Programmed September 2024

Giallo!

Black-gloved killers, blood-red violence: welcome to the mind-warping world of giallo, the luridly stylized genre of mystery-thrillers that emanated from Italy in the 1960s and ’70s. Sprung from the imaginations of directors like Mario Bava ( Blood and Black Lace ), Dario Argento ( Deep Red ), and Lucio Fulci ( Don’t Torture a Duckling ), giallo took classic influences—Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock—and scrambled them into baroque exercises in pure stylistic excess, defined by kaleidoscopic color, voyeuristic camera work, eye-popping mise-en-scène, and eardrum-shattering soundtracks. Unbound from narrative logic and laced with subversive critiques of church, state, and class, these perversely pleasurable cinematic transgressions are some of the most inspired and imaginative genre films ever made.