The Best Giallo (and Best Giallo-Inspired) Movies of All Time, from ‘Deep Red’ to ‘Cruising’

There are a lot of niche horror genres, from Lovecraft riffs and zombie movies to body horror. But maybe no horror genre is more niche and simultaneously more historically important than the giallo films that took Italy by storm in the 1970s.

Not exactly a defined film movement, giallo originated in the world of literature. In Italy, a giallo novel is any crime or mystery fiction story, with the name (the word means “yellow” in Italian) coming from the 1929 series of pulp novels “Il Giallo Mondadori.” Before the 1960s, a giallo film was a literal adaptation of a giallo novel, but the term soon shifted to apply to a type of film from auteurs like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci that took the crime and mystery stories and applied a new, stylish, and violent bent to them.

There are no set rules for what makes a movie a giallo, but you know one when you see one. The plot is almost always a murder mystery, although the tone is far from your average whodunnit. The villain is a mysterious killer often in a disguise that includes black gloves and a trench coat. The hero is typically a young woman, a tormented and helpless outsider in the film’s world, and her desperate efforts to evade the killer provide the dramatic meat. The stories are psychological in nature, exploring madness, paranoia, and sexuality.

But giallo films are remembered less for what they’re about than what they look like: grisly, explicitly gory, and borderline pornographic kill scenes litter the typical giallo. And this hyperviolence and sexual content is rendered in a lurid, stylish aesthetic that emphasizes vivid colors, impressionistic visuals, and inspired use of music. The imagery is what separates a giallo from the slasher films they helped to inspire — and which largely replaced them as the genre declined in popularity in the late ’70s and earliest ’80s.

But although giallo as a genre doesn’t fully exist anymore — the term generally only applies to the Italian movement of the ’60s and ’70s — its influence can be seen in pretty much every slasher and in the many movies that attempt to recapture the vibe and appeal of the form, from many of Brian De Palma’s most famous works to “Berberian Sound Studio” by Peter Strickland. To trace both the key highlights of the genre and the legacy it helped spawn, IndieWire decided to celebrate October by looking at both the best of the genre itself and the modern-day films that channel the key features of giallo for inspiration. From “Deep Red” to “Malignant,” here are the five best giallo films and the five best giallo homages of all time.