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22 “Te sound, it looks wonderful.” — Dario Argento If the colour yellow once evoked the pleasant imagery of bright summer days and blooming bush daisies, it certainly took a dark turn in the cinematic world of twentieth century Italy. Murder mysteries shot in saturated colours depicting grim, twisted nightmares of brutal killings became the new yellow—the giallo flm. But before referring to a genre of graphic Italian horror flms, giallo, the Italian word for yellow, was used to describe a genre of paperback mystery novels with bright yellow spines and covers introduced by the Milanese publishing house Mondadori in 1929.1 Most of the stories were translations of English whodunits and hard- boiled detective novels, including work by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie 2, with translations of Edgar Wallace novels appearing to be some of the most popular during the 1930s and 1940s.3 Despite the fact some critics, such as Alberto Savino, believed that mysteries were “unnatural” and “foreign” to Italian culture, these novels managed to inspire not only an Italian literary tradition with authors such as Giorgio Scerbanenco, Andrea Camilleri, and Carlo Lucarelli 4, but also some of the most terrifying and visually striking flms to come out of Italy during the 1960s and 1970s. Gialli frequently cross generic boundaries of crime flms, horror movies, and thrillers, and therefore may be more appropriately considered flone, as they are by many Italian critics, rather than part of a genre.5 Meaning large thread, the term flone is used to indicate a looser collection of similar themes and styles.6 Gialli can be more generally related to each other in this way, and thus a flm like Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) can be called giallo despite its greater resemblance to the supernatural horror thriller.
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