Before There Was a Blumhouse Productions . . . There Were Italian Gialli Horror Films
An examination of 1940s film noir inspiring European horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s
As I prepare this essay on the majesty of the Italian Giallo film, Blumhouse Pictures productions, through their distributor, Universal Pictures, released their reboot of that studio’s iconic, tortured hound of the night with Wolf Man, on January 17, 2025. To gear up for that release: I streamed Blumhouse’s psychological shock-scares horror, Speak No Evil (2024), and the supernatural-driven, House of Spoils (2024).
During this Summer 2025 Blumhouse treated horror fans with the psychological yarn, The Woman in the Yard (March 28), the horror tech-thriller, Drop (April 11), and the horror sequel M3GAN 2.0 (June 27), and in time for Halloween, Blumhouse releases another horror sequel, The Black Phone 2 (October 17). By the time you read this essay, you’ll be more than likely be able to pay-per-view stream or purchase the hard media-versions of The Woman in the Yard and Drop as you prepare for the release of M3GAN 2.0.
But from whence did these modern horrors crawl into our digital streaming lives?
Most horror film aficionados believe the American slasher film cycle of the early ’80s birthed with John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic Halloween. In reality: Slasher films got their start in Italy with a literary format known as Giallo or “Yellow” in the Italian vernacular. Spain had their own variants of the Italian films: they are still referred to as a “Giallo” and not an “Amarillo.” Gialli offer psychological and supernatural scares in an analogous vein to their modern-day, Blumhouse counterparts.
Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s 126-paged novella horror classic (The Strange Case of) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), small literary houses in Italy churned out a Giallo variant: a cost-effective format of reading entertainment intended for male readers — considering most of the psychologically damaged antagonist’s victims were female — who eschewed cheaply-produced romance novels with splashy, sexy-gaudy covers enamored by the women in their lives. These Italian paperbacks were produced by small literary houses that kept their printing costs down by binding the books in universal, unadorned yellow covers with simple, black-lettered titles so readers could easily stuff the ironically blood red-soaked tales in their jeans’ back pocket for easy, portable reading.
While the names of filmmakers Dario Argento and Mario Bava are bantered about as the fathers of Gialli films, the true father — well, grandfather — is Edgar Wallace.
Huh?
You mean, the British-born writer who wrote the screenplay for 1933’s King Kong?
The ex-army press corps and London’s Daily Mail scribe moved into novels and became the “King of the Thrillers” by grinding out 957 short stories, 170 novels, and 18 stage plays — many of which he riffed as a secretary dictated them. Many times: he worked on as many as three books at once.
Sadly, as with the prolific Phillip K. Dick: Wallace’s greatest fame was posthumous (he died in 1932). While alive, his first film adaptation was The Man Who Bought London (1916), and those adaptations hit fever pitch in the ’60s with the forty-seven films of the Edgar Wallace Mysteries series.
Wallace’s new found fame — and on his way to becoming a Gialli inspiration — began when the Danish production company Rialto Film co-produced with the German film market, 1959’s Der Frosch mit der Maske (aka The Face of the Frog) which started the krimi genre, aka an abbreviation for the German term “Kriminalfilm.” Krimis — like the later Gialli films they inspired, were hyper-noir films, replete with dizzy-sickening, zooming cameras and lurid, masked supervillains. And many reprints of Wallace’s novels sported those cheap yellow covers that gave our beloved, pre-slasher ’80s films their name — Giallo.
What are some of the Wallace novel-to-screen Gialli adaptations you might have seen? Well, there’s Massimo Dallamono’s What Have You Done to Solange? (1972), Jess Franco’s Night of the Skull (1974), Riccardo Freda’s Double Face (1969), Umberto Lenzi’s Seven Blood Stained Orchids (1971), and Duccio Tessari’s The Blood Stained Butterfly — all are Wallace novel adaptations.
In the screenwriting department, the Giallo-genre owes much to Ernesto Gastaldi, who wrote many of the era’s classics, such as All the Colors of the Dark, Death Walks at Midnight, The Killer Is Still Among Us, The Scorpion with Two Tails, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, and Torso, to name a few. One of his earliest was the ’60s precursor, Libido, which he co-wrote and directed with Vittorio Salerno, who gave us No, the Case Is Happily Resolved.
