by: Shaun Anderson
Posted on 01.03.10 in All Horror Films > Giallo

This impressive and efficient giallo was directed by Tonino Valerii who spent much of the 1960’s working on Spaghetti westerns. As well as taking on the role of assistant director for Sergio Leone on A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1964), Valerii also directed three himself before taking a change of direction in the early 1970’s. This would be Valerii’s only crack at the giallo form and …

by: Shaun Anderson
Posted on 12.08.09 in All Horror Films > Giallo

After the critical and commercial failure of Dario Argento’s historical comedy The Five Days of Milan (1973), he returned chastened to the familiar terrain of the giallo. This was a territory that Argento had helped to both popularise and innovate with such trend setting suspense filled films as Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971) and the obscure Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971). For his fourth and ultimately defining entry into …

by: Shaun Anderson
Posted on 11.24.09 in All Horror Films > Exploitation > Giallo

As the title might suggest Strip Nude For Your Killer is not the most sophisticated and intellectual cinematic experience. This is the Italian giallo at its least auspicious and most self-consciously exploitative. In many ways this is the flip side to the formal eloquence of Dario Argento or Mario Bava, a film in which the visual style takes a back seat to nudity and perverted sexual relationships. The director Andrea Bianchi makes perfunctory nods …

by: Letitia
Posted on 11.24.09 in All Horror Films > Giallo

Dario Argento’s masterpiece, Suspiria, relies almost completely on atmosphere—color, music, and setting—to create a sense of horror. Of course, there is gore (this is an Argento movie, after all), but the gore has a stylistic, high-contrast, hyper-real quality that does the opposite of what gore in movies usually does. Suspiria’s violence doesn’t make the viewer want to turn away—it makes the viewer stare, guilty that they do not even want to look …

by: Shaun Anderson
Posted on 11.23.09 in All Horror Films > Giallo

The name of Lucio Fulci is now most firmly associated with a series of highly stylised and graphically violent horror films which he made between 1979 and 1983. These films often eschewed any efforts at a plausible narrative and were riddled with numerous continuity errors. Rather than destabilise these films, the fractured narrative space and temporal confusion often created a dream like atmosphere which was highly appropriate to the Lovecraftian imagery that …

by: Shaun Anderson
Posted on 11.22.09 in All Horror Films > Giallo

After the outlandish and colourful hallucinations of Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980) Dario Argento returned to the plot complexities, red herrings, and cool cosmopolitanism of the giallo. Beneath the thick layer of supernatural hocus-pocus that marked his exploration of the Three Mothers both horror outings functioned primarily within the narrative strategies of the murder mystery format – offering the giallo a route into the realm of dark fantasy. Unfortunately very few Italian filmmakers …

by: KFear
Posted on 11.10.09 in All Horror Films > Cult/Erotic > Giallo

Ah yes, New York City! It’s a place to behold, at least once, by everyone. I was always under the impression that people see this gaping hell-mouth of a city as a place of life or death, no in between about it. Many films show its lighter sides, but many more will show its darkest side of all; whores and murders, the works! Still, it’s understandable how …