The Giallo's Fingerprints on the Modern Slasher

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 13:00:00 +0000

The American slasher likes to tell a tidy origin story about itself — a masked killer, a group of teenagers, a final survivor, all of it springing fully formed from a handful of late-1970s films. It is a good story and it is missing a continent. Nearly every mechanism the slasher treats as its own invention was already running, a decade earlier, in the Italian thrillers called gialli, named for the yellow covers of the cheap crime paperbacks they descended from. The black-gloved killer, the point-of-view stalk, the elaborately staged death, the amateur who has to solve the murders because the police cannot — Italy built all of it first, and the fingerprints are still on the modern slasher, smeared but unmistakable, if you know where to look.

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The Giallo's Fingerprints on the Modern Slasher