Giallo
Also known as gialli · giallo film
The Italian murder thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s, with black-gloved killers, stylish set pieces and a final reveal, named after Italy's yellow-covered crime paperbacks.
In practice
Giallo, plural gialli, is a kind of Italian murder thriller that flourished from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. The word means yellow in Italian. It comes from the cheap crime paperbacks the publisher Mondadori sold with yellow covers from 1929, and in Italy it still means any crime story.
Outside Italy, giallo names a specific film style. A masked or black-gloved killer murders a series of victims, usually women, in elaborate set pieces. An amateur, often a foreigner who witnessed one of the crimes, investigates. The killer's identity and motive, often a trauma from the past, are revealed in a final twist.
Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1964) set the form, and Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) made it popular. The films are known for saturated color, bold camera movement and scores by composers such as Ennio Morricone and the band Goblin, and they strongly influenced the American slasher.
A giallo scene in screenplay form
INT. ART GALLERY - NIGHT
Through the glass front, PETER (30s) sees a figure in a black raincoat and black leather gloves struggling with a woman among the sculptures. A blade flashes. The figure is gone.
PETER
There was a painting on the wall behind them. Red. It's not there anymore.
INSPECTOR MORSELLI
You saw a murder, and you're telling me about the decoration?
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The gloves, the glass between the witness and the crime, and a detail the witness cannot place are the giallo's signatures. The missing painting is the clue the whole film will turn on, planted in the first murder and explained only in the last scene.
What makes a giallo
Most gialli share a recognizable set of elements: a killer whose face is hidden, seen through gloves, a hat and a raincoat; murders staged as set pieces with striking color and sound; an outsider who becomes a detective because they saw too much; and a solution that depends on a misremembered detail.
The plots are puzzles, but the films care as much about mood and style as logic. Police are often useless, the city is glamorous and threatening at once, and the killer's motive usually lies in a childhood trauma or a hidden identity.
Giallo films
Blood and Black Lace (1964): a killer in a mask and gloves murders the models of a Roman fashion house. Mario Bava's use of color set the look of the genre.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970): an American writer in Rome witnesses an attack in a gallery and cannot stop thinking about what he saw. It made Dario Argento's name.
Don't Torture a Duckling (1972): Lucio Fulci sets a series of child murders in a southern Italian village full of superstition and suspicion.
Deep Red (1975): a pianist sees a murder through a window and becomes obsessed with a painting that has disappeared from the scene. It is often called the best giallo.
Last Night in Soho (2021): Edgar Wright's modern homage borrows the color, the music and the dream logic of the genre.
Giallo vs. slasher
The slasher grew partly out of the giallo: Bay of Blood (1971) is a direct ancestor of Friday the 13th. Both feature a hidden killer and a series of elaborate murders.
The giallo is a mystery, so the killer is an ordinary person whose identity is the final reveal. The slasher's killer is usually known and nearly unstoppable, and its question is who will survive. The giallo's hero investigates; the slasher's final girl endures.
How to write a giallo
Start with the witness. Give your hero a reason to see part of a crime and a detail they cannot make sense of. The whole investigation is their attempt to remember it correctly.
Design each murder as a set piece with its own location, color and sound, and write those choices into the action lines. In giallo the murders are the spectacle the audience comes for.
Hide the killer in description. Write the gloves, the hat and the shadow, never the face, and keep the killer's speech out of the dialogue or disguised.
Plant the solution in the first murder. In Plot, you can tag the scene that holds the misremembered detail and check, when you write the reveal, that the clue was really there.
Common questions
What is a giallo film?
A giallo is an Italian murder thriller of the 1960s and 1970s, with a hidden black-gloved killer, stylish murder set pieces, an amateur detective and a final twist.
Why is it called giallo?
Giallo means yellow in Italian. The name comes from the yellow covers of the crime paperbacks the publisher Mondadori sold from 1929, and in Italy it means any crime story.
What was the first giallo film?
Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) is usually named the first giallo, and his Blood and Black Lace (1964) fixed the genre's look.
Is Suspiria a giallo?
Not strictly. Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977) borrows the style of his gialli, but its killers are supernatural witches, so it is usually classed as supernatural horror.
What is the difference between a giallo and a slasher?
A giallo is a mystery whose final question is who the killer is. A slasher usually shows its killer from the start and asks who will survive.