Where giallo came from
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Giallo is Italy’s gift to the horror film: the murder mystery dressed in black gloves and painted in colours too strong for real life. Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace, a 1964 story of a killer stalking fashion models, helped shape the American slashers of the 1970s, according to the BFI. The Hollywood Reporter describes the genre as Italy’s erotic cross of the whodunnit and the slasher, and puts its heyday in the 1970s.
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The name is a colour. Giallo means yellow, after the cheap crime paperbacks that the publisher Mondadori began printing in the late 1920s. Many were translations of Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace, and Italian authors wrote their own under English-sounding pen names. In Italy the word still covers any crime story, from any country. Audiences abroad narrowed it to one peculiarly Italian strain of thriller cinema.
The films found their feet in the early 1960s, at the moment the golden age of the spaghetti western was drawing to a close. Senses of Cinema names Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much, a Hitchcock-flavoured murder mystery set in Rome, as the film most fans count as the first true giallo. Bava filled it with so many detective clichés that, the BFI reports, he lost interest in the plot and poured his effort into the look of the thing. That trade, story for style, became the genre’s signature.
The recipe was finished by the next generation. The scholar Mikel J. Koven, quoted in Senses of Cinema, argues that Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage took the story shape of The Girl Who Knew Too Much and joined it to the look of Bava’s Blood and Black Lace. That blend, Koven says, is what most people now mean by a giallo, helped by the film’s success around the world. IndieWire’s short version is a stylish Italian film built on a murder mystery and outrageous violence.
What makes a giallo a giallo
Definitions vary, but the BFI lists the usual ingredients: stylised murders, amateur sleuths, black gloves, buried memories, cryptic titles, and eerie scores by Ennio Morricone. Senses of Cinema adds the killer in trench coat and hat, and the glamorous victims whose lives that killer cuts short. Even the props became a language. Slant notes that the genre’s weapon of choice is the straight razor.
The timing mattered. In the 1970s, Hollywood hits such as The Exorcist, Jaws, Carrie and The Omen had moved horror into homely, modern settings and shot them in a natural style. Argento and Tovoli went the other way on Suspiria, with a palette of primary hues and deep blacks.
A 2008 Guardian blog called these mutant murder mysteries some of the boldest European filmmaking of the 1970s. Its writer promised any newcomer that, love it or hate it, they would not be bored. Little White Lies goes further and calls Argento’s Deep Red a trashy masterpiece.
The films also had a complicated relationship with their audience. MovieMaker notes that the original gialli winked at queer viewers when most cinema ignored them, while still stereotyping or belittling queer characters.
The love affair has lasted. Dario Argento, the director most tied to the form, took a new giallo called Dark Glasses to the Berlin International Film Festival in 2022, at the age of 81.
The people who built giallo
Mario Bava, the cinematographer who started it
Mario Bava was born on July 31, 1914, the son of Eugenio Bava, a sculptor, set designer and cameraman from the days of Italian silent film. The boy worked as his father’s assistant, then built his own name shooting pictures for directors including Roberto Rossellini, G. W. Pabst and Raoul Walsh. He was a rescuer before he was a director. Slant records that he helped save two Riccardo Freda productions, I Vampiri in 1957 and Caltiki the Immortal Monster in 1959.
His first film as director was the 1960 gothic horror The Mask of Satan, in which Barbara Steele plays a witch who rises from her grave for revenge. The BFI calls Bava the man who reshaped genre cinema almost single-handed across the 1960s. Senses of Cinema argues he did more than borrow from the detective novel. He brought a self-aware, expressive style that the genre would repeat and vary until it became a meditation on cinema itself.
Dario Argento, the critic who made it famous
Dario Argento came to directing from film criticism. He had also written screenplays, including the spaghetti western The Rope and the Colt, before he directed The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970. IndieWire says that debut opened his “Animal Trilogy”, three gialli credited with making the genre popular.
