The simple joy of giallo
Giallo films made for glorious Italian escapism
Last year, in a misguided attempt to find an interest I could talk to normal people about, I decided to get into 1970s Italian cinema. As it would turn out, this is not a more successful topic of conversation than the novels of Émile Zola or terrorism in Africa — but I quickly fell in love with the films of the era.
The 1970s were a time of enormous tension in Italy. Known now as “The Years of Lead”, the country was racked with political violence between left and right wing factions. It was also a Golden Age of Italian cinema. While some of the films of the era dealt with serious political and economic issues, such as the controversial but renowned Swept Away (later remade as a notorious Hollywood bomb starring Madonna), much more Italian cinema of the era was made up of silly “genre films” which provided a wonderful escape from the complex world outside.
Giallos are a real testament to the value of leaving behind a divided reality and using cinema as pleasant escapism.
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The genres of Italian films range from the famous “spaghetti” Westerns, to the expected “swords and sandals,” to the fake “Mondo” shockumentaries that continue to mislead viewers to this day. My favorite of the great Italian genres is giallo, a type of rarely-scary horror film that, when done correctly, is the perfect entertainment. In our era, where it seems everything must be filled with insufferable social commentary or soaked in bad irony, giallos are a real testament to the value of leaving behind a divided reality and using cinema as pleasant escapism.
Giallos, which simply means “yellow” in Italian, are named after a popular brand of Italian pulp novels that had yellow covers. In the typical giallo, the people around a beautiful woman begin to be stabbed to death with a knife or an ice pick, and then after many twists and turns, it is a loved one trying to kill her for the inheritance or insurance money but covering the crime up as the work of a serial killer.
Occasionally, there appear to be supernatural elements, but it generally turns out to be a Scooby Doo sort of thing, where it is faked for some financial motive. In other instances, the killer is either motivated by revenge or there is some amusing pseudo-psychological explanation, such as the killer witnessing something which triggered latent trauma and caused psychosis. The standard-issue giallo villain costume is a full black outfit with a face covering and black gloves, which has the benefit of allowing the killer to be shown without indicating who it might be. Commonly, one sees the killer’s gloves preparing various things from a first person perspective — an influential technique that, among other things, was later a major plot device in the popular American teen drama Pretty Little Liars.
Giallos are something like the bridge between the earlier film noirs and the slasher movies that would be popular in the ‘80s. In short, they are like films noirs but with added gore, nudity, and drug use. Though the genre is somewhat inherently sleazy, at its best these elements are in harmony, and there is fairly tasteful nudity of gorgeous women instead of uncomfortable extreme sex scenes, and ample blood without gut-wrenching gore. Ideally, the complicated plot line makes sense when the killer inevitably explains motive at the end. In the cheaper examples, the sexual content and gore are extreme, while the plot explanation may be nonsensical. These elements, as well as their tendency to include bright colours, perhaps makes it appropriate that they are the evolution of “black films” into “yellow films.”
The earliest giallo is widely agreed to be The Girl Who Knew Too Much by Mario Bava (originally released in English as an entirely different cut called The Evil Eye.) This film does not break much new ground, and is primarily a successful homage to the work of Hitchcock. It is Bava’s 1964 Blood and Black Lace, about a modelling house whose employees all start getting murdered by a man in black that really set the conventions of the genre. It was also the somewhat modest birth of the tradition that a giallo title should be garish and ideally imply both sex and violence, some prime examples include Death Walks on High Heels and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, or on the more extreme end, The Slasher is the Sex Maniac! and Strip Nude for Your Killer.
While the genre’s conventions were set in 1964, to thrive giallo needed to exchange the staid world of film noirs for the colorful 1970s as well as the loosening of censorship in Italian films that went along with the social changes of the era. The one area where these films may delve into social commentary is in portraying the “sexual revolution” as abusive towards women, but even in these storylines it doesn’t appear that was the point at the time, and it was simply meant to be lurid sexual content.
The genre got really popular with Dario Argento’s 1970 film The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Argento is the only director of giallos to really be remembered as a great film maker. His 1976 film Suspiria, about an American dancer at a German ballet school run by a coven of witches, is more of a conventional horror film than a giallo, but is considered the most famous Italian horror film of all time and is a genuine cult classic. While Argento’s films are good, and his cinematography (for which he is most famous) is above reproach, I find his films take themselves a little bit too seriously for the genre that is at its best when it’s fun. The real ratings sweet spot for giallos is between 6 and 7 on IMDB, as anything higher is too good to be properly fun while anything lower tends to be a sleaze-fest well past the point of diminishing returns.
The prime era of the giallo film was, without a doubt, roughly 1970-1975. The portrayal of life in Italy is sublime. Everyone lives in groovy 1970s houses or apartments with strange phones and commonly with answering machines the size of a VCR (in one instance, it is a plot point that there is no time stamp on messages so it cannot work as an alibi). Many people drive weird little Italian cars. Everyone has a well-stocked bar cart if not a full home bar, though seemingly the only thing they ever drink is J&B Scotch, which they inexplicably have neat out of a tumbler (I have asked a group of bartenders if there is any conceivable advantage to drinking neat liquor out of a tall glass, and they answered in the negative.) J&B had aggressive product placement in both Hollywood and Italian films, but in giallo it is so extensive as to be something of a running joke among fans of the genre. I must admit all these years later it is still working, as I’ve been trying to find it at the store. Commonly, the characters smoke Marlboro cigarettes, though cigarette branding is less exclusive. A beautiful woman in a fabulously fashionable see-through night gown discussing everyone who keeps getting murdered while having a Marlboro cigarette and J&B Scotch is a peak giallo image.
On a technical side what makes Italian films of this era special is something you wouldn’t expect: they are always dubbed in their original version, known as post-synchronization in the film industry. This practice started due to the technical limitation of loud cameras and persisted in part, according to a 1992 article about the decline of the industry, because the naturally gregarious Italian film crews never learned to be quiet on the set.
Post-synchronisation has several advantages, including that it makes filming on location among the ruins, stately houses, and natural scenery of the Mediterranean much easier. The bigger advantage though is that post-production teams have tremendous leeway in editing to arrange the plot however they wish (the infamous Spanish B movie director Jesús Franco would sometimes release an entire second film out of outtakes under a pseudonym without paying the investors or actors). Actors commonly didn’t even know what films were about, and I am not sure what they had them say to keep their mouths moving. Giallos generally feature complex and creative camera work with shots expertly spliced together to give a sort of surrealist feel.
The other huge advantage of dubbing came in the casting arena. You may have wondered how it is that Clint Eastwood came to star in The Man With No Name trilogy, and it is that the Italian film industry had international casts because actors didn’t need to speak Italian. This allowed directors to choose whichever actor had “the look” with less concern about their ability to say the lines or the quality of voice. Commonly, actresses in Italian cinema were winners of beauty pageants, recruited into the industry. My favorite giallo actresses are the French-Italian Edwige Feneche and the Czech-American Barbara Bouchet — stunningly gorgeous women who are both legends of Italian genre films. One of the two seem to appear in about half of the most famous giallos, though the roster of beautiful women in Italian films of the time is large. The most iconic male lead is probably the British-Uruguayan actor George Hilton, but as the genre pretty openly targeted the drooling idiot demographic, the women were much more significant. It is safe to say that in the era before the internet, that there would reliably be on-screen nudity was part of what drew cinema-goers to these films.
As a younger man, I used to be a real film snob. For a number of years, I mostly stopped watching films in favour of ridiculous TV shows, and it was in part because I was always trying to work my way through classics, and it stopped being enjoyable but instead something more like work. Part of what inspired me to start watching all these ‘70s films was the famous quote from John Waters about how irony ruined everything: “Even the best exploitation movies were never meant to be ‘so bad they were good.’ They were not made for the intelligentsia. They were made to be violent for real, or to be sexy for real. But now everybody has irony. Even horror films are ironic. Everybody’s in on the joke now.’ I’m not easy to scare but also don’t like being scared, and don’t generally watch comically bad movies, so I have never been a big horror fan. Yet, I love giallos, which though they may be somewhat ridiculous are genuinely enjoyable to watch (and for that matter, are violent and sexy for real). For my part, it is a reminder that enjoyment is the reason you watch movies, and they are much better for that than anything made today. Plus, giallos go great with a glass of neat J&B Scotch (presumably, I am yet to find it for sale anywhere in my region).
If you are interested in watching giallos, some are on common streaming services, but to find some of the more obscure titles you may, like a giallo villain, have to embrace the thrill of the hunt.
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