Gialli offered European readers sexually-inspired gore stories that caused the fans of the suggestive, atmospheric horror films produced by Britain’s Amicus and Hammer Studios to flinch — and Stevenson, along with noted Gothic horror authors Sheridan Le Fanu, Gaston LeRoux, and Guy de Mausspaunt to roll over in their graves . . . and don’t forget the inspirations of Thomas De Quincey to Italian filmmaker Dario Argento. Gialli — filled with quaint, occasional reader-acceptable typos by way of underpaid and overworked editors and proof readers — were well-written, suspenseful and engaging tales (the “content” is the key) that Sheridan Le Fanu probably wanted to include in his influential, short-story collection In a Glass, Darkly (featuring the vampire classic “Carmella”) then realized he had to rein his imagination or be judged by a puritanical, elitist lynch mob for writing “filth.” The Nazis wanted to send Czechoslovakian writer Karel Čapek to a concentration camp for sharing his foretelling futuristic insights, after all.¹ So who knows what the torch bearers would have done to Le Fanu if he let his imagination run wild.
It was those yellow-bound books that inspired the spaghetti-horror, aka pasta-horror, cycle spearheaded by Mario Bava with 1971’s Twitch of the Death Nerve, aka Bay of Blood, and Dario Argento, who became the maestro of Italian Gialli with 1970’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.
Don’t believe this writer?
Watch Carpenter’s Halloween, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th, and Brian DePalma’s Dressed to Kill — and compare to Bava’s and Argento’s work: The similarities of Bava’s Twitch of the Death Nerve vs. Friday the 13th, are striking.
Halloween, produced for a reported $350,000, John Carpenter’s classic grossed an estimated $80 million dollars in worldwide box office during its initial release. Initially dumped into the U.S drive-in market to make a quick buck, the fluke blockbuster status of the film inspired mainstream Hollywood to jump on the yellow-painted bandwagon with 1980’s Friday the 13th and 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.
As fate would have it: The John Carpenter-inspired slasher film cycle coincided with the introduction of a contraption known as a VCR that played something called a VHS tape — and that hunk of analog electronics transitioned the slasher film genre from America’s outdoor drive-ins onto the shelves of the burgeoning U.S home video market.
Slasher films — affectionately referred to as “boobs and blades” for their concentrations on well-endowed, giggly women and the shiny, sharp objects that stabbed them — were cheap and easy to produce and the worldwide film markets were hot for product: all you needed was a patch of woods, desperate teen-aged actors, a pair of overalls, a few, five-gallon buckets of Karo syrup mixed with Red Dye #5, and a mask to make a movie. Returns on a film’s investment produced under the “boobs and blades” banner were guaranteed. Slashers became the number one way for a newbie actor or writer, budding director or producer, to get into the film business. Soon, the SOV: shot-on-video genre was born as those young horror bucks eschewed conventional filmmaking techniques, instead shooting with consumer-grade home video cameras and editing the films with multiple-wired VCRs.
At the same time those direct-to-video “boobs and blades” knock offs started flying off the video store shelves, a new form of heavy metal birthed in Britain in the late seventies — dubbed by Sounds magazine as “The New Wave of British Heavy Metal” (NWoBHM). Featuring the violent, religious mania and bloody lyrics composed by the likes of Venom and Iron Maiden, complete with the requisite Satanic imagery on the album covers, slasher films and heavy metal music were a match made in hell: the music coming out of England was, in fact, Gialli musicals. This music-inspired slasher sub-genre even got its own name: “Metalsploitation,” which featured other beloved, so-bad-they’re-good bloody analog tales showcasing the exploitive titles of Black Roses, Shock ’em Dead, Terror on Tour, Rock ’n’ Roll Nightmare, Hard Rock Zombies, and Rocktober Blood. The genre peaked — and quickly burnt out — when the major studios took a slice of the Metalsploitation pie with 1986’s big-budgeted, Trick or Treat.
