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.
Read More »Classic Horror on Disc: Arrow’s Who Saw Her Die? (1972)
Disc Details Arrow Video, 2019. Region A.Feature: 94 mins. Aspect ratio 2.35:1. The Movie After Short Night of the Glass Dolls (1971), director Aldo Lado returned to the giallo and delivered one of the genre’s most interesting fims, Who Saw ...
Read More »Tre Spaghetti Westerns by 3 Giallo Directors: Fulci, Argento and Martino
I didn’t grow up on Westerns, despite how they were often shoved down my throat. I hated Roy Rogers and John Wayne. The idea of The Lone Ranger and Zorro was all right, but I preferred my masked vigilantes a ...
Read More »31 Days of Gialloween: Dario Argento’s Tenebre (1982)
“The impulse had become irresistible. There was only one answer to the fury that tortured him. And so he committed his first act of murder. He had broken the most deep-rooted taboo, and found not guilt, not anxiety or fear, ...
Read More »31 Days of Gialloween: Phenomena (1985)
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, ...
Read More »31 Days of Gialloween: Dario Argento’s Opera
To me, Opera (1987) is the last true masterpiece in Dario Argento’s long career filled with cinematic masterpieces. Though he occasionally stumbled, he produced consistently mesmerizing films from his debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), to this film ...
Read More »31 Days of Gialloween: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)
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 ...
Read More »31 Days of Gialloween: Four Flies on Grey Velvet
Though I spent the better part of my teen years obsessively tracking down, watching, and re-watching Dario Argento’s giallo films, the third title in his so-called “Animal Trilogy”—including The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) and The Cat o’ Nine ...
Read More »31 Days of Gialloween: Pensione paura (1977)
I took a few days off from celebrating Gialloween for an ill-timed work trip, but since I can’t ever really get giallo films off the brain, staying in a hotel inevitably made me think of the grim, slimy, and little ...
Read More »31 Days of Gialloween: Slaughter Hotel (1971)
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 ...
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