Giallo Films and Gore Reborn: How Fulci, Argento, D'Amato and Tinto Brass Inspired Today's Horror
Giallo films are Italian murder thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s, known for stylish killers, bold colors, and eroticism. Since the 2000s, they have been reborn in two waves: European "neo-giallo" films such as The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013), and American gore horror by directors like Eli Roth, influenced by Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, and Joe D'Amato.
For decades, these films were treated as trash. They were cut by censors, banned as "video nasties" in Britain, sold under a dozen different titles, and dismissed by critics as cheap Italian imitations of Hitchcock. Their directors often hid behind American pseudonyms. Their stars were rarely taken seriously.
Then something strange happened. The children who had rented those battered VHS tapes in the 1980s grew up and became filmmakers.
In Belgium, the directing duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani built entire films out of the black gloves, flashing knives, and saturated colors of the giallo. In Britain, Peter Strickland made a film about the sound engineers of a 1970s Italian horror movie, and Edgar Wright sent a young woman back into the neon nightmares of 1960s London. In Italy, Luca Guadagnino remade Dario Argento's Suspiria. And in America, a new generation led by Eli Roth, Quentin Tarantino, and Rob Zombie revived the raw, practical gore of Lucio Fulci, Joe D'Amato, and Ruggero Deodato, bringing it back to multiplexes around the world.
Even the eroticism that once made these films scandalous has returned. The provocative, body-centered cinema of Tinto Brass echoes today in films like Immaculate, The Substance, and Ti West's MaXXXine.
As a film critic who has watched Italian genre cinema since long before it became fashionable, I find this revival fascinating, and sometimes troubling. Some filmmakers have understood what made the originals great: the style, the dream logic, the music, the sense of danger. Others have borrowed only the blood.
In this article, we trace how the giallo and Italian gore were reborn: who the original masters were, which modern filmmakers were influenced by them, and what the new generation kept, changed, or lost along the way.
The Original Masters: Bava, Argento, Fulci, D'Amato, Deodato and Tinto Brass
The modern giallo and gore revival draws on six Italian directors of the 1960s to 1980s: Mario Bava, who invented the giallo's visual style; Dario Argento, who made it an international success; Lucio Fulci and Joe D'Amato, who pushed it toward extreme gore; Ruggero Deodato, who created the cannibal and found-footage template; and Tinto Brass, who defined Italian erotic cinema.
What Is a Giallo?
The word giallo means "yellow" in Italian. It comes from the cheap mystery paperbacks with yellow covers that Italian publishers began selling in the 1920s. By the 1960s, filmmakers had turned those stories into a genre of their own: murder mysteries with a masked or black-gloved killer, glamorous settings, gruesome deaths, erotic subplots, and a final twist revealing the murderer's identity.
What set the giallo apart from American thrillers was not the plot, which was often confusing, but the style: saturated colors, elaborate camera movements, extreme close-ups of eyes and blades, and unforgettable music. As we explored in The Rise of Italian Giallo, the genre turned violence into something almost operatic.
Mario Bava: The Inventor
Most film historians credit Mario Bava with creating the giallo. His The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) is often called the first true giallo, and Blood and Black Lace (1964), with its faceless killer stalking models in a fashion house, established the genre's look: vivid reds, greens, and purples, and murder staged like a fashion shoot.
Bava's influence stretches far beyond Italy. His gothic horror Kill, Baby, Kill (1966), which starred Erika Blanc, and his proto-slasher A Bay of Blood (1971) are often cited as ancestors of American slasher films like Friday the 13th.
Dario Argento: The Stylist
Dario Argento made the giallo a worldwide phenomenon. His debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), was a huge international hit and triggered a wave of imitations. His masterpieces Deep Red (Profondo rosso, 1975) and Suspiria (1977), with their pounding scores by the rock band Goblin, are still considered among the most beautiful horror films ever made.
