When watching a giallo, the audience member wants one of two things--either to vicariously live through the upper class excess the characters experience on screen, or to see these rich fools die horrible deaths for the base, solipsistic, grotesque lifestyles they lead.

The 1964 film Der Hexer, known in the US as The Mysterious Magician, is slightly different in structure than the usual German Kriminalfilm of the era. Often times these Edgar Wallace story adaptations include a title referencing the antagonist, usually ...

So far in Smooth Kriminal, our column dedicated to German krimi films of the 1960s, we have regularly mentioned how the sub-genre relates to the Italian giallo of the following decade. This is true enough, but an observation we don’t ...

The 1960s is a time in German film history that is not often given close attention. After World War Two there was an understandable lull in rate of production and quality, seeing as how the country was slowly recovering with ...

There is something about Christmas time and the combination of red/green aesthetics with residual, familial tensions that invite viewings of violent chaos and transgressing virtue.

It is difficult for filmmakers to come up with new or original vampire stories, seeing as how it had been done and re-done so many times by about the 1960s. All the tropes have been established and adhered to: blood ...

Audiences of the late 1980s seeking a modern, fresh vampire flick had Vampire’s Kiss (1988) to choose from, to which they were either pleasantly surprised or confused and perturbed. This early Nicolas Cage-starring vehicle put out by HBO turns out ...

The beginning of Dario Argento’s 1985 film Phenomena is absolutely beautiful, a quality that does not diminish with the quick onset of cinematic violence. Perhaps fifteen years into the director’s career some spectators began to get tired of auteur-ish repetition, ...

Dario Argento certainly isn’t the creator of giallo, as he is occasionally referred to, but his directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) did thicken and solidify a number of tropes and notions about what the cycle of ...

Sometimes gialli go beyond their already manic nature, into a head space–or body space–beyond their original means. This includes instances where these lurid slices of excess and abjection overlap with softcore or hardcore depictions of sex on screen. Samm Deighan ...