However, before the glut of heavy-metal horror films hit the video store shelves, Paul Williams and Brian DePalma composed a campy, 1974 rock ’n’ roll Giallo-inspired reboot of Hammer Studios’ 1962 film version of The Phantom of the Opera (based on Gaston LeRoux’s novel). Somewhat similar to 1975’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the camp ’n’ rock department, Phantom of the Paradise featured an emotionally damaged musician, Winslow Leech, who rains vengeance on the narrow-minded fools who stole his music and ruined his career. An emotionally damaged antagonist out for revenge who wears a mask? It’s pure Giallo. The only difference is that poor Winslow isn’t concealed behind POV black gloves.
Needless to say, the Gialli cycle was misunderstood by mainstream America, with the genre’s mixtures of murder and the supernatural rated as “style over substance” and “lacking in narrative logic.”
Well, that’s was always the point . . . that, and if puritanical U.S distributors (ironically) didn’t chop and slice the Italian and Spanish imports into incomprehensible messes. Italian Gialli — or any of the Spanish variants — of the ’70s always eschewed “realism” and “substance” over what were always the main priorities of the genre: art and surrealism rooted in Impressionism and Renaissance art: two art forms mostly eschewed by the mainstream public.
The Gialli resume of Dario Argento, the leader of the genre, is the cinematic equivalent of Salvador Dali’s melting clocks and M.C Esher’s impossible objects and staircases to nowhere. A Giallo film is all about the utilization of oozing color palates and oddball light sources, nonsensical supernatural red-herrings to nowhere, psychic links to killers hidden in POV, whispered poetic passages, hyper-sexual oddball red-herring characters, rape and murdered moms, junk science (about sunspots, Y chromosomes, eye-memories, love-chemicals), pedophile fathers, doctors and detectives riddled with kinks and ulterior motives, and a general, overall incoherence (even before U.S. distributors got their hands on them in an editing suite) set to a soundtrack of jazz-rock noodling and chanting choirs.
The whole point of Paolo Cavara’s Black Belly of the Tarantula and Sergio Martino’s The Case of the Scorpion’s Tale — and every bloody tale concerned with insects and animals — is for you, the viewer, to have a series of “WTF” moments. Gialli are crime capers, that is, film noirs with the violence in full living-dead color, along with a dash of the supernatural tossed in for good measure. You can watch the likes of the black and white noir classics of the 1940s and 1950s with A Double Life, Black Angel, Double Indemnity, Farewell, My Lovely, My Name is Julia Ross, The Possessed, So Dark the Night, and Sorry, Wrong Number, as examples.
In 1944’s Double Indemnity, when Fred MacMurray pops up from behind the car’s backseat and strangles the husband of Phyliss Dietrichson (a smoldering Barbara Stanwyck), the camera pulls back and frames on her satisfied face as her husband gags to death off frame (and we can imagine what expression is across MacMurray’s face). That’s film noir. In a Giallo: the eye-buldging strangulation is in full frame. In film noir: the sex — via editing and cinematography — is implied. In a Giallo: it’s on camera — and, in most cases, only one person walks away unslashed from the encounter.
Actor Tony Musante’s vacationing American writer Sam Dalmas and Michael Brandon’s rock drummer Roberto Tobias, in the respective films The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Four Files on Grey Velvet, have everything in common with William Holden’s Joe Gillis in Sunset Blvd., Fred MacMurray’s pasty of Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, and John Garfield’s Frank Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Each are somewhat well-intentioned, yet flawed individuals. The only difference is the film noir schleps of the latter films don’t end up in a Dario Argento what-the-fuck Giallo plot twist of an intelligent chimp wielding a straight razor and having to rescue a cute girl with psychic links to insects (Phenomena, for those of you wondering what in-the-hell am I talking about).
This all dates back to Mario Bava with his black-and-white, 1963 neo-noir The Girl Who Knew Too Much and its introductions of Giallo conventions serving as the progenitor for the genre. Then Bava sealed the deal with his next film, the 1964 color-shot Blood and Black Lace, which introduced all the high fashion, shocking color-palate gore, and psycho-sexual encounters missing from the likes of the black and white film noir classics — such as Double Indemnity and Sorry, Wrong Number, which inspired Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much.