Argento's legacy is the one modern filmmakers imitate most directly: the colored lighting, the killer's point-of-view shots, the black leather gloves, and the idea that a murder scene can be a work of art. When Luca Guadagnino remade Suspiria in 2018, he was paying tribute to Argento's most famous film.
The Giallo's Other Architects
Around Argento, dozens of directors made gialli in the 1970s. Umberto Lenzi made four erotic thrillers with Hollywood's former "Baby Doll," Carroll Baker, beginning with Orgasmo (1969). Sergio Martino directed a series of gialli starring Edwige Fenech, including The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971). And Emilio Miraglia made The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971), also with Erika Blanc.
These films made stars of actresses we have profiled at Meeting Venus, including Barbara Bouchet, Rosalba Neri, and Nieves Navarro.
Lucio Fulci: The Godfather of Gore
Lucio Fulci began in comedies and Westerns, then made two of the finest gialli of the early 1970s: A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971) and Don't Torture a Duckling (1972), both starring Florinda Bolkan, with Barbara Bouchet in the latter.
His real fame came later, with a series of supernatural gore films: Zombi 2 (1979), known in Britain as Zombie Flesh Eaters, City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981), and The House by the Cemetery (1981). Their shocking practical effects, especially the famous splinter-in-the-eye scene in Zombi 2, earned him the title "the Godfather of Gore." Several of his films ended up on Britain's list of banned video nasties.
We explored his career and reputation in depth in Lucio Fulci: His Horror Films and Ongoing Controversy.
Joe D'Amato: The King of Sex and Gore
Joe D'Amato, the best-known pseudonym of cinematographer Aristide Massaccesi, directed around 200 films and mixed horror and erotica more fearlessly than anyone. He made the Black Emanuelle series with Laura Gemser, and the gore films Beyond the Darkness (1979), Anthropophagus (1980), and Absurd (1981). His fake snuff sequence in Emanuelle in America (1977) came three years before Cannibal Holocaust.
As we argued in Joe D'Amato: Master Filmmaker or King of Sex and Gore?, he was a master craftsman of exploitation, and his films are now restored in 4K.
Ruggero Deodato: The Cannibal Pioneer
Ruggero Deodato made the most notorious Italian horror film of all: Cannibal Holocaust (1980). Its "found footage" of a film crew killed in the Amazon looked so real that Italian courts seized the film and charged Deodato with murder, until he brought his actors to court alive. The film's real killing of animals on camera remains deeply controversial.
Deodato's legacy is double. He shaped the Italian cannibal cycle that inspired Eli Roth's The Green Inferno, and he pioneered the found-footage format that would later drive The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity.
Tinto Brass: The Master of Erotic Cinema
Tinto Brass never made horror films, but his influence on modern horror's treatment of the body is hard to ignore. After early experimental work, he turned to provocative period films such as Salon Kitty (1976), which featured the ballerina-turned-actress Rosemarie Lindt, and the scandalous Caligula (1979). From the 1980s, beginning with La chiave (1983), he became Italy's leading director of erotic cinema.
We looked at his work in Tinto Brass: A Journey Through Provocative Cinema, his portrayal of women, and a comparison with Pier Paolo Pasolini.
The Six Masters at a Glance
| Director | Signature films | Main legacy | Modern heirs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mario Bava | Blood and Black Lace (1964), A Bay of Blood (1971) | Invented the giallo's look; ancestor of the slasher | Cattet & Forzani, Edgar Wright |
| Dario Argento | Deep Red (1975), Suspiria (1977) | Color, music, murder as art | Luca Guadagnino, Peter Strickland |
| Lucio Fulci | Zombi 2 (1979), The Beyond (1981) | Supernatural gore and practical effects | Damien Leone (Terrifier), Rob Zombie |
| Joe D'Amato | Beyond the Darkness (1979), Anthropophagus (1980) | Mixing sex and gore; fake snuff | Eli Roth, Ti West |
| Ruggero Deodato | Cannibal Holocaust (1980) | Cannibal films; found footage | Eli Roth (The Green Inferno) |
| Tinto Brass | Salon Kitty (1976), La chiave (1983) | Erotic cinema centered on the body | Coralie Fargeat, Ti West, Michael Mohan |
Together, these six directors created a cinema of style, sex, and blood that the mainstream spent decades ignoring. The next generation would not make that mistake.
