Underseen Thrillers for October
...to avoid a referential cycle of giallo madness
Originally, I was planning to do a Gialloween theme on the substack for October. As I began looking over movies to cover, I eventually came to realize something I had kind of known all along--that the giallo is a sub-genre that has been completely saturated by film criticism. Back in 2016 I had finished a Master’s thesis about the use of giallo aesthetics in Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s films. I think it was in 2017 that I covered the giallo fantastico sub-sub-genre in print for Diabolique Magazine. In 2018, two colleagues and I at the Diabolique website did a “31 Days of Gialloween” series that covered a film a day. I then followed that up in October of 2019 with an article called “Returning to Gialloville” because I just hadn’t said everything I wanted to say about the genre.
But by now… maybe everything has already been said? I came to this realization when examining two films: Footprints on the Moon (1975) and Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970). Footprints is covered at length in Kier-La Janisse’s House of Psychotic Women book, and Forbidden Photos gets a capsule review. Both of those films also have disc releases with commentaries by my colleague Kat Ellinger (Footprints for Severin, which was released last year and Forbidden Photos for Arrow from 2019). After listening to the commentaries I realized that a lot of what I would be doing is just re-hashing what Kat already covered. She even mentions my “Returning to Gialloville” article in the Forbidden Photos commentary, so I would have found myself in a referential cycle of giallo madness. Additionally, there are a number of great books on the genre like Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess, and Horror Cinema, and Mikel Koven’s La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and The Italian Giallo Film.
So ultimately what I am getting at is that if you want to read about gialli, there is already more than enough out there. What I’ve decided to do is choose four films that are giallo-adjacent or which I humbly believe contain the spirit of the genre. That being said, even just the taxonomy of the genre has become exhausted, with the marketing and criticism of James Wan’s Malignant in 2021 leaving thousands of horror buffs needing to know--”But is it a giallo!?” That over-saturation got me feeling like maybe we should all just chill out and watch some thrilling movies, be they Italian or otherwise.
The genre is typically defined by an ever-growing body count as the movies play out, often by a killer in black gloves, a slicker, and a hat. But this is not what I love about the genre. My favorite tropes have to do with the half-baked Freudian psychoanalysis found in so many plots, which generally outline a frenzied mood of emotional fragility found in so many of the characters. This mood is embodied by scenes of flesh and blood, dispatched in highly stylized set pieces. And then there are so many other markers, like telephones, J&B Whiskey, creative ways to die, and ever mounting tension. The underseen thrillers I am covering for October are Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965), The Corruption of Chris Miller (1973), The Vanishing (1988), and In the Cut (2003). These are titles from all Europe and The US (and a director from New Zealand), which may not all follow the giallo formula, but exude the spirit of the genre in some way or another. And if they don’t, well maybe I am just tired of trying to fit things in boxes and just want to ramble about these films for a bit. Either way, it will make for a wild, fun, and salacious month of writing and thinking.