The giallo, 1963 to 1976

By 1964 Mario Bava had staged six murders inside a Roman fashion house and could not have told you who the killer was without checking the shooting script. Blood and Black Lace hangs its killings on a stolen diary passed between blackmailing models, and Bava plainly found the diary tedious, because he barely connects the murders to it. What he cared about was the killer, a figure in a blank white stocking mask and black leather gloves, moving through rooms lit in gel reds and greens so saturated the mannequins look embalmed, taking beautiful women apart one at a time with an invention the plot never once matches. The Italian title is Sei donne per l'assassino, "Six Women for the Murderer", which tells you where the weight sits. The plot is scaffolding. The murder is the building.

That one decision, that a killing could be the reason a scene exists rather than its consequence, is the giallo, and most of what the cycle did over the next decade is a variation on it.

The books were yellow

The name is a publisher's accident. In 1929 the Milan house Mondadori launched a line of cheap crime paperbacks called I Libri Gialli, the yellow books, named for the bright yellow covers with a red circle that made them jump off a station kiosk. They translated Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and the rest of the Anglo-American detective canon, and they sold in enormous numbers. Within a few years giallo had stopped meaning a colour and started meaning any murder mystery at all. By the time Bava was filming, an Italian who said he was reading un giallo meant a whodunit, and the word reached the cinema pre-loaded with pulp and a lurid cover. The films kept the promise of the cover and quietly threw away the part where a detective explains everything at the end.

Bava draws it twice

Bava got there first, and he got there in black and white. The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) is usually filed as the first giallo, and it is still half a Hitchcock tribute. An American tourist in Rome witnesses a murder on the Spanish Steps, is believed by nobody, and gets pulled into a run of alphabetical killings. The colour and the cruelty are not there yet. Underneath the homage the giallo skeleton is already assembled, though. A foreigner sees a killing, nobody believes her, and she has to work it out herself because the police will not. American International bought the film, added a comic voiceover, cut the marijuana subplot and released it as The Evil Eye, having decided Italian dread needed jokes. It did not.

A year later Bava shot Blood and Black Lace in colour and fixed the rest of the grammar in one picture: the faceless masked killer, the black gloves, the fashion-world setting stocked with interchangeable beautiful victims, and the murder built as a set-piece with its own lighting and choreography. Everything from Deep Red to Halloween is downstream of those two films, and Bava made them because the plots bored him.

You watch for the furniture

Fans of the cycle recognise each other by the props. The black leather gloves on the killer, worn so the audience cannot read a hand as male or female, and in Dario Argento's films worn by Argento himself, who performed the murderers' gloved-hand inserts with his own hands rather than trust an actor to get it right. The bottle of J&B Scotch, its yellow label sitting on so many bar carts across so many gialli that spotting it became a fan drinking game and, plausibly, a sponsorship the producers were happy to take. The baroque titles that read like ransom notes: Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, The Case of the Scorpion's Tail, Death Walks on High Heels.

And the one that matters most, the witness who saw something and cannot remember it right. Over and over the hero is an outsider, usually a foreigner, who watches a killing through glass and comes away certain that a detail was off and will not come back, then spends the whole film failing to retrieve it. It runs The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and it runs Deep Red. That failure to remember is the giallo's real subject. These are the most beautiful films of their decade, and they are about not being able to trust what you saw.

Argento makes it an export

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) is where the giallo stopped being a domestic curiosity and became a thing other countries bought. A young Argento, lifting his premise uncredited from Fredric Brown's novel The Screaming Mimi, put an American writer in Rome, trapped him between the two glass panels of a gallery's automatic doors while a woman is stabbed a few feet away, and built two hours out of what he half saw. Vittorio Storaro shot it, a decade before his Oscar for Apocalypse Now. Ennio Morricone wrote the lullaby. It was a large hit at home and abroad, and it turned Argento into a brand and the giallo into an industry.

He followed it with two more animal-titled films, The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), which fans call the animal trilogy. Argento rates Cat the worst thing he ever made, and he is roughly right. He and Morricone fell out over Four Flies and did not work together again for years, which turned out to matter, because it cleared the seat for the band that would give the cycle its sound.