So, the next time you fire up The Conjuring or Happy Death Day, or any of the box-office successful sequel-prequels-sidequels of the Blumhouse-universe variety, just remember: Those are the (vastly better made, natch) digital variants of celluloids crafted by Dario Argento (Deep Red, Suspiria), Mario Bava (Hatchet for the Honeymoon), Paolo Cavara (Black Belly of the Tarantula), Ruggero Deodato (Phantom of Death), Riccardo Freda (The Ghost, The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire), Lucio Fulci (Don’t Torture a Duckling), Umberto Lenzi (Seven Blood Stained Orchids), and Sergio Martino (The Case of the Bloody Iris, All the Colors of the Dark, The Strange Case of Mrs. Wardh, Torso, Your Vice is a Locked Door and Only I Have the Key).
These Italian forefathers birthed the jump-scares oeuvre of today’s digital divide in the first place.
The Giallo film lives on today with the major studio wares of James Wan’s Malignant, Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho and, Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio, on the list. Sure, these modernized takes may be a bit too “pretty” in contrast to the classic, cheap n’ quickly made Gialli of yore. The budgets of a Giallo film in 21st century are more studio-generous; as result . . . well, to a Euro-film snob such as this writer, sometimes the new digital breed are too carefully made: made to please the suits bankrolling them, so the films are lacking in the classic schlock and the exploitative elements, which takes away from the lack-of-logic strangeness we adore of the genre.
The truth is we — well, me— don’t want to make sense of these films rife with heart-weeping beautiful women victimized by ultra-violence dispensed by POV black-gloved killers slashing by way of ear-bleeding Ennio Morricone and Goblin soundtracks.
This writer will even debate Sly Stallone’s Cobra and D-Tox, as well as Charles Bronson’s 10 to Midnight, are Euro-influenced Giallo-variants crossed with Poliziotteschi (Italian cop procedurals that pinched from Clint Eastwoood’s Magnum Force) elements in their frames.
But my hands are cramped and my orbs are aching . . . so that’s another film debate for another time. Save me the aisle seat for this bloody Blumhouse Summer!
Ten Plot Points to Make an Italian — or Spanish — Giallo Film
1. Employ twenty-something, curvaceous nude models with perfectly made-up faces that never run, drip, or smudge; their hair never loses its Aqua-Net coif; their French-manicured hands defy rotted monasteries, the dingiest of cellars, the dankest of crypts, and the darkest of twisted winter woods.
2. The aforementioned beauties always wear graveyard-appropriate mini dresses and hot pants. They must also run around in some type of high heels, open toe mules, or chunky cork wedges. No matter how cold the castle or manor: the ladies must wear the sheerest of negligee.
3. The arousing, unsynchronized gasps and screams of those crypt-kickin’ hotties must rival the worst dubs of Asian cinema.
4. Always craft fictional, creepy European historical characters and events based on real-life, creepy European historical characters and events.
5. Dig into a horror aficionado’s grab-bag and homage, i.e., rip off, 1940s MGM film noirs and 1930s Universal Studios horror films. Clip British Amicus and Hammer Studios’ gothic horrors of the 1960s, as well.
6. Always rip off Alfred Hitchcock and William Castle, as well as the Italian masters of Dario Argento, and Mario Bava.
7. Always deploy what-the-hell-why not deus ex machinas, red herrings, and MacGuffins — and each must be in some style of P.O.V shot.
8. Always script in junk science reasons for the slaughter or make up a scientific reason all your own.
9. Insects and bugs or some type of arachnids, along with cats, simians, or some type of tailed primate must be present at some point.
10. If the story isn’t psychological, then it should be supernatural — or a mixtures of both. In either case: Both the antagonist and protagonist must have a sexual kink based in religious fervor: one of the kinks is having sex in the first available, abandoned graveyard or water-filled, web-strewn crypt — regardless of the who or what is chasing you.
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1.“The ‘Future’ of A.I Goes Up in Flames: Artificial Intelligence in the hands of man: a cinema perspective” by R.D Francis/Counter Arts
