The Giallo Deep-Cuts Canon

I have already made the case for the starting ten. The giallo canon runs from Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much to Argento’s Opera, and those films earn their places on a specific ground: each one either invented a piece of the grammar or ran it to its limit, and a newcomer who watches them in order will understand the genre. That is what a canon list is for. It is a curriculum.

This list has a different job. Italy made somewhere north of a hundred and fifty gialli in the boom decade, and once the curriculum is done the interesting question stops being which films built the form and becomes which films did something strange inside it. The ten below are obscure by any reasonable measure — several went decades without an English-language release, two were disowned by people who made them, one is about chickens. None of them belongs on the starter list, and every one of them will surprise a viewer who thinks the genre is a black glove and a J&B bottle.

The mutants

Death Laid an Egg (Giulio Questi, 1968). A poultry magnate, his wife, her cousin, a motel, a knife and an industrialised chicken farm breeding wingless, headless meat. Questi and his editor Franco Arcalli — who would go on to cut Last Tango in Paris and 1900 — assembled it as if the giallo were an avant-garde form, slicing the timeline into shards and scoring it with Bruno Maderna’s genuinely difficult modernist music. Gina Lollobrigida and Jean-Louis Trintignant are in it, playing a marriage as a hostile takeover. It is a murder mystery, a satire on automation, and a horror film about protein, and the industry it belonged to had no idea what to do with it. Distributors recut it into something called Plucked. Watch the long version.

The Bloodstained Butterfly (Duccio Tessari, 1971). Tessari, who had written A Fistful of Dollars, made the only giallo built as a courtroom procedural: a girl is killed in a park, a man is arrested within twenty minutes, and the film then spends its middle hour on evidence, testimony and the tedium of Italian criminal process. Helmut Berger drifts through it playing Tchaikovsky. The structural gamble is that the whodunit is answered at the halfway mark, which frees the second half to be about something else entirely — whether a conviction and a truth are the same object. Arrow’s edition rescued it from total obscurity.

The stylists

The Black Belly of the Tarantula (Paolo Cavara, 1971). The premise is entomological: the killer paralyses each victim with a needle before killing them, copying the wasp that stings the tarantula and eats it alive while it lies conscious. That single conceit turns every murder into a study in helpless spectatorship, and Cavara shoots the paralysis in close-up on the eyes. Morricone supplies one of his loveliest thriller scores. It has three Bond women in the cast — Barbara Bouchet, Claudine Auger, Barbara Bach — and a rumpled, exhausted Giancarlo Giannini as the detective, which is the rarest thing in the genre: a policeman who reads like a person.

The Fifth Cord (Luigi Bazzoni, 1971). Vittorio Storaro shot it three years before The Conformist made him famous, and the film is essentially an argument that a giallo can be constructed entirely out of architecture. Franco Nero plays an alcoholic journalist who is probably useless and possibly the killer. Bazzoni’s architectural giallo contains a sequence in an empty concrete underpass that is among the most beautiful things in Italian genre cinema, and the murder set in a spare white apartment is staged so that the geometry does the frightening.

Short Night of Glass Dolls (Aldo Lado, 1971). A corpse in a Prague morgue narrates his own investigation from inside a paralysed body while a pathologist prepares to open him. Lado’s debut uses the giallo’s machinery to build something closer to political horror — a story about who in a city is permitted to disappear. The paralysed-witness giallo also has Ennio Morricone in an unusually restrained mood and an ending with no comfort in it whatsoever.

The cruel ones

What Have You Done to Solange? (Massimo Dallamano, 1972). Dallamano, who had photographed A Fistful of Dollars for Leone, shot this in London: a Catholic girls’ school, an Italian teacher with a student mistress, and a series of killings whose method is so specific and so gynaecological that the film has to keep it almost entirely off-screen. That restraint is the reason it works. The horror lives in the reaction shots and in Morricone’s score, which is scandalously tender for the material. The final revelation is genuinely upsetting rather than merely twisty, and it lands because Dallamano spends ninety minutes making you like the wrong people.

The Perfume of the Lady in Black (Francesco Barilli, 1974). Barely a murder mystery at all — a woman in a beautiful Rome apartment slowly loses the border between her childhood and her present, and the film declines to tell you when the slippage started. The Roman paranoia giallo belongs to the strand that Polanski opened with Repulsion, and its last ten minutes take a swerve so vicious that first-time viewers routinely refuse to believe the film went there.

