by Adam Page
There is a certain kind of cinema that gets under your skin, feeling like a splinter you can’t quite locate. It’s persistent, irritating and slightly beautiful in its wrongness. Italian giallo is that kind of cinema. It’s operatic, garish, and morally unhinged. The sort of movie-making that makes you feel a little implicated just watching it, as though you’ve wandered into something you weren’t supposed to see and now can’t look away.
Even for cinephiles, there is nothing that can quite prepare you for the experience of watching a Dario Argento movie for the first time and realising, usually around the third elaborate murder set piece, that you’re dazzled, disgusted and truly uncertain who you’re supposed to be rooting for.
It turns out, that uncertainty is the whole point.
First, the terms. Giallo, meaning yellow in Italian and named after cheap pulp crime paperbacks with lurid yellow covers which flooded the Italian newsstands in the mid-20th century, is a genre which defies an easy summary. They are part noir, part slasher, and part art-house psychodrama. Equally Hitchcock reverence and fever dream excess. Mario Bava basically invented the modern template with his Blood and Black Lace in 1964, and Dario Argento perfected the baroque extremity throughout the 1970s with movies like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, and his hypnotic, barely coherent masterpiece Suspiria.
These movies are preoccupied with violence. And specifically, violence against women. The murders are elaborate and photographed with all the attentiveness of a fashion shoot. The lighting is extraordinary. The camera lingers. In some aesthetic dimension that implicates the viewers profoundly, the murders are gorgeous. And disproportionately the targets are young women.
The easy read, the lazy one film critics trotted out for decades, was just condemnation. That they were exploitative movies made by men to titillate other men at the expense of women. Misogynistic fantasies clothed in art-house cinematography to wash out the bad intentions. Case closed.
That reading isn’t exactly wrong, it’s just incomplete. And incomplete readings of complex art are, in my humble opinion, more misleading than honest ignorance.
Mario Bava knew something about cinema that a lot of his contemporaries apparently didn’t: the camera isn’t neutral. Each shot is a choice, and the build-up of choices constitute a moral position. Whether you intend it or not.
With Blood and Black Lace, a fashion house turns into a slaughterhouse, the models being picked off with systemic cruelty. On its surface, the movie is exactly what it appears to be; an elaborate excuse to kill beautiful women in various creative ways. Bava, however, does something quietly subversive throughout. His victims have interior lives. They have secrets: affairs, abortions, blackmail material. They aren’t just passive objects waiting to be dispatched. They are real people running complicated schemes in a world that wants to reduce them to mere surface.
Greta, Nicole, Isabella. These women exist in a world where their beauty is their currency and death sentence. Bava isn’t celebrating that arrangement, he’s autopsying it. The backdrop of the fashion world isn’t incidental; it’s the whole thesis. It’s a world which consumes and aestheticises women, assigning them value based on visual appeal, then discarding them. The killer with the featureless mask, blank, without identity, an embodiment of impersonal violence, is in some reading the fashion world itself, made flesh.
Bava does not make this argument cleanly, though. He’s clearly enjoying the hell out of the murders. That tension between complicity and critique is never resolved because Bava, bless his heart, was not interested in resolution. He wanted sensation, and the uncomfortable places sensation takes the viewer.
His later masterwork Kill, Baby, Kill in 1966 is a ghost story which doesn’t quite fit the giallo mould but shares its DNA, and features something remarkable: a female protagonist who is both truly terrifying and truly sympathetic. Melissa, the ghost child, is victim and perpetrator, monstrous and innocent. Bava took the dirty secret of the genre and put it on the screen: the victims and monsters are usually the same person, being processed through different stages of a system which produces both.
Okay then. Dario Argento.
Here is where it gets complicated. Where it gets interesting. And where the critic who wants a clean feminist takedown has to accept ambiguity or abandon intellectual honesty entirely.
By all honest accounting, Argento is a movie-maker who has made a career out of killing women in elaborate and beautiful ways. He has made statements in interviews that would destroy careers today. He mused about finding women more interesting to kill because aesthetically they are more compelling as victims, and that lands somewhere between provocative artist-talk and serious red flag depending on your generosity. His personal relationships, including a long creative partnership with actress and partner Daria Nicolodi, were complicated by a tendency to use her as raw material for his artistic vision, but not always treating the actual human with the corresponding care.
And yet.
And yet Suspiria exists. As does Deep Red and Tenebrae. And what we find in these movies, if we’re watching carefully and not just cataloguing the body count, is something quite peculiar about Argento’s relationship with his female characters. It’s something that doesn’t neatly resolve into either exploitation or empowerment but lives in the uncomfortable, productive space between.
Think of Suzy Bannion in Suspiria, played by Jessica Harper with an intelligent and watchful stillness that the movie tries to overwhelm with sensory excess and fails. Suzy is the embodiment of the Argento heroine; an American abroad, an outsider at a school with hidden rules and someone who sees what others dismiss and won’t accept the official story. The whole plot of Suspiria is Suzy’s gradual, hard-won and extremely costly education in the real nature of power, more specifically, the power of older women over younger, institutionalised in the witches’ coven running the Tanz Akademie.
Feminist scholars like Carol Clover, whose seminal 1992 work Men, Women, and Chain Saws basically created the critical framework through which we now talk about gender in horror, identified the trope of the “Final Girl”. The surviving female protagonist of the