The Italian Art of Violence

An ominous figure with an obscured face, clad in a trench coat, fedora, and leather gloves—all black—stalks a young model through a gloomy antique shop packed with statues, lamps, and ornate furniture. Though the store is in near darkness, pink and teal lights flash inexplicably in the background. Dramatically canted camera angles emphasize the model’s growing panic and confusion as she crashes around in the dark, desperate to escape. But the killer sneaks up on her, just as she reaches an exit door, and smashes a cruelly hooked gauntlet from a nearby suit of armor into her face, instantly killing her.

This sequence from Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964), generally regarded as the first giallo film, set the template for a type of highly stylized, lavishly decorated murder set piece that would be replicated in hundreds of Italian horror movies to follow throughout the 1970s and early ’80s. Bava established many of the subgenre’s visual and thematic tropes, while helping cement the giallo plot formula as a perverse, violent variation on the classic murder mystery. Though it has become almost shorthand to refer to any stylish thriller as gialloesque, it is a specific subgenre tied to a particular time and place: Italy in the 1960s and especially the seventies, with the most intense period of production between 1970 and 1975. With their virtuosic celebrations of death, these films reflect the air of paranoia and fear haunting a society undergoing dramatic, violent changes.

By the time the giallo emerged, various genre movements had begun to take over the Italian film industry. Though the fifties are best remembered as an art-house golden age in Italian cinema, even then the work of Federico Fellini and Vittorio De Sica coexisted with peplum, a genre of popular, cheaply made sword-and-sandal movies. Bava inaugurated the Italian gothic-horror subgenre in 1960 with Black Sunday, a gorgeously shot, black-and-white tale about a satanic witch executed in seventeenth-century Moldavia who is resurrected two hundred years later to terrorize her young ancestor. Many imitators followed in its wake, and the popularity of these formulaic gothic-horror films eventually gave way to several other subgenre cycles over the next two decades: light-hearted musicarelli, increasingly ribald comedies, spaghetti westerns, and violent procedural crime thrillers known as poliziotteschi.

Gialli can be seen as another response to this initial gothic-horror cycle, which ran from roughly 1960 to 1965. Expressionistic black-and-white cinematography gave way to luridly colorful set pieces; and where the gothic-horror films are almost always concerned with supernatural evil (ghosts, witches, and vampires, often returning from the past to haunt contemporary Italians), giallo films are menaced by human perpetrators. Though some directors, like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, would return to supernatural horror with films like Suspiria (1977) and The Beyond (1981), their giallo movies are more firmly grounded in murder-mystery tropes. The Italian word for yellow, giallo refers to the mass-produced pulp novels published by Mondadori from the late twenties onward, which often had yellow covers. For their stories, gialli draw heavily from the quickly produced yet elaborately plotted fiction of Italian pulp writers, as well as English-language mystery novelists like Edgar Wallace and Agatha Christie. Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) cheekily opens with its female protagonist reading a crime paperback while on a flight to Italy.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much a.k.a. The Evil Eye

This precursor to the subgenre—also known under its initial U.S. release title The Evil Eye (the cut showing on the Criterion Channel)—is more lighthearted and comedic in tone than the giallo films to follow, but it established the basic plot formula. A somewhat isolated protagonist (in this case, a young American woman who has recently arrived in Rome) witnesses a murder and is driven to investigate the crime herself when it seems the killer is closing in on her. She uncovers a series of murders, suggesting a long-buried conspiracy, and is certain she has glimpsed an important clue. Unlike detective fiction or police procedurals, giallo films almost always revolve around an average person not connected to law enforcement who is pushed to solve the mystery—in order to stay alive, but also out of a deep-seated curiosity.

In Blood and Black Lace, the elaborately stylized murders serve as the foundation of the film itself. Here Bava emphasizes style above all else, even plot. But instead of the expressionistic black-and-white cinematography of the earlier Italian gothic-horror films, he embraces a distinctly sixties pop-art sensibility, enhanced by a pulsing, jazzy score from Carlo Rustichelli; surreal, candy-colored lighting; and cinematography from Ubaldo Terzano that heightens the disorientation of both the characters and the viewer through extreme angles, fluid camera movements, and reflection shots, joined together through dissonant editing techniques. This primacy of style is the strongest unifying element of all giallo films, with some of Italy’s greatest cinematographers—including Terzano, Bava himself, Vittorio Storaro, and Luigi Kuveiller—leaving their marks on the genre as decisively as the directors they worked with.

The plot of Blood and Black Lace, built around the murders of several models who work at the same fashion house, manipulates audience expectations and genre conventions. Two-thirds of the way into the film, the police arrest all of the male suspects that they—and the audience—have identified. Yet that very night, another murder occurs, upending the theory that one of the men is a sex-crazed serial killer. Unlike in the standard murder mystery, where the perpetrator is generally revealed to be a single individual, almost always male, Blood and Black Lace established an opposite convention that nearly all giallo films in its wake would borrow, revealing killers to be women, couples secretly working in partnership, or even entire criminal conspiracies. The giallo universe is one in which anyone, often the last person you suspect, could be a murderer.

This air of paranoia and conspiracy would intensify in unison with Italian cultural and political conflicts. The giallo boom of the early 1970s coincided with the onset of the Years of Lead, a roughly two-decade period of political violence marked by explosive battles between right- and left-wing factions, including kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations. Director Lucio Fulci, who helmed some of the most confrontational gialli, claimed that “violence is Italian art,” but throughout the seventies, violence was also a condition of daily life in Italy. The filmmakers who followed Bava’s example refined his approach to murder as spectacle, with operatic levels of bloodshed and even some gore. Even if they do not always address daily politics directly, most giallo films share this air of impending violence and palpable paranoia, in which no one can be trusted and—thanks to some of Argento’s innovations—the protagonist-detective cannot even trust their own eyes.