The structural jokes

The Killer Must Kill Again (Luigi Cozzi, 1975). A husband hires a murderer to remove his wife. The murderer does the job and leaves the body in the boot of a car, which two teenagers promptly steal for a night at the coast. The rest is a near-real-time chase in which the killer must retrieve his own evidence from people who do not know they are carrying it. Cozzi — later responsible for the gloriously deranged Starcrash — builds it with almost no dialogue and a genuinely sadistic sense of geography, and George Hilton plays the husband as a man discovering that he has commissioned a force of nature.

Footprints on the Moon (Luigi Bazzoni, 1975). Bazzoni again, Storaro again, and a film that borrows the giallo’s amnesia plot to go somewhere the genre had never been: a woman who has lost three days follows a postcard to a Turkish island and keeps meeting people who remember a version of her she has never been. The dreamlike amnesia giallo is barely a thriller by the end, and the recurring fragment of a black-and-white lunar film that gives it the title is one of the eeriest images the Italians ever produced.

Amer (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2009). The distant descendant, and proof the form still has voltage. Three chapters, a life in three thresholds, almost no dialogue, and a soundtrack assembled from recycled library cues by Morricone, Nicolai and Ortolani. Cattet and Forzani extract the giallo’s sensory vocabulary — the leather, the glass, the eye in close-up, the razor — from the whodunit that used to carry it, and run it neat. It is exhausting and it is the most rigorous thing anyone has made about why these films work.

The near-misses

Four more sit just outside the ten and would displace any of them on a different afternoon. Emilio Miraglia’s The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971) welds the giallo to the Hammer-style gothic and is the best example of a hybrid the Italians tried repeatedly and rarely landed. Giuliano Carnimeo’s The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972) is the genre at its most purely decorative and is worth it for Edwige Fenech and the tower-block architecture alone. Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) has a dream sequence that got its director prosecuted in Italy, on the grounds that the eviscerated dogs in it were real — Carlo Rambaldi had to bring the props into court to prove otherwise. And Sergio Martino’s Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) is a loose Poe adaptation with the finest title in cinema.

The mechanics the famous ten hide

Watch these back to back and one thing becomes obvious that the starter list obscures: the giallo’s real subject is the unreliability of attention. Every film in this genre turns on a witness who saw the truth and misfiled it, which means the director’s craft problem is the same every time — how to show the audience a fact and simultaneously make them not notice it. The famous films solve it with spectacle. Deep Red buries the answer in an early shot so beautiful you look at the composition instead of the content.

The deep cuts solve it more interestingly because they had less spectacle to spend. Bazzoni uses architecture: the fact is in the room, and the room is so aggressively designed that the eye reads it as texture. Dallamano uses affection, keeping you busy with sympathy while the information walks past. Barilli uses time, letting a detail from the first reel decay in the memory until it returns unrecognised. Questi refuses the trick entirely and lets the audience know more than everybody on screen, which converts suspense into something closer to dread. These are four different theories of how looking fails, and you get exactly one of them from the canonical run.

The other thing a run through the obscurities corrects is the assumption that the giallo was a factory. It looks like one from the outside — the same faces, the same Rome apartments, the same Bruno Nicolai cues, films shot in five weeks to fill a distribution slot. But the production model was closer to a repertory company than an assembly line, and the personnel moved constantly between the strands. Ernesto Gastaldi wrote plots for half the directors here. Storaro shot two of these before he shot Bertolucci. Morricone scored three of the ten in a single stretch of the early seventies while also writing westerns and political thrillers. The system was cheap and fast, and it kept putting genuinely serious craftsmen inside disreputable pictures, which is precisely why the disreputable pictures keep repaying attention.

Where to start, and where they live

Take The Black Belly of the Tarantula first — it is the most conventional of the ten and the easiest evening. Then Solange for the one that will stay with you, then The Fifth Cord for the photography, then Death Laid an Egg when you are ready for the genre to stop making sense. Arrow, Shameless and Camera Obscura have most of these in print in Europe; the American boutiques have picked up Solange, Footprints and Amer. A few still circulate mainly through the fan networks that kept the genre alive for thirty years while the rights sat in a drawer in Rome.

If you have not done the curriculum, do that first — the ten to start with, then the giallo’s rules and why it refuses them for the argument about why the solutions never satisfy. Then come back. The reward for finishing the famous list is a genre that turns out to be far weirder than its reputation, and this is where the weird lives.