Welcome back to Horror 101, a series of articles where we explain horror movie legends and their lore. For beginners, the confused, or just those who need a refresher, these articles are for you. 

In this giant-size edition of Horror 101 that opens our year of lectures-that-aren’t-really-lectures, I delve into the subgenre all the Letterboxd cool kids have been talking about. Where did all these black gloves and knives come from? What’s a Dario Argento? You don’t know what it means, and at this point, you’re too afraid to ask. That word most people dread having to explain without spilling into rambling: giallo.

I was like you once, soft, uninitiated. Now my brain has been replaced with a hard drive made exclusively of the best of Italian horror (at the very least the most stylish ones). So today, you’ll learn everything giallo, how it came to be, and why it matters. 

WHAT IS GIALLO?

An extremely popular subgenre of horror that sprung out of Italian cinema in the 1960s, an exact definition of giallo usually comes with a lot of qualifiers and moving parts that make it hard to explain concisely. The simplest definition? Giallo (plural gialli) is a very stylized subgenre that fuses thriller and horror, usually set in Italy and focused on a sometimes erotic and always extremely violent murder mystery.  

Predating the slasher genre as we know it, many giallo plots tend to converge on a familiar path: someone witnesses a murder—or more broadly, anything they weren’t meant to see (cult conspiracies, ill-gotten treasures, etc., etc.), and sets off a chain of very grisly killings by the person or people trying to keep it a secret.  

Gialli generally skews the traditional murder mystery formula, as they’re rarely cut and dry, and often subvert the conventional detective story with sudden revelations and twists in the case’s development (logically inconsistent as they may be). The mystery killer is usually given a big reveal in the finale, as well as an explanation of their motives, which may or may not come in the form of a long speech or series of flashbacks. Slap an evocative sentence-long title on it, and boom. Giallo!

Even then, this is a bit narrow to encapsulate the massive scope of giallo and doesn’t touch on the stylistic elements that make the subgenre. Why it looks the way it does is just as important as when and where it came from. 

WHY DOES GIALLO LOOK THE WAY IT DOES?

The directorial greats of giallo tended to depict their mysteries with luscious technicolor, hot palettes, and employing some very uncommon camerawork with plenty of zooms and close-ups. Sometimes it evokes sheer terror, sometimes it stuns the senses, but it’s always incredibly stylish, and makes for beautiful cinema. 

Giallo’s very vibrant and saturated colors, love of grotesque close-ups (especially on eyeballs), and odd camera angles are easy to write off as a byproduct of the psychedelic boom that enthralled films of the 60s and 70s. But in reality, directors like Argento and Bava derived a lot of inspiration from the surrealist and German expressionist art movements that came before them. The former claims Luis Bunuel as one of his more prominent muses, and homages to Bunuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou can be found in more than a few of his films as a result.

In a way, giallo’s style doesn’t bridge the gap between the real and the surreal as much as it demolishes the gap altogether; framing unconventional crime stories through a lens of even less conventional presentation leaves the boundaries of realism very fuzzy, and creates a one-of-a-kind look that trades off verisimilitude for a gorgeous visual language.

WHY IS IT CALLED GIALLO?

Surprisingly, the name doesn’t come from cinema, but rather from literature. In the late 1920s, Italian localizations of English crime-thriller novels and American pulp detective stories came into fashion throughout Italy. Printed by publisher Mondadori in a signature yellow cover, and giallo being the Italian word for yellow, giallo became synonymous with cheap murder mystery stories packaged in dime novel bindings.  

Film scholar Ian Olney points out in his book Euro Horror that as Mondadori expanded into publishing original fiction, a literary style known as the “anti-detective story” cropped up alongside it; this type of novel often decentralized the focus from a hero detective solving the case to showing readers the more sensual and chaotic aspects of a crime spree, with the mystery really only pulling together in the final chapters. 

Olney believes early giallo filmmakers like Bava intentionally presented their mysteries similarly to the anti-detective stories. Audiences and critics then saw the similarity and popularized giallo as shorthand, explaining how the word became a catch-all for the films to this day. 

WHAT WAS THE FIRST GIALLO FILM?

It is generally agreed that the genre’s father, Mario Bava, made the first giallo film with The Girl Who Knew Too Much back in 1963. 

…That being said, if you go into it expecting the much crazier sights and sounds of giallo as we know it, it will come up pretty short; for me, it just feels too much like the conventional murder mysteries of the era. Barring some slightly expressionist strains in Bava’s directing, I doubt most uninitiated would even recognize The Girl as giallo when put up next to its genre descendants like Torso or Don’t Torture A Duckling.

Movie historian Fabio Melelli asserts that an even better example would be the film he followed The Girl up with, 1964’s Blood and Black Lace. I’m hard-pressed to agree considering this one contains all the elements most associated with the genre and feels a lot more like a true beginning. The tradition’s roots may have taken hold with The Girl Who Knew Too Much, but it flowered its colorful, blood-stained petals with Blood and Black Lace.

Indeed, Mario Bava is undoubtedly the most important of all of these filmmakers for making the genre what it is. He’s followed closely in influence only by Dario Argento, whose fame would go on to break out of giallo stardom into being one of the most acclaimed horror directors of all time. 

Argento is possibly the most prolific giallo artist, putting out a whopping 16 gialli in his career, some of which would go on to be critical and cult darlings. Argento’s Suspiria is undoubtedly the most popular giallo of all time despite its debated status (more on that later), followed only by the beloved Deep Red. 

Lucio Fulci’s contributions to the genre made him the proverbial bad boy of giallo, a lord of gore often lambasted for the shocking amounts of violence in his films. Regularly making it to the Video Nasties list in the U.K. meant nothing to him; I mean, are you truly a devoted filmmaker if you don’t catch a few charges in the process of making your films?