The Neo-Giallo in Europe: Cattet and Forzani, Strickland, Guadagnino and Wright
The European giallo revival is led by the Brussels-based couple Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, whose films Amer (2009) and The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013) are the purest modern homages to the genre. Alongside them, Peter Strickland, Luca Guadagnino, and Edgar Wright brought the giallo's colors, sounds, and obsessions into British and Italian art-house cinema.
Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani: Giallo as Pure Sensation
Hélène Cattet, who is French, and Bruno Forzani, who is Belgian, met in Brussels in 1997, and have made films together ever since. For them, the giallo was not just an influence, it was the reason their partnership worked. As they explained, the genre let them combine their different backgrounds because it "unifies two kinds of cinema: entertainment and experimental."
After a series of self-produced short films, including Yellow Room (2002), a title that is itself a nod to the word giallo, they made their feature debut with Amer (2009). A French-Belgian co-production, it tells the story of a woman named Ana at three stages of her life, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, through a series of dreamlike, almost wordless sequences. Critics described it as a postmodern homage to the giallo, and it won a prize at the Sitges Film Festival, one of the world's leading fantasy and horror festivals.
The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013)
Their second feature, The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps), went even further. Klaus Tange plays a man who returns home to find his wife has vanished, and is drawn into a labyrinth of lies and murder inside a strange Art Nouveau apartment building.
Even the title sounds like a lost 1970s giallo, many of which had long, poetic, bizarre titles, such as The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh or Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key. The film is a feast of the genre's signatures: black gloves, glinting razors, extreme close-ups of eyes, split screens, and music borrowed from classic Italian scores.
Critical reception was mixed. Some critics saw it as a dazzling sensory experience; others, like The A.V. Club, felt it tested the limits of how much style a film can carry without a story. But it has become a cult favorite, and it remains the duo's most searched film. Together, Amer and The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears are often described as a diptych on desire: one feminine, one masculine.
From Westerns to Spies
Cattet and Forzani then moved into other Italian genres. Let the Corpses Tan (Laissez bronzer les cadavres, 2017), adapted from a novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jean-Pierre Bastid, is a violent "acid Western" about a gang of robbers hiding out in a Mediterranean villa, a tribute to the spaghetti Westerns and Eurocrime films of the 1970s.
Their fourth feature, Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Reflet dans un diamant mort, 2025), premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival. It turns to the Eurospy films of the 1960s, and it stars Fabio Testi, a genuine icon of 1970s Italian cinema, who appeared in gialli such as What Have You Done to Solange? (1972). Casting him was a way of connecting the revival directly to the original era.
Peter Strickland: The Sound of Italian Horror
The British director Peter Strickland approached the giallo from an unusual angle: sound. In Berberian Sound Studio (2012), Toby Jones plays a shy English sound engineer hired to work on a violent Italian horror film in the 1970s. We never see the film he's working on; we only hear it, as technicians stab cabbages and smash melons to create the sounds of murder. Slowly, the violence of the film seeps into his mind.
It's a film about the making of Italian horror, and a tribute to the craftsmen, composers, and sound designers whose work gave the genre its power.
Strickland returned to the genre with In Fabric (2018), about a cursed red dress sold in a sinister department store, which destroys everyone who wears it. With its lush colors, eerie shop assistants, and dreamlike logic, it's closer in spirit to Argento's Suspiria than to any modern horror film.
Luca Guadagnino: Remaking Suspiria
In 2018, the Italian director Luca Guadagnino, fresh from the acclaimed Call Me by Your Name, did something few dared: he remade Dario Argento's Suspiria.
