his last truly great film being Opera (aka Terror at the Opera, 1987) and movies like Phantom of the Opera (1998) and The Card Player (2004) being so far beneath his best films that this is hard to reconcile them with his output in the 1970s and early ‘80s. However, he is still the undisputed master of the giallo and anyone interested in the genre should have a look at his filmography before looking at films by anyone else.
One other thing to look out for in a giallo is the almost compulsory consumption of J&B whiskey which bizarrely features in many films in the genre, whether it’s being drunk or just featured with a bottle (or sometimes a crate!) somewhere in the scene. I’m not sure whether that brand of whiskey was particularly popular in Italy during the 1960s and ‘70s or whether it was just a feature around film sets because it was consumed regularly by filmmakers and was therefore always around to use as a prop. Either way, if you’re watching a film and not as a bottle of J&B whiskey, the chances are that the film is Italian, a horror and possibly a giallo.
The thing with film noir and giallo is that the more you watch, the more you discover and want to watch. I’ve seen a lot of both and have many that I want to see or upgrade the DVDs I have to a better (and particularly uncut) version. So when you see a horror film featuring a scene from the killer’s POV and the murderer is in some way disguised and wearing leather gloves, the chances are you’re watching a giallo, especially if the killer’s identity remains a secret right up until the end, keeping you guessing the whole time. In this respect, Wes Craven’s Scream trilogy is heavily indebted to the giallo movement with the elaborate disguises, gruesome death scenes and numerous suspects before the final reel reveal of who is behind the murders and why.
In Horror: The Definitive Guide to the Cinema of Fear, the fine book edited by James Marriott, film buff Stephen Thrower (author of the equally brilliant Nightmare USA) identified five defining features and if you can check most of them then you know you’re watching a giallo:
Italian
Murders
Sex
Sleaze
Style
It’s hard to come up with a list of five films that best illustrate what a giallo is and would be compulsory viewing for someone interested in the genre, but here goes, in date order:
The Girl Who Knew Too Much (La ragazza che sapeva troppo), Mario Bava, 1963
Blood and Black Lace (Sei donne per l’assassino), Mario Bava, 1964
The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo), Dario Argento, 1970
Don’t Torture a Duckling (Non si sevizia un paperino), Lucio Fulci, 1972
Deep Red (Profondo Rosso), Dario Argento, 1975.
You’ll probably find that, just as I’ve done, once you’ve found one film and director you like, you’ll end up wanting to see more and more films by other directors such as Sergio Martino, Sergio Pastore, Silvio Armadio and Andrea Blanchi. Really though, Dario Argento is probably the greatest exponent of giallo films and his output is tremendous. I’ve only been watching these films for several years and have spent a lot of money on a lot of DVDs and a couple of BDs and see no end in sight.
