Giallo - vo.rs

Dario Argento: Colour, Glass, and the Killer's Glove

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Ask a Dario Argento film to make sense and it will look at you the way a cat looks at a closed door — briefly, then never again. This is the great scandal of his career and the reason his best films outlive tidier ones: he did not care whodunnit, he cared how the light hit the knife. Plot, for Argento, is the excuse that gets the characters into the beautiful room where the terrible thing will happen. Once they are there, logic is dismissed for the evening and the film becomes a fashion shoot conducted at the point of a straight razor. Fifty years on, his imitators are legion and his best sequences remain unrepeated, because almost nobody else was willing to be this silly and this serious at the same time.

The Twelve Films That Invented the Slasher

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 13:00:00 +0000

The slasher gets talked about as though it sprang from Haddonfield in 1978 with the knife already sharpened. It didn’t. The masked killer, the subjective camera, the doomed teenagers, the surviving girl who lives to scream the credits in — every one of those parts was invented separately, in different countries, over eighteen years, and bolted together only when someone finally noticed they fit. What follows is the assembly line, in the order the parts came off it. Watch them in sequence and the genre stops looking like a style and starts looking like an engine you can see being built, bolt by bolt. I’ve kept the killers’ identities and the twists to myself throughout, so treat the whole list as spoiler-free.

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.

Suspiria (1977): Argento's Colour as a Weapon

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Try to summarise the plot of Suspiria and you will sound like someone describing a dream to a stranger at breakfast. An American ballet student arrives at a prestigious German dance academy. Odd things happen. There are witches. That is very nearly all of it, and it is beside the point. Dario Argento’s 1977 film is one of the few genuinely great horror pictures where narrative is the least interesting thing on offer — a fairy tale wired directly to the optic nerve, printed in colours so violent they feel like an assault, and scored by a rock band who seem to be actively trying to frighten you out of the cinema. Nearly fifty years on, nothing else looks or sounds quite like it.