And it was all yellow: a brief history of giallo

There are no haunted houses and hardly any ghosts, but there is plenty of weird stuff going on in giallo (plural, gialli) films.

Giallo, as we know it, originated in Italy around the 1960s. As a genre, it is hard to describe with any degree of accuracy. At times considered 'trash,' 'bad,' or 'exploitative,’ giallo is a heady amalgamation of genres, including thriller, horror, slasher, all peppered with a healthy (or unhealthy, depending on your point of view) dose of blood, sex, and mystery with a heavy European slant.

And Italian filmmakers, let me tell you, are not shy. Their films go all out to shock and gross their audiences out, sparing no detail, no matter how fleshy it might be. While the taste and nature of some of the stuff on show borders the realms of questionability, giallo never disappoints, in a queer sort of way. To put it simply, you cannot be indifferent.

There are common tropes specific to the genre: beautiful, sophisticated (and, um, sexually liberated) women. Environments are usually luxurious, or at least affluent. Masked killers with a deep dislike of said women feature heavily. Knives, which are commonly shown piercing victims' bodies in glorious technicolor. And (lots of) nudity, mostly gratuitous. Certainly voyeuristic, for this is one of the cornerstones of giallo.

Yet, giallo is not all about gross-out moments (of which there are plenty, granted). One defining feature that remains constant is the mystery aspect central to the plot. From that perspective, giallo can be compared to classical, plot-driven British whodunnit films, which enjoyed their heyday between the 1920s and 1950s.

Still, there is blood. A lot of blood. Crime mysteries Italian-style are always bloody murder indeed.

What makes a giallo be...well, a giallo

The word itself means 'yellow' in Italian. The genre took its name from a series of cheap paperback books called 'Il giallo Mondadori,’ which featured a distinctive yellow cover. Mondadori was (and still is) Italy's biggest publishing house. Some years earlier, it had begun publishing an imprint focused on romance novels, which sported bright blue covers. Giallo was, at the time, a mere continuation of this color coding for popular literature, with no special meaning.

Early on, these books were translations of British and American authors, including Agatha Christie and Edward Wallace. Giallo paperpacks caught on due to their cheap price, popular content, and accessibility. Many Italian publishers jumped onto the bandwagon and began issuing their own giallo, with the trademark yellow cover. Giallo became synonymous with 'mystery', and just as one would look for a particular Agatha Christie title in the 'Mystery' section of a bookstore, the Italian equivalent would be 'Giallo.'

Though it started in print form, giallo soon caught the attention of Italian filmmakers. Big names like Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, andDario Argento began their careers as giallo directors.

It is generally accepted that the first giallo film was The girl who knew too much, directed by Mario Bava in 1963. Though somewhat tame by the genre's later standards, The Girl... established giallo's constants of mystery, beautiful women in peril, and well-crafted suspense.

Changing attitudes in audiences loosened the filmmakers' restraints when it came to showing sexually charged scenes and very explicit murder scenes. Mario Bava's influential Blood and Black Lace (1964), for instance, featured a rather savage masked killer who embarks on a murderous rampage of barely clothed or altogether naked women while searching for a diary.

Considered to be a watershed moment in gialli, Blood... established the genre's classic 'stalk and kill' sequences, later imitated in countless other titles. More importantly, the film would greatly influence the upcoming slasher genre in the United States. Blood... predates the seminal -and far more popular- Halloween by nine years, for example.

Bava's piece set the standard for giallo films of the era. Soon, other directors were racing to outdo each other in terms of more gore, higher body count, and far more explicit sexuality. Gialli were produced relatively cheaply and quickly, and the same storyline was told over and over in slightly different settings. At the peak of their popularity, almost 200 giallo and horror films were being produced a year. An impressive output indeed.

But Italian cinema standards were at times a little too extreme for audiences elsewhere. Though Italian directors often made the point of shooting in English (even though actors commonly did not speak the language, and regularly delivered their lines phonetically), the films' content was borderline -and often, way, way, over the line- offensive for the more prudish American audiences.