Bava, Argento, and Fulci formed the big three, often collaborating and considering each other good friends. Despite their often disparate styles, the crew went on to make a catalog of gialli that would change the horror landscape forever. 

ARE THERE AMERICAN GIALLO FILMS?

Giallo’s influence outside of Italy manifested early on in regular appearances in American grindhouses, being served in dubbed forms alongside the rest of the cinema junk food in the U.S. (And who doesn’t love junk food?). 

As Italian and American horror cohabitated, American filmmakers began to take pages from their European cousin’s playbooks. The most notable aspect of mystery killers stalking their victims and brutally dispatching them became a popular story in the slasher subgenre’s formative years. This resulted in the creation of not only slashers, but some infrequent and very well-made American gialli as well. 

Brian DePalma’s Dressed to Kill is probably the most notable since it saw some solid commercial success, and its story hits all the classic giallo beats. The John Carpenter penned Eyes of Laura Mars, and even more surprisingly, William Friedkin’s ultra-controversial Cruising has been labeled by some as a part of the genre too. We would only see more explicit homages in the following decades as giallo’s time in the spotlight inevitably passed.

WHY DID GIALLO FALL OUT OF FASHION?

Like many film trends, giallo was always living on borrowed time. As tastes changed in 80s and 90s cinema, gialli were soon subsumed by the supernatural and slasher films that became more popular in America. This reverberated into European horror fans’ tastes, with Italian audiences losing interest in black-gloved killers and contrived mysteries favoring the quick and dirty ultraviolence of Western monsters like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. 

One major contributing factor to giallo’s gradual dip in popularity was that many of its greatest creatives left it behind to focus on other styles of film. Bava and Fulci were never ones to be pinned down to a single genre. Argento has long been maligned by critics for the slow decline in quality of his giallo works; however, his foray into supernatural horror saw him dip in and out of the genre regularly and deliver unexpectedly good gialli like The Stendahl Syndrome and Dark Glasses reliably late into his career. 

Unfortunately, the sun has set on giallo as a popular trend, but that still hasn’t stopped it from echoing through pop culture. Films like Adam Brooks’ and Matthew Kennedy’s The Editor still pay tribute to the genre decades later, as do the works of Argentinian director Luciano Onetti with modern gialli like Deep Sleep and Abrakadabra. 

Even midrange box office hits like James Wan’s Malignant borrow from the giallo greats, partaking in their aesthetic, presentation, and off-kilter plots. That is to say, if you couldn’t restrain giallo by country, how could you ever think to restrain it by time? 

It’s giallo now, giallo forever. 

WHAT GIALLO SHOULD I WATCH FIRST?

Now, there is no correct answer to this. 

But in my humble opinion, Opera. It is Opera. Aesthetically, performance-wise, the mystery of it, the film synthesizes into an exceptionally fun time. It returns to the surrealist origins of giallo through Argento’s direction in a delightful way. Opera also has one of my favorite shots in all of horror (you’ll know what it is when you see it). Watch it.

…But I am nothing if not thorough, so here are some case-by-case recommendations for other giallo you can watch first based on what you like.

• Watch Blood and Black Lace first if you want to get the quintessential giallo experience. It is the genre codifier, and not for no reason. Bava’s camerawork in this is inhumanly smooth, the lighting and framing is an evergreen class in setting the tone of a film, and the mystery killer here is quite possibly the scariest in the genre just for how brutal and rough every attack feels.   

• Watch Deep Red first if you care mainly about the cinematography and brutal kills because it is amazing on a technical level. Still, if you care about the mystery killer’s reveal, you might be disappointed: it’s easy to figure out before the movie has even really begun if you have working eyes. That being said, it has the best soundtrack of all gialli, and is mandatory viewing just for that, so you will have to watch it eventually. 

• If you want a bay of blood in your giallo film watch…well, A Bay of Blood. It’s very, very nasty, and the very meanspirited voice and characters make it a satisfying precursor to the slasher genre. I know a lot of people out there consider this the ur-slasher, and I agree. Most of the 80s slasher filmmakers owe Mario Bava a lot for their style.

• If you gravitate towards the more crime-drama aspects of giallo and like a very investigative crime film, you can’t go wrong with Death Walks on High Heels. It makes for a very engaging mystery, and it manages to do that while staying comprehensible! Try The Psychic if you want something similar but with more of a slow-burn pace.

• And if all you care about is an insane ending, go with Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Seriously, you will never be able to predict that final scene.

…SO. IS SUSPIRIA GIALLO?

Oh right, the “more on that later” is “more on that now”.

Some only consider films giallo if they’re straightforward, Italian murder mystery stories with no supernatural elements. Others are more neutral and consider it giallo as long as it contains the spirit of the genre, allowing it to bend rules and tonal borders. Even Fangoria put out an article last summer with a pretty bold title fighting against its classification as such. 

That being said, even films like Deep Red touch the supernatural: that film’s plot is incited by a legitimate psychic reading a crowd and accidentally finding the killer. Psychic phenomena are such a staple of giallo that there’s even a proper term for giallo with more supernatural elements: giallo-fantastico, coined by film scholar Kim Newman.

So yes, I would say Suspiria is giallo. It is a very conventional giallo mystery with some grisly murders, and until the supernatural elements show up, it’s indistinguishable from its contemporaries. 

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A special thanks to writers Ian Olney, Arrow Film’s own Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and also everyone involved in Federico Caddeo’s wonderfully informative documentary All the Colors of Giallo. They provided much of the vital info it took to write this article, so check their stuff out. You can watch that documentary for free here by the way.

And that will be it for today’s Horror 101 lesson. See you in the next class and stay tuned to Horror Press’s social media feeds for more content on horror movies, television, and everything in between!