Torso
Torso is a 1973 film from Italy, directed by Sergio Martino, running 89 minutes. reelscum files it under giallo.
- Year
- 1973 · 1970s films
- Country
- Italy
- Runtime
- 89 min
- Director
- Sergio Martino
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- known (28/100)
- Also known as
- The Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence · Carnal Violence
Defined in the glossary: Giallo
Sleazy for an hour, then a brilliant silent final act.
Sergio Martino spends an hour on a fairly standard campus-stalker giallo, all scarves and red herrings, and then delivers a final act that justifies the whole thing. A group of women hole up in a remote villa, one wakes to find the killer already inside, and the sequence that follows plays out almost silently as she tries not to make a sound.
It is a masterclass in staging suspense with almost no dialogue, and it points straight at the American slasher that arrived a few years later. Everything before it is decoration; that last stretch is the real film.
Sleazier than it needs to be for fifty minutes, then gripping.
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Written about
- The giallo, 1963 to 1976
A line of yellow paperbacks, a killer in black gloves, and Mario Bava building the American slasher a decade before Hollywood cashed the cheque.
On these lists
- The giallo starter pack
Six films, in this order. By the end you will know whether you can live without the plot making sense.
Filed alongside
The New York Ripper
Genuinely nasty and hard to defend. The killer quacks. It doesn't help.
A Lizard in a Woman's Skin
Fulci does psychedelia. The dog scene got him prosecuted.
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The one usually called the first giallo. Still half a krimi.
Alice, Sweet Alice
American giallo in Catholic New Jersey. Genuinely disturbing and well acted.
Don't Torture a Duckling
Fulci's best film and his angriest. A giallo about mob justice in a village.
What Have You Done to Solange?
Unusually sad for a giallo, and much better for it.
Opera
Needles taped under the eyes so she cannot look away. Argento's last truly great film.
Four Flies on Grey Velvet
Argento's third. Unavailable for decades, and worth the wait for the last shot.
All the Colors of the Dark
Satanic paranoia in Swinging London. Edwige Fenech is excellent.
StageFright
A killer in a giant owl mask, a locked theatre, and Soavi announcing himself.
The Psychic
Fulci does a clockwork giallo. A woman's vision of a murder turns out to be her own future.
The Case of the Bloody Iris
The Fenech giallo distilled to its purest form: models, murders, and no reason to solve any of it.