3 - Neo-Giallo

Summary

Introduction: (Neo-)Giallo and Affect

Before discussing Luca Guadagnino's 2018 film Suspiria, which is the primary focus of this chapter, I will first address the renewed interest in the giallo film. Giallo, meaning yellow in Italian, referred to pulp fiction novels (with yellow covers) that featured stories such as murder mysteries, police procedurals, and stalk and slash narratives to which the American slasher film owes a deep debt. Drawing from the literary model, giallo films were, as Lindsay Hallam recounts, “made in high numbers throughout the 1960s and 1970s, gaining popularity within Italy while also garnering screenings and fans abroad.” The giallo, indeed, reached audiences far and wide—take for example, screening practices in Taiwan. Under the rule of the Kuomintang party, which established martial law from 1949 until 1987, the regime implemented strict censorship ordinances. To skirt regulations theater owners would insert illicit material—often smuggled from abroad, including giallo films—and splice them into sanctioned films. Theater owners established an array of mechanisms to alert the projection booth when government inspectors would arrive, allowing the theater to switch back to certified material. Seasoned audience members played right along with the whole routine, and even anticipated a disjunctive viewing experience. Edwige Fenech, one of the “sex goddesses” associated with giallo films, was a major draw for Taiwanese audiences. Newspaper advertisements merely needed to mention her name (which served as a nod and wink) to bring in audiences, who reveled at the prospects of seeing some sexually charged spectacle featuring Fenech, or other well-known starlets of the genre. In the American context, giallo films gained traction with videocassette distribution, and prior to that, as Raidford Guins observes, “were exhibited in limited release, or found on the midnight movie circuit, or at paracinema festivals, or at drive-in cinemas after their post-War glamour period had run its course.” Regardless, the point here is that spectators did not attend these screenings for coherent narratives as such, but rather were lured to the theater with the promise of seeing some sort of rousing spectacle.

While the hallmark of the giallo rested upon its promise to deliver audiovisual spectacles, the exact parameters of the genre are subject to some debate.