Giallo

Giallo means yellow, after the yellow covers of the Mondadori crime paperbacks that Italian readers bought at station kiosks from 1929 onward. As a film category it means a murder mystery shot as a fashion spread, with the mystery treated as the least interesting element.

The grammar

A giallo has: an outsider, usually foreign, who witnesses something they cannot correctly remember. A killer in black leather gloves, shot from the killer's point of view. A series of elaborate murders of beautiful people. An explanation at the end involving childhood trauma, which will not bear thinking about. And a score, frequently by Morricone or Goblin, that is doing more work than the script.

Bava invents it, twice

The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) has the structure. Blood and Black Lace (1964) has the look: a fashion house lit in gel reds and greens, mannequins everywhere, and a killer in a blank white stocking mask. Bava stages six murders and barely bothers connecting them, having worked out that the killing can be the point of a scene rather than its consequence. Everything from Deep Red to Halloween is downstream.

Argento makes it an export

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) was a hit across Europe and started a boom so large that Italian producers made roughly 150 of these in a decade. Deep Red (1975) is the best of them: the clue is on screen in plain sight in the first ten minutes, and the film does to you exactly what it does to its protagonist.

Where it went

A Bay of Blood (1971) is the hinge into the American slasher. Two of its murders are lifted almost shot for shot in Friday the 13th Part 2. The giallo cycle died around 1982 and the slasher took the audience.

Watching advice

Find the Italian audio. The English dubs are uniformly worse, and on several of these the dub was recorded by people who had not seen the film.