To circumvent this issue, there are usually different versions of the same movie, depending on the market they were destined for. Swedish audiences enjoyed sexual stuff, for instance, but balked at gore and violence. American audiences, the other way around. So Italian editors would slice and splice different cuts of the films to adapt them to European or overseas markets. This often led to confusion though, and it partly explains why the same film can be known by a different name depending on where you watch it.

The giallo killer: A faceless, relentless killing machine

Due to their low budgets and derivativeness, giallo films were sometimes referred to as spaghetti slashers, in the same way that imitation Italian westerns were known as spaghetti westerns. This was too simplistic and derisive, and wholly missed the point of the genre.

Italian cinema was never known for its big, blockbuster-like, bottomless budget films. Their cinema industry was, and to a great extent still is, very small when one considers Italy's cultural significance as a whole. Italian cinematographers have always worked within the constraints of tight budgets, and have to make the best of it.

The typical (or, stereotypical) giallo killer would be a shadowy, masked, gloved individual who would use knives, bladed weapons, ropes, and many other devices to bump its victims off. Interestingly, guns were never part of a giallo killer's arsenal of death. In giallo, killings tend to be intimate and done at close quarters.

The killer's motivations differ from movie to movie, but they always center around a similar idea. Victims are invariably women, in many cases wearing next to nothing, so a certain degree of misogyny and deep hatred of women by the character are common threads. Usually, this hatred is triggered because of a female betrayal experienced by the killer (or killers).

I postulated above about the voyeuristic nature of gialli. The camera recreates and lingers when portraying the victim's fear and anguish when she first realizes she is in mortal danger. Then, the stalking, the chase. And finally, the killer catches up to his or her quarry, and the death process begins. This is usually a long and drawn-out piece that culminates in a memorable demise. Gialli are well known for the routine fetishization of murder and death. This is as much about titillating the audience as it is pure indulgence on the director's part.

Let's take Dario Argento's masterpiece Deep red (1975) as an example. This giallo tour de force features a long string of nasty, but masterfully crafted death scenes, shown in exquisite detail. It can be argued that the violence is gratuitous and unnecessarily graphic. Yet, I'd put it to the reader that the stylized mechanisms of death add to the value and the idiosyncrasies of the genre. Giallo is a violent, unforgiving world. No PG-13 stuff here.

Alternate versions of Deep red exist. As mentioned before, this is due to censorship issues in the US, where a full 22 minutes of footage deemed too graphic were excised from the approved cut. Later releases restored this missing footage in a director's cut. This film is also notable for the inclusion of supernatural elements, something that 'traditional' gialli normally steer clear of. Argento's later work, like Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980), would delve further into supernatural realms.

The decline of giallo

The Italian terrorist organization Red Brigades operated in Italy throughout the 70s and 80s. The heyday of giallo coincided with this era of fear and uncertainty, and many have drawn parallels between the two. Some film historians and social commentators have said that giallo merely reflected and extrapolated the fears and anguish collectively felt by Italians at the time. The Red Brigades carried out kidnappings, acts of sabotage, and assassinations. Viewed in that context (and cinema must always be seen in the historical context in which it is produced), giallo externalized a deeply rooted sense of existential dread among the common people.

By the early 1980s, sociological shifts meant that interest in the murder mystery genre began to wane. Giallo movies had by then dropped the mystery part altogether and focused almost exclusively on violently voyeuristic and increasingly sadistic death scenes, which gave rise to the slasher genre. By the 1990s, giallo had almost vanished, with only a handful of 'giallo-like' films being produced.

A final thought about this study in yellow

The exploitative nature of giallo is undisputed, just as is its graphic and sometimes distasteful nature. The Italian murder mystery machine produced a lot of sub-par movies, for sure, but has also generated a few gems. The aforementioned Deep red was just one of them. The bird with the crystal plumage (1971) and Don't torture a duckling (1972) are other prime examples of the genre.

Over time, gialli have faded from people's minds and fallen out of favor with audiences. As with most cinematographic genres, it outlived its time. However, giallo most certainly became the precursor to the hugely popular slasher genre, starting in the late 70s.

But that, as they say, is a story for another time.