Many Italian directors made gialli, among them Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino, Antonio Margheriti and Umberto Lenzi. Senses of Cinema still singles out Argento as the name the genre is synonymous with, because he kept experimenting with its form across his whole career.
His pull on audiences was physical. Luciano Tovoli, who later shot Suspiria, told American Cinematographer that he once looked out of his window and saw a crowd sprinting from one cinema to another. Both were showing The Cat o’ Nine Tails, and the crowd was hunting for a free seat. Tovoli had not seen an Argento film, so he went and watched them all. “Ignorance is a curable sickness,” he said.
The writers, the stars and the friends
Behind the directors stood writers who worked at speed. Ernesto Gastaldi, who wrote The Case of the Bloody Iris, was known for turning out scripts quickly, and he worked with producer Luciano Martino. The genre was also a small world of friendships. Actor George Hilton, Slant reports, became friends with Edwige Fenech and introduced her to Luciano Martino, the man she went on to marry.
Daria Nicolodi was another quiet engine. She co-wrote Suspiria with Argento, a tale of witchcraft in a ballet school on the edge of the Black Forest.
The genre’s pioneers left a style that later filmmakers still chase. MovieMaker describes director Colin G. Cooper setting out to reclaim giallo for queer fans with his short Bath Bomb. The BFI notes that many filmmakers in the past two decades have tried to rework the genre’s uglier habits, such as its violence towards women.
The films that set the rules
Blood and Black Lace (1964)
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If The Girl Who Knew Too Much was the sketch, Blood and Black Lace was the painting. Senses of Cinema says this is the film where the genre’s motifs set hard: the black-gloved killer, the inventive murders, and the obsessive amateur detective. The Girl Who Knew Too Much had been shot in black and white, and IndieWire says the colour of Blood and Black Lace helped establish the genre’s signature look.
The story follows a killer preying on models at a Rome fashion house run by Eva Bartok and Cameron Mitchell. Its bathtub murder became a scene other directors copied, among them Martin Scorsese and Pedro Almodóvar. The BFI calls it a landmark giallo whose expressive colour and gory set pieces hit hard. It also dropped the comedy of Bava’s earlier film and struck the darker tone the 1970s gialli would follow.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)
Argento’s debut gave the genre its most famous opening trap. Tony Musante plays Sam Dalmas, an American writer in Rome who sees an attack inside an art gallery. He ends up caught between its two glass doors, unable to help, as the attacker escapes. The BFI says the film added sex and style to the murder mystery and set Italy’s giallo boom going. Senses of Cinema describes a tidal wave of Italian giallo production after its commercial success.
Deep Red (1975)
IndieWire calls Deep Red the most acclaimed giallo ever made, and Argento’s peak. David Hemmings plays an English musician who sees a psychic murdered and goes looking for the gloved killer. Its working title was The Sabre-Toothed Tiger, because Argento first meant it as a fourth animal film.
It was also where Argento first worked with his band. Deep Red began his long partnership with the prog rock group Goblin and their frontman Claudio Simonetti. Little White Lies points to its best trick: Argento shows the killer’s face early on, in plain sight, and plays entirely fair. The BFI notes the casting of Hemmings echoes Antonioni’s Blowup, and that the film closes on its hero staring at his own reflection in a pool of blood. IndieWire lists Saw, Scanners and Halloween II among the later horror films that borrowed from it. The Hollywood Reporter names it as a classic of the genre.
Suspiria (1977)
Suspiria opened in Italy on February 1, 1977. Jessica Harper plays Suzy, an American student at a ballet academy run by witches. Whether it counts as a giallo is, in the BFI’s words, the great debate, because it takes the genre’s tropes and gives them a supernatural turn.
