[Editorial] Black Gloves, Blood and Style: The History of the Giallo Part 3

The Legacy of the Giallo

After the golden age of giallo had waxed and waned during the years of 1970 and 1978, the popularity of the Italian horror subgenre began to decline into the 1980s.

With it’s failure to generate audiences, both budgets and production values began to shrink and giallo’s main front runners started to experiment with other subgenres of horror. Dario Argento explored the supernatural and occultism with his giallo-influenced tour de force Suspiria (1977). Lucio Fulci moved on to creating grindhouse schlock with the likes of Zombi 2 (1979) and Mario Bava’s health began to decline, unfortunately leading to his death in 1980, but not before working on the special matte effects on Argento’s supernatural movie Inferno (1980). 

Despite giallo’s popularity deteriorating, its influence began to seep into American and British cinema, creating a legacy that continues within horror cinema to this day. Some of the most notable movies that carried a giallo influence was the Alfred Hitchcock directed Frenzy (1972) and Brian De Palma’s Dressed To Kill (1980). However giallo’s biggest influential contribution is perhaps one of horror's greatest subgenres - the slasher.

The connection between giallo and slasher lies in some of the most commonly featured tropes including a vengeful action perpetrated by a killer on an anniversary of a trauma. Much like the stereotypical giallo movie, slasher films tend to center around stalk and murder routines, and more often than not the victims are beautiful young adults. A sexual component is usually involved with either borderline exploitative scenes of sexual activity or nudity. As did the Italian horror of the 1960s and 1970s, slasher movies of the 1980s pushed the boundaries of what was accepted as morally decent at the time. 

The initial entry into the slasher genre could perhaps be said to be Bob Clarke’s Canadian mystery horror Black Christmas from 1974. The tale of an unknown killer terrorizing a sorority house of nursingstudents, killing them in grotesque and imaginative ways, with the only glimpse of Billy the killer being his gloved hands or a pair of eyes, is straight from the giallo handbook 101 and can be seen to almost be the bridging piece from giallo to slasher . Forging a stronger connection to the Italian subgenre, Bob Clarke even cast John Saxon as Lieutenant Ken Fuller. John Saxon starred in what is considered one of the first giallos, Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963). John Carpenter has cited Black Christmas (1974) as one of his biggest influences in writing and creating his 1978 hit Halloween and it’s easy to see the inspiration with its roots deep in the giallo tradition, especially in the technical use of point of view camera work and Michael Myer’s stalk and murder tendencies.

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As the slasher boom of the 1980s began to come into full effect, some movies became carbon copies of the giallo films that had come before. A masked killer stalking and murdering beautiful co-eds in retribution for a past wrong, which concludes with a last girl standing, aka a final girl, sounds like numerous plots of 1980s slashers, but this narration is in fact the spine of Sergio Martino’s giallo horror Torso or I Corpi Presentano Tracce Di Violenza Carnale from 1973. Mario Bava’s masterpiece Bay Of Blood (1971) is a hugely influential giallo horror, set amongst a lakeside setting and containing some of the most gruesome and creative murder pieces which gave rise to it being Bava’s most violent film. Directed by Sean Cunningham, the 1980 Friday The 13th is almost an exact replica, including it’s infamous twist ending which also echoes the reveal of Dario Argento’s Deep Red/ Profondo Rosso (1975). 

The slasher is not the only subgenre with its origins in the giallo. In the early to mid 1990s saw a rise in popularity of the psychological thriller which led into psychological horror. Psycho-sexual thrillers such as Basic Instinct (1992) and neo-noir procedural movies like David Fincher directed  Se7en (1995) starring popular Hollywood actors attracted huge audiences and were amongst the most successful movies of their release years. Much like the giallo, these psychological thrillers contained questionable realities, with their protagonist experiencing huge psychological stress whilst dealing with obsessive and pathological personalities. Psychological horror dealt with the darker side of the human psyche, usually also consisting of  law enforcement, working to solve a murder mystery, an element which is one of the main tropes of the giallo subgenre. 

Despite the era of giallo running short, it’s legacy lives on through some of the most popular subgenres of horror and cinema as a whole. Even as recent as 2021, the giallo had a resurgence in the inspiration for two of the year’s biggest horror releases. James Wan directed Malignant (2021) was a rollercoaster ride of black gloved murders perpetrated by an unknown assailant with an incredible reveal in the last act. Last Night In Soho (2021) directed by Edgar Wright brought the stylish and mesmerizing visuals reminiscent of 1960s Italian cinema to London in the 1960s. Featuring, again, an Argento-esque murder mystery twist, Wright’s love letter to West End London was full to the brim with giallo sentimentality. Even though the Italian horror subgenre of the giallo is highly underrated and is mostly overshadowed by consequential horror boom eras, it has survived and lives on, infiltrating modern horror, quietly hiding in the shadows.

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