Rather than copy the original's candy colors and Goblin score, Guadagnino made a colder, darker film, set in divided Berlin in 1977, with Dakota Johnson as a young American dancer and Tilda Swinton in several roles. The score was composed by Thom Yorke of Radiohead. Many Argento fans were divided, but the remake introduced a new generation to the original, and it remains one of the most searched films of the revival.
Edgar Wright: Giallo Goes to Soho
The British director Edgar Wright, known for Shaun of the Dead and Baby Driver, openly drew on the giallo for Last Night in Soho (2021). Thomasin McKenzie plays a young fashion student who, in her dreams, travels back to the London of the 1960s and into the life of a glamorous aspiring singer, played by Anya Taylor-Joy. The dream soon becomes a nightmare of exploitation and murder.
The film's neon reds and blues, mirrored reflections, and knife-wielding figure in the shadows are pure giallo. And, like many classic gialli, it is also a story about how an industry exploits young women's dreams, a theme we explore often at Meeting Venus, from how sexy roles ruined the careers of iconic actresses to the stories of stars like Barbara Bouchet and Erika Blanc.
What the Europeans Kept
What unites these filmmakers is that they understood the giallo was never really about plot. It was about images, sounds, and sensations: the color red, the sound of a blade, the rhythm of a scream against a lush score. As we explored in The Rise of Italian Giallo, the original directors used murder as a canvas for style. The European revival kept that spirit, and in some cases pushed it even further into pure abstraction.
In America, the revival took a very different path. There, filmmakers were less interested in the giallo's elegance than in the raw, shocking gore of Fulci, D'Amato, and Deodato.
The Gore Revival in America: Eli Roth, Grindhouse, Rob Zombie and Terrifier
In America, the Italian revival took the form of explicit gore. Eli Roth, a devoted fan of Ruggero Deodato, led the way with Hostel (2005), Hostel: Part II (2007), and The Green Inferno (2013), while Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse, Rob Zombie's films, and Damien Leone's Terrifier series brought 1970s and 1980s exploitation back to mainstream cinemas.
Eli Roth: The Disciple of Deodato
No modern American director has been more open about his debt to Italian horror than Eli Roth. After his debut, Cabin Fever (2002), he made Hostel (2005), about American backpackers lured to a Slovakian hostel where wealthy clients pay to torture and kill them. Critics coined a new label for it and for the Saw franchise: "torture porn."
The idea of the rich hunting the poor for sport is an old one, as we explored in From Human Hunting Movies to Real-Life Conspiracies. But Roth's graphic style came straight from the Italians.
Hostel: Part II and a Famous Cameo
For the sequel, Hostel: Part II (2007), Roth switched to three female protagonists and pushed the violence even further. The film was banned from theatrical release in several countries.
It also contained a hidden tribute. In one scene, a client is shown eating a victim's flesh: he is billed simply as "Italian Cannibal," and he is played by Ruggero Deodato, the director of Cannibal Holocaust. At the time, it was a wink to horror fans. Six years later, it became clear it was much more.
The Green Inferno (2013): A Love Letter to Cannibal Holocaust
Eli Roth reportedly considers Cannibal Holocaust his favorite film, and The Green Inferno is his tribute to it. A group of student activists travels to the Amazon to stop deforestation, and after a plane crash, they are captured by a cannibal tribe.
The homage runs through every detail. The title comes from the film-within-a-film in Cannibal Holocaust, the documentary that the doomed American crew sets out to make. The end credits carry a dedication, "For Ruggero," and even include a list of the original Italian cannibal films as a primer for the audience. Critics also noted the influence of Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox (1981).
Roth's film uses special effects rather than the real animal killings that made Deodato's film so notorious, a difference worth stressing. Deodato himself lived to see the tribute; he died in Rome in December 2022, at 83.
The film also changed Roth's personal life: on the set, he met the Chilean actress Lorenza Izzo, who became his wife and the star of several of his later films.