What nobody debates is the colour. Argento wanted primary hues and deep blacks, inspired in part by the Technicolor of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Tovoli says that when he showed Argento the photographic tests, Argento walked up to the screen and touched it. Tovoli shot in anamorphic Technovision, and he told American Cinematographer the story of its lens maker. Enrico Chroscicki tracked down the old drawings of an anamorphic lens in France, built a single 50mm lens in his Rome workshop, and rented it out for years before he could afford a full set. The Digital Fix notes that horror usually lives in the dark, but bright primary colours fill every corner of this film. Argento shares the credit for the music, and the Digital Fix hears the score as deliberately out of step with the pictures. The BFI calls it the horror movie as high art.
A Bay of Blood (1971)
Bava’s late film reads like a blueprint for the American slasher. Little White Lies says its body count of young people stalked by the water foreshadowed the Friday the 13th films, and Friday the 13th Part 2 repeats two of its killings. Slant lists it, under its American title Twitch of the Death Nerve, among Bava’s most popular gialli.
Kill, Baby… Kill! (1966)
Not every Bava classic is a whodunnit. Slant’s Ed Gonzalez calls this ghost story, also known as Operation Fear, arguably Bava’s greatest achievement. Its most famous scene has a man running again and again through the same room of a mansion, and Gonzalez notes that it shaped a similar sequence in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Bava even lets the camera ride a graveyard swing, taking the point of view of the swing itself.
How giallo spread beyond Italy
The boom years
After The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, a trickle of gialli turned into a flood. Money helped. Senses of Cinema explains that postwar state funding had readied the Italian industry to serve smaller American distributors, who came looking for cheap genre films to fill drive-ins. So the films aimed at American and British audiences as well as Italian ones, and their settings grew vaguely English-speaking. Sergio Martino shot The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail in Athens in 1971. Flavio Mogherini took The Pyjama Girl Case to Sydney in 1977.
The BFI calls 1972 a bumper year, with Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling, Aldo Lado’s The Short Night of the Glass Dolls, and Martino’s Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key. The same year brought Massimo Dallamano’s What Have You Done to Solange?, which the BFI says holds almost every story element of the textbook giallo.
Fulci paid a price for Duckling. The Guardian’s blogger writes that its picture of a superstitious village and its swipes at the Catholic church won him no friends at home. Fulci claimed he was briefly blacklisted afterwards, and that he chose the odd title for fear of a lawsuit from Disney. He later moved on to zombie films such as City of the Living Dead.
Martino, meanwhile, bent the form towards Italy’s own troubles. Slant notes that Scorpion’s Tail drew on a real Italian insurance scam. His The Suspicious Death of a Minor took its cue from the wave of kidnappings in 1970s Italy and blends the giallo with the poliziotteschi, the Italian cop thriller.
From Rome to the slasher
The American titles tell the story of the export trade. Bava’s A Bay of Blood went out in America as Twitch of the Death Nerve, then as Last House on the Left Part II, to cash in on Wes Craven’s 1972 debut. Little White Lies argues that its body count had a deep influence on the slasher films that followed.
Argento’s own films kept the form moving. Senses of Cinema says his animal trilogy helped redefine the giallo and prepared the ground for Deep Red and Tenebrae. IndieWire adds that Suspiria was among the first films to bring the supernatural into the genre. The BFI traces that turn to German Expressionism, quoting Argento on his debt to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
The American erotic thriller
Brian De Palma took the most from Italy. IndieWire says almost every De Palma film carries some giallo, with Dressed to Kill the plainest homage and Blow Out his best. William Friedkin’s Cruising, released in 1980, is not usually called a giallo, but IndieWire’s critic argues its mix of sex and violence and its iconography come straight from the Italian form. The idea of a detective chasing his own mirror image was a giallo staple at least as far back as Luigi Bazzoni’s The Fifth Cord in 1971. In that critic’s reading, Cruising turned giallo into the American erotic thriller, and Italy then borrowed it back.
John Carpenter, the director of Halloween, has named Suspiria among his five favourite horror films. The Guardian’s blogger reckons Bava’s Blood and Black Lace left every later film in its debt.
