Tag Archives: Giallo

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 ...

“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, ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Listen. I don’t know if you’re ready for this, but Alberto De Martino’s L’assassino… è al telefono aka The Killer is on the Phone (1972) is one of the single most batshit giallo films in the history of the genre. ...

Aldo Lado’s directorial debut Short Night of Glass Dolls is a bleak and brilliant foray into giallo territory that doesn’t seem to get as much love as many of the better-known titles of the early 1970s. This time we are ...