Giallo

A giallo (plural gialli) is an Italian murder mystery built around stylised killings by a masked or unseen killer, usually in black gloves, in a cycle that began in 1963 and peaked in the early 1970s. The word is Italian for yellow, after the covers of the cheap crime paperbacks Mondadori started publishing in 1929. The films borrowed the name and almost nothing else.

A giallo is built around murder set pieces. There is a mystery, and it is usually resolved in the last four minutes by a character explaining a childhood trauma, but the mystery is scaffolding. What the films care about is the killing itself: a figure in black leather gloves, a razor or a shard of glass, a victim who is usually a beautiful woman, and a camera far more interested in choreography than in the corpse.

Where it came from

Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) is the usual starting point. His Blood and Black Lace (1964) set the pattern that stuck: a fashion house, a masked killer, six murders, and a plot nobody involved seems invested in. The cycle went international after Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), and by 1972 Italian studios were shipping roughly one a fortnight.

How to recognise one

• A foreigner in Rome or Turin witnesses something they cannot interpret
• A title that is a full sentence, often involving an animal (Don't Torture a Duckling, The Case of the Scorpion's Tail)
• Ennio Morricone or Bruno Nicolai, doing something unsettling with a wordless female vocal
• A killer's identity that will not survive a second viewing

What came after

The American slasher took the killer's POV, the set-piece structure and the elaborate deaths, then dropped the colour, the architecture and the indifference to logic. Whether that was a loss depends entirely on which of those you were there for.

Where to start

Blood and Black Lace for the template, Deep Red for the best version of it, Torso for how strange the cycle got by 1973.