The Italian Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock was famously known as the master of suspense. His style of filmmaking is immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with his work. His tales of the macabre and suspenseful became absolute monoliths in American cinema and pop-culture, paving the way for future directors being recognized by audiences for their specific styles or preference to genre. However, during this time in Hollywood’s adolescence, a new style of filmmaking began to pick up steam in Italy.
These films became known as giallo — named after cheap yellow-cover bound pulp fiction novels that had gained popularity in the country after World War II. These early giallo films featured many of the same elements, such as masked killers, gore, psychedelia, a foreigner protagonist, and sex, among other things.
Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much is often cited as the first true giallo, as it is the earliest example of a film that contains the vital elements that makes giallo, giallo. In the film, a lone American woman in Rome is witness to a gruesome murder, making her the black-gloved killer’s next target.
Above all else, these films had an emphasis on style and visuals that took priority over the plot. Despite working off of bare-bones scripts, these films still manage to be emotionally impactful and riveting through flashy camera and lighting techniques.
As the end of the 60’s started to bleed into the early 70’s, this movement shifted away from crime thrillers and pivoted toward horror and exploitation. Many of the same elements remained, but these filmmakers leaned into the sleazier aspects of their work — symbolizing a long awaited rebellion against conservative catholic values, and a status quo that was still trying to find itself only 30 years after the reign of Mussolini.
These films were never truly successful, only hitting with the specific crowd that would be trying to find this kind of exploitative, pulpy entertainment. This all changed in 1970 when Dario Argento’s The Bird with The Crystal Plumage released to mainstream praise. Argento would be forever cemented as the face of giallo and Italian horror as it began to spread worldwide, attracting audiences that fell in love with this style of filmmaking for its expressionistic displays of madness and terror.
Argento was born on September 7th, 1940 in Rome. He was brought into the Italian film industry through his father, producer Sal Argento. He began his career writing for other directors. Most famously, he co-wrote the screenplay for spaghetti-western legend Sergio Leone’s Once Upon The Time in The West. This earned him legitimacy within the Italian film community, earning him the nickname of “The Italian Hitchcock” and only pushing him further to direct his own feature.
While Plumage was far from being the first giallo, it was the first to break through to international audiences. The film blurs the line between horror, crime-drama and thriller all alongside Argento’s soon-to-be iconic visuals that would go on to define his style of filmmaking. Intense colors, snap-zooms, and elaborate set design. His further films would only continue deeper into this style, getting more and more expressionistic and surreal. His films such as The Cat o’ Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and Deep Red all communicate these same themes.
During this same time, Argento’s soundtracks became integral to the experience of enjoying his work. Originally working with Leone’s composer, Ennio Morricone, Argento struck a friendship with the Italian prog-rock band Goblin. Their bombastic and grandiose style of music only helped create a unique atmosphere, building upon the dreamlike and surreal tone these films took on.
Arguably, Argento’s most famous piece is his 1977 masterwork, Suspiria. The film follows a young american dancer named Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) on her arrival to Germany to enroll in the prestigious Freiburg Academy. When she arrives, she finds a student fleeing the school and running off into the night. Suzy is weary but morning comes and she is fully enrolled into the school. However, as night falls, strange occurrences and suddenly missing students push Suzy and her roommates to suspect something is going on.
The film is notorious for having little to no plot to it — and whatever slim plot the film does have, it spoils itself with the soundtrack crooning “WITCH!” over and over in the first five minutes, no less.
But if there is an argument to be made about the validity of giallo in the grand scheme of filmmaking as a whole, this is the perfect example. Suspiria to this day is marked as a landmark horror film, including recently being remade by Luca Guadagnino in 2018. It holds all this acclaim and praise to this day despite having a pretty barren script.
When it comes to the work of Argento and his contemporaries, it doesn’t matter. The experience is wholly driven from the style of filmmaking itself, while the story takes a backseat. It allows a viewer to completely detach and allow themselves to be carried along by the visuals and music. The style is, quite literally in this case, above substance and the emotions driven from these films is completely conjured by just that.
I would easily recommend most of Argento’s filmography between the 70’s and 80’s, all the way from The Bird With the Crystal Plumage to Opera. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that there’s a clear drop in quality of his films once he got to the 90’s, but one cannot ignore his importance to the world of cinema. Dario Argento stands out as one of the true auteurs of the horror genre, as he continues to make films to this day. He is currently in pre-production of his next film, Occhiali Neri (Black Glasses) and I’m excited to see what he has in store next.
A version of this story originally appeared on CreatorCoffeeShop.com