Argento never stopped. He made Sleepless in 2001 and, in 2009, a film called simply Giallo, co-produced by and starring Adrien Brody.
Where giallo stands now
Strictly, giallo is a closed chapter. IndieWire notes the term usually applies only to the Italian films of the 1960s and 1970s. Its afterlife is another matter. The same critics see its influence in nearly every slasher, and in homages from Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio to Malignant.
How the films came back
For decades the gialli were hard to see outside Italy and cult circles. Senses of Cinema credits the global DVD boom with bringing them back, and in 2013 the Melbourne International Film Festival ran a giallo retrospective. The restorers have kept going. In 2024 Celluloid Dreams put The Case of the Bloody Iris out on 4K disc, and Slant praised how the new transfer brought up its reds and blues. In March 2026 Vinegar Syndrome released the ninth volume of its Forgotten Gialli set, with films from the 1990s.
That Bloody Iris disc carries a joke worth knowing. Its killer wears gloves that are yellow, not black, a nod to what the word giallo means. Martin Scorsese, too, has shown his hand as a fan: he wrote the introduction to Tim Lucas’s book on Bava, All the Colors of the Dark.
The new gialli
The BFI pointed in 2021 to Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor and Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho as signs of a live appetite for the genre’s nostalgic horror. Its list of neo-gialli includes Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, which tips its hat to giallo while making a film about misogyny itself. Peter Strickland’s In Fabric, about a cursed red dress, has what the BFI calls a pure giallo feel of neon reds and 1970s design. Knife + Heart wraps the genre’s neon camp in a pulsing synth score by M83. Further afield, the BFI’s list takes in Red Nights, a Hong Kong pastiche of the genre starring Carrie Ng, and Thesis, which borrows giallo’s love of the murder mystery for a story set in the home video era.
Luca Guadagnino remade Suspiria in 2018 with Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton, and he called it a homage rather than a remake. Jessica Harper, the original Suzy, appears in it as a different character.
The women of giallo
The genre’s treatment of women still divides viewers. Little White Lies names Edwige Fenech, Mimsy Farmer, Dagmar Lassander and Florinda Bolkan among its irresistible faces. Josh Saco, co-founder of the analogue film specialists Cigarette Burns, calls them the original scream queens. He points out that the women are the killers as often as they are the victims. IndieWire notes that giallo imagery shaped plenty of American films of that era, such as Eyes of Laura Mars, Dressed to Kill and Happy Birthday to Me.
Starter guide
Eight films to watch with the lights low this Halloween, in the order they were made.
- The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Mario Bava, 1963). The BFI says it is widely credited as the genre’s earliest example. IndieWire puts it on its list of essential gialli, and Little White Lies calls it one of Bava’s influential films.
- Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava, 1964). IndieWire names it among the five best giallo films of all time, and Little White Lies calls it one of Bava’s influential films.
- The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1970). The BFI calls Argento’s debut a hugely influential thriller that kick-started the genre. IndieWire names it among the best giallo films of all time.
- The Cat o’ Nine Tails (Dario Argento, 1971). IndieWire calls it essential cinema from Argento, on its list of his best horror films. The Guardian says Argento defined the genre with the trilogy it belongs to.
- A Bay of Blood (Mario Bava, 1971). IndieWire puts it on its list of essential gialli. The BFI counts it among Bava’s classics, and calls it a key stepping stone to the American slasher.
- Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975). The Hollywood Reporter names it among the classics of the genre, and Little White Lies calls it a trashy masterpiece.
- Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977). The BFI calls it a gothic masterpiece and says it is regarded as one of the greatest horror films ever made. IndieWire puts it on its list of Argento’s best horror films.
- Tenebrae (Dario Argento, 1982). The BFI singles it out as a classic from the giallo’s later years. IndieWire puts it on its list of Argento’s best horror films.