Knock Knock (2015): A 1970s Remake With Keanu Reeves
Roth's next film was not a gore film but an erotic thriller. In Knock Knock (2015), Keanu Reeves plays a happily married architect who lets two young women into his home on a stormy night, when his family is away, and becomes their victim. The two women were played by Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas, years before her Oscar nomination for Blonde.
Knock Knock is a remake of the 1977 cult film Death Game, one of the many 1970s exploitation films Roth grew up on. Reviews were mixed, and some critics felt it borrowed the look of exploitation cinema without its purpose, but it confirmed Roth's role as America's leading curator of 1970s genre cinema.
Grindhouse (2007): Tarantino and Rodriguez Revive the Double Feature
The most ambitious tribute came from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. Their Grindhouse (2007) recreated the experience of a cheap 1970s double feature: two films, Rodriguez's zombie story Planet Terror and Tarantino's car-chase slasher Death Proof, complete with scratched film, "missing reels," and fake trailers for films that didn't exist. One of those trailers, directed by Eli Roth, was Thanksgiving, which he finally turned into a real feature in 2023.
Tarantino has long championed Italian genre directors. Grindhouse was a box-office disappointment, but it helped a new generation discover the forgotten films of the 1970s, and its title became shorthand for a whole style of filmmaking.
Rob Zombie: From Rock to Horror
The musician Rob Zombie brought his love of 1970s horror to the screen with House of 1000 Corpses (2003) and The Devil's Rejects (2005), and later remade John Carpenter's Halloween. His style owes more to American drive-in films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre than to the giallo, but his later film The Lords of Salem (2012), with its witches, dream imagery, and saturated colors, recalls the Italian supernatural horror of Argento and Fulci.
Terrifier: Fulci's Practical Gore Goes Mainstream
The most extreme and most successful gore revival of recent years is Damien Leone's Terrifier series, built around the silent, grinning killer Art the Clown. The films are defined by their elaborate, handmade practical effects, the same kind of physical gore that made Lucio Fulci's zombie films infamous.
What began as a low-budget cult item became a phenomenon. Terrifier is now searched hundreds of thousands of times a month in the United States alone, and more than a million times in October 2025. We looked critically at the character in Art the Clown: A Horrific Character Exploiting Women and Children.
What the Americans Kept, and What They Lost
The American revival clearly kept the practical gore of Fulci, D'Amato, and Deodato, and their willingness to shock. It also kept something of their spirit of provocation: like the Italian films before them, Hostel: Part II and Cannibal Holocaust were banned in several countries.
What it often lost was the style. The dreamlike color, the elaborate camera work, and the music that made Argento and Fulci unforgettable are rarer in American gore films, which tend to focus on the violence itself. That's partly why, as a critic, I remain uneasy about some of this revival. As I wrote in Why I Don't Cheer for Extreme Violence, gore on its own is not the same as horror, and the best Italian films understood that.
The shock value of these films also has a long history, which we traced in The Rise of Graphic Violence in Modern Horror Films and Banned Video Nasties of the 1980s.
From Cannibal Holocaust to MaXXXine: Found Footage, Eroticism and the Body in Modern Horror
Beyond gore, the Italian masters left two more legacies. Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980) created the found-footage horror format that later drove The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. And the erotic, body-centered cinema of Tinto Brass and Joe D'Amato echoes today in films like Immaculate (2024), The Substance (2024), and Ti West's MaXXXine (2024).
The Found-Footage Legacy
When Cannibal Holocaust was released in 1980, its idea was radical: most of the film is presented as "recovered" footage shot by an American documentary crew who disappeared in the Amazon. The shaky camera, the raw sound, and the illusion of reality were so convincing that, as we have seen, Deodato had to prove in court that his actors were alive.
Nearly twenty years later, The Blair Witch Project (1999) used the same idea, three student filmmakers lost in the woods, their footage found a year later, and became one of the most profitable films ever made. Its marketing even encouraged audiences to believe the story was true, just as Deodato had kept his actors hidden. Paranormal Activity (2007) and a flood of imitations followed.
We traced this history in The Found Footage Film Genre: Origins, Evolution and Future, explored its effect on audiences in Psychological and Emotional Effects on Viewers of Found Footage Horror Films, and looked at a recent innovation in Late Night with the Devil, which presents its story as a lost 1970s television broadcast.
Joe D'Amato also deserves a mention here. As we noted in our D'Amato article, the fake snuff sequence in his Emanuelle in America (1977) used the same grainy, "real footage" technique three years before Cannibal Holocaust.
Immaculate (2024): The Return of Nunsploitation
The Italian exploitation cinema of the 1970s had a whole subgenre set in convents, known today as "nunsploitation," which mixed religious settings with forbidden desire and cruelty. In 2024, it returned with Immaculate, directed by Michael Mohan and starring Sydney Sweeney as a young American nun in a remote Italian convent who discovers she is pregnant, despite being a virgin.
Shot in Italy, with its candlelit corridors, Catholic imagery, and shocking final act, the film openly draws on Italian religious horror. We explored it in Sinful Sanctuary: Unraveling the Sacrilegious Secrets of Immaculate. Sweeney, who also produced the film, has become one of the most discussed actresses of her generation, as we noted at Meeting Venus in our article on her American Eagle jeans campaign.
The Substance (2024): The Female Body as Horror
The French director Coralie Fargeat made one of the most talked-about horror films of the decade with The Substance, starring Demi Moore as a fading Hollywood star who takes a black-market drug that creates a younger, "perfect" version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley.
The film's graphic body horror, saturated colors, and extreme close-ups recall both the Italian masters and the body horror of David Cronenberg. But its real subject is the one that haunts so many of the actresses we have profiled: how the film industry treats women's bodies, and discards women as they age. We explored it in Exploring The Substance: A Deep Dive into Body Horror and Feminist Themes.
Seen that way, The Substance is almost a reply to the cinema of Tinto Brass and D'Amato. Where their films celebrated the female body, often for a male audience, Fargeat turns that gaze into horror.
Ti West's X Trilogy: Slasher, Porn and Giallo
No modern filmmaker combines horror and adult cinema as directly as Ti West. His trilogy, X (2022), Pearl (2022), and MaXXXine (2024), all starring Mia Goth, follows a young woman determined to become a star, from a 1970s adult film shoot on a Texas farm to the sleazy Hollywood of 1985.
X takes its structure from 1970s American slashers. But MaXXXine, set in the world of video nasties, adult films, and moral panics, features a black-gloved killer stalking Los Angeles, a clear homage to the giallo. We looked at the trilogy in X, Pearl and MaXXXine: A New Trilogy of Terror.
De Palma and His Heirs
Between the Italian masters and today's filmmakers stands Brian De Palma, whose erotic thrillers such as Dressed to Kill (1980) and Body Double (1984) combined Hitchcock, the giallo, and explicit sensuality, often with lush scores by Pino Donaggio, an Italian composer. We analyzed his style in Suspense Through Camerawork: Decoding Brian De Palma's Psychological Thrillers, and his influence on a recent horror film in Suitable Flesh.
Nudity, Consent and the New Horror
One major difference separates today's films from the originals: consent. Many actresses of the 1970s had little control over how their bodies were shown. As we saw in the story of Laura Gemser, some discovered that producers had used body doubles for scenes they had refused, without telling them.
Today, intimacy coordinators, contracts, and actresses who also produce their own films, as Sydney Sweeney did with Immaculate, have changed how sex and nudity are filmed. Streaming has changed it too, as we explored in Full Frontal Nudity and Sex on Streaming Services. The new horror still uses the body to shock, but more often it asks who controls that body, and why.
That, perhaps, is the most interesting way today's filmmakers have honored the Italian masters: not only by copying their images, but by questioning them.
Conclusion: Why the Italian Masters Still Matter
For decades, the films of Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Joe D'Amato, Ruggero Deodato, and Tinto Brass were dismissed as trash, cut by censors, and hidden under a dozen titles. Today, their influence is everywhere: in the dreamlike neo-giallo of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the sound design of Peter Strickland, Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria, Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho, Eli Roth's Hostel and The Green Inferno, the practical gore of Terrifier, and the erotic horror of Immaculate, The Substance, and MaXXXine.
The revival has taken two very different paths. In Europe, filmmakers kept the giallo's style: the colors, the music, the dream logic, the sense that murder could be staged like art. In America, filmmakers kept its shock: the practical gore, the provocation, the willingness to be banned. The best modern films manage both. The weakest borrow only the blood.
As a critic, I find the most encouraging part of this story is not the imitation, but the questioning. Films like The Substance and Last Night in Soho look back at the Italian cinema that exploited women's bodies and ask what it cost the women on screen, the same question we have asked at Meeting Venus in the stories of Laura Gemser, Erika Blanc, Rosemarie Lindt, and Barbara Bouchet.
If you want to understand where today's horror comes from, go back to the source. Watch Bava's Blood and Black Lace, Argento's Deep Red, Fulci's The Beyond, and then Cattet and Forzani's The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears. You'll see a line running straight from 1960s Rome to the multiplexes and streaming platforms of today.
The yellow paperbacks are long gone. But the giallo, and the gore that followed it, have never been more alive.
Frequently Asked Questions About Giallo Films and Their Modern Revival
What is a giallo film?
A giallo is an Italian murder thriller, popular from the 1960s to the early 1980s, usually featuring a mysterious killer in black gloves, stylish violence, bold colors, and erotic subplots. The name means "yellow" in Italian and comes from the yellow covers of Italian mystery paperbacks.
Who invented the giallo?
Mario Bava is generally credited with creating the genre, with The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1964). Dario Argento made it an international success with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970).
What is neo-giallo?
Neo-giallo refers to modern films that imitate or reinterpret the classic Italian giallo. The best-known examples are Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's Amer (2009) and The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013), Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and In Fabric (2018), and Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho (2021).
What is The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears about?
Directed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the 2013 film follows a man, played by Klaus Tange, searching for his missing wife in a mysterious Art Nouveau building, where he becomes caught in a web of lies and murder. It is a stylized homage to the Italian giallo, and critical reception was mixed.
Which modern horror films were inspired by Italian horror?
Major examples include Eli Roth's Hostel (2005), Hostel: Part II (2007), and The Green Inferno (2013); Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria (2018); Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007); the Terrifier series; Immaculate (2024); and Ti West's MaXXXine (2024).
Is The Green Inferno a remake of Cannibal Holocaust?
Not officially, but it is a direct homage. Eli Roth reportedly considers Cannibal Holocaust his favorite film, took his title from the film-within-a-film in Deodato's movie, and dedicated The Green Inferno "For Ruggero."
Was Ruggero Deodato in Hostel: Part II?
Yes. Deodato, the director of Cannibal Holocaust, makes a cameo in Hostel: Part II (2007), credited as "Italian Cannibal." Eli Roth cast him as a tribute.
Did Cannibal Holocaust invent found-footage horror?
Cannibal Holocaust (1980) is widely regarded as one of the first found-footage horror films, and it inspired later films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999). Joe D'Amato had already used a similar fake "real footage" technique in Emanuelle in America (1977).
Is Suspiria (2018) a remake?
Yes. Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria (2018) is a remake of Dario Argento's 1977 original, reimagined as a darker story set in divided Berlin in 1977, with a score by Thom Yorke.
Is Terrifier influenced by Lucio Fulci?
Damien Leone's Terrifier series belongs to the same tradition of extreme practical gore effects that Lucio Fulci made famous in films like Zombi 2 and The Beyond. Its handmade, physical effects are closer to 1980s Italian gore than to modern digital horror.
Where can I watch classic giallo films?
Many classic gialli have been restored on Blu-ray and 4K by specialist labels such as Arrow Video, Severin Films, 88 Films, and Mondo Macabro. Several are also available on horror streaming services, depending on your region.