The glut and its craftsmen

Between 1970 and 1975 the giallo became a production line. Distributors wanted them, and the 1965 Corona Law made them safe to bankroll: the state paid a rebate on a film's box-office takings, so anything cheap enough to clear a modest gross earned its money back whether or not a soul remembered it a month later. A small crew of professionals turned them out at a rate that would embarrass a modern studio. Sergio Martino directed five in three years. Torso (1973), with Suzy Kendall, is the one most people have seen, a masked-killer body count that is a slasher in all but name; working with Edwige Fenech and the reliably caddish George Hilton he made The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and All the Colors of the Dark, sliding from murder mystery into satanic hallucination whenever the mood took him. Luciano Ercoli built two colder, cleverer pictures, Death Walks on High Heels and Death Walks at Midnight, around his wife Nieves Navarro, billed for export as Susan Scott. Umberto Lenzi ground out several before he got bored and pivoted to eating people, which is a different piece on this site.

Behind a great many of them sat one writer. Ernesto Gastaldi wrote or co-wrote all five of Martino's gialli and put his name, or the export alias Julian Berry, to more than a hundred scripts across his career. He could plot a giallo in his sleep, which, given how rarely they resolve cleanly, was arguably the whole skill.

Deep Red is as good as it gets

Deep Red (1975) is the one where everything the cycle had been fumbling toward locks into place. A pianist watches a psychic murdered through a window, is sure he saw something in the room he cannot place, and spends two hours failing to remember it, while the film does the same to the audience. The killer's face is on screen, in plain sight, in the first ten minutes, reflected in a mirror the hero takes for a painting on the wall. The murderer turns out to be Marta, an ageing former actress with almost nothing to do until the final reel, which is the giallo confessing what its reveals are worth: the solution is whoever the camera was least interested in. David Hemmings plays the pianist as a deliberate callback to the photographer he played in Blow-Up, another man who cannot trust what his own eyes recorded.

And it has Goblin. Argento hired the jazz composer Giorgio Gaslini, was unhappy, and brought in a young prog band whose pounding harpsichord-and-Moog theme sold more than a million copies in Italy and sat on the charts for a year, which is not a sentence you get to write about many horror scores. Goblin came back for Suspiria two years later and the partnership became the most recognisable sound in Italian horror. Deep Red is the peak of the form, and the one film where the murders, the music and the trick played on the viewer are all doing the same job.

Out of the boutique

The best giallo may carry neither Bava's name nor Argento's. In 1976 Pupi Avati took the whole apparatus, the black gloves and the fashion-house glamour, threw it out, and set The House with Laughing Windows in a rotting village in the Po delta. A young man is hired to restore a church fresco of a saint's martyrdom, painted by a local madman who worked from life, and the deeper into the plaster he digs the more the village would prefer he stopped. No fashion shoots, no city gloss, only provincial daylight and the certainty that everyone around him knows something he does not. It gets voted the best of the genre more often than almost anything with Argento's name on it, and it earns it on an ending that is one of the quietly nastiest things the cycle ever produced.

What America took

Here is the debt nobody at the American end liked to name. Bava made one more crucial film, A Bay of Blood (1971), which dropped even the pretence of a detective and became a chain of thirteen murders over a contested lakeside property, inventive set-piece killings with almost no plot to string them on. That is the slasher, made in Italy, nine years early. The rest of the inheritance is all over the American product: the killer's-eye camera that hides whose hand is on the knife, the murder staged as stand-alone spectacle instead of a beat in a story, the film that is really a body count with a thin frame around it. Black Christmas (1974) put the killer inside the sorority house and shot him as a breathing point of view. Halloween (1978) opened from behind a child murderer's mask.

Argento answered from the other side of the ocean with Tenebrae (1982), a cold, bright, ferociously nasty giallo that lands well outside this cycle's window, made while Reagan-era slashers were busy selling his own ideas back to him. By then the man who started all of it was dead. Bava died of a heart attack on 27 April 1980, twelve days before Friday the 13th opened in American cinemas and began printing money off a grammar he had built and been largely forgotten for. Its sequel copied two of his A Bay of Blood killings shot for shot, down to the spear driven through a couple in bed.