Argento kicked off the subgenre’s boom years with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970. Like The Girl Who Knew Too Much, it follows an American in Rome who gets caught up in a murder mystery when he accidentally witnesses—and in this case prevents—a murder. In the film’s dazzling opening set piece, the American bystander is trapped between two glass doors at the entrance to a stark white art gallery decorated with large, menacing steel sculptures. He witnesses a figure in a black trench coat and fedora attempting to kill a woman in the closed gallery. After managing to scare the killer off, he is sure he has seen something of crucial importance, though he spends much of the film deliberating over what this might be. Eventually he realizes that while he did see one person attacking the other, he incorrectly reversed the identities of victim and perpetrator. Many of Argento’s films revolve around this problem of seeing and interpreting; often his protagonists cannot even trust what they have witnessed with their own eyes.

Deep Red

Following in the footsteps of Blood and Black Lace, which is set in a fashion house, and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage—focused on a writer and a mystery surrounding an art gallery—many giallo films are concerned with style, fashion, and art. Several are set in the fashion world and focus on models, designers, and photographers, like Luciano Ercoli’s Death Walks at Midnight (1972) and Andrea Bianchi’s Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975). Many feature main characters who are writers, artists, and musicians, including Argento’s Deep Red (1975) and Tenebrae (1982). These milieus offer a pretext for elaborate, stylized set pieces; they also allow for these films to be populated not by “average” Italians, but by bohemian, creative, neurotic, and even perverse characters, with sexual mores outside the more conservative ones of mainstream Italian society.

This focus on “outsider” characters is key to the films’ complex gender politics. On the one hand, gialli are structured around scenes of elaborate, cruel violence directed at woman—usually young, beautiful, and scantily clad. On the other hand, gialli often upend their audience’s assumptions about gender, violence, and sexuality. There are many women characters who are strong and assertive, and they can be read as a reaction against the repressive gender roles and restrictive social attitudes around sexuality that still held sway in a staunchly Catholic country where fascism was a living memory. For instance, divorce wasn’t legalized until December of 1970, decades later than in most European countries.

Some of the most interesting examples of the genre have strong women protagonists. In Ercoli’s Death Walks at Midnight, the director’s wife and collaborator, Spanish actress Nieves Navarro, plays a model who witnesses a murder while on LSD and insists on investigating the crime though no one will believe her. She’s a force of nature who cannot be contained, despite the attempts of nearly all the male characters in the film to subdue, gaslight, assault, or murder her. Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972), Deep Red, and Strip Nude for Your Killer all feature women as co-investigators alongside their male counterparts. These women laugh at or ignore the rampant sexism around them, flaunt their sexuality with confidence, and even save their male companions from violence and impending death.

Death Walks at Midnight

There are also many women killers and coconspirators in these films. Argento helped popularize this trend with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, where the killer is revealed to be a woman who was victimized in the past and has been driven to madness by trauma. These female killers use sexist stereotypes in their favor: assumptions about how women are too demure or innocent to commit violent crimes often serve as an alibi. Building off of earlier films like Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and William Castle’s Homicidal (1961), several gialli feature cross-dressing killers; murderers throughout the subgenre are often concealed behind androgynous attire like trench coats and motorcycle helmets.

While there’s certainly a psychosexual subtext to the murders in giallo films, these killings are often revealed to have specific, typically logical motives: financial gain, revenge, or to cover up the evidence of a past crime. In a parallel with the rise of poliziotteschi, a number of gialli cross over into conspiracy-thriller territory and criticize church and state as inherently corrupt institutions. Many of these films expose criminal conspiracies behind a series of murders, in place of a lone killer. Some of these, like Who Saw Her Die? (1972) and Fulci’s especially scandalous Don’t Torture a Duckling, suggest that members of the Catholic clergy are murderers and their crimes are being protected by the Church itself. Others, like What Have You Done to Solange? (1972) and What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (1974) point the finger at wealthy businessmen or powerful gangs who exist to exploit the weak and powerless. All the Colors of the Dark (1972) and The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974) hint at sinister cults operating behind the scenes. All of these reflect the paranoia that Italian life—and especially politics—was being controlled by cabals, whether that meant groups of corrupt businessmen or violent political radicals. This fear culminated in the kidnapping and assassination of former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978, a sensational crime that spawned conspiracy theories and intensified the country’s division.

Tenebrae

This atmosphere of nihilism and paranoia only intensified as the giallo cycle wound to a close in the early eighties. Films like Argento’s Tenebrae depict a colder, more sadistic world, where no one—not even the protagonist—can be trusted. In Tenebrae, an American writer of popular, extremely violent mystery novels is in Italy to promote his recent book, when someone begins recreating the murders from his fiction in real life. Argento replaces the colorful, stylish world of seventies giallo with a futuristic, almost Brutalist view of Rome, where Bava’s influential candy-colored lighting is exchanged for sterile fluorescent bulbs that give the film an almost clinical palette. The murder set pieces are built around lengthy tracking shots and even more explicit violence, as women have their throats graphically cut and limbs hacked off. Tenebrae is a fitting capstone to the subgenre, because it knowingly circles back around on itself, like a snake eating its own tail, as the boundaries between protagonist-detective and killer begin to dissolve. So while giallo films began as stylish, florid thrillers, with an approach to the genre that is at once baroque yet tongue in cheek, the downbeat final entries of the early eighties gave way to something crueler, uglier, and far more disturbing. It is that very tension—between playful style and shocking violence—that made the giallo such a fruitful and distinctive moment in Italian cinema.