Taking audiences on a voyage to dark and disturbing corners, Italy’s giallo genre drew its label from the yellow color of the pulp fiction softcover books that became popular in postwar Italy. Over time it became the umbrella title for the cinematic state of mind wherein Italian filmmakers play sinister games with the characters and with the audience. Gialli serve up lip-smacking and lipstick-smearing blends of baroque imagery, Euro chic, stalking and voyeurism, bedrooms as sensual refuge and killing ground, gloved hands wielding deadly weapons, ill-advised couplings, and lurid bloody violence—emblazoned with titles that would have been at home on those old paperbacks. The Quad dares you to marinate in six fresh scoops of giallo from the 20th-century heyday of this stylish and still-influential subgenre, all but one screening in their original Italian-language versions.
New York premiere of DCP restorations