It's the season for blood and gore and unhealthy, possibly psychotic fixations, and few subgenres inspire obsession quite like "giallo" thrillers. But perhaps a detail-oriented, focused audience is appropriate for these particularly fetishistic films, as giallo is defined by outrageous production design, bold close-ups, intense color, memorable scores filled with sighs and shards of sound, and strange, gruesome murders performed by a very particular type of villain. With bizarre titles like "A Lizard in a Woman's Skin" and "Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key," they won't be slipping our minds anytime soon.
Nightmarish but enthralling male-fantasy thrillers, tuned to a sexuality shaped by pin-up magazines, rock and roll, and the heightened, aestheticized world of movies and advertising, these bizarre spaces in which an urbane bourgeoisie reckons anxiously with social issues that were new and raw in the '70s — they heyday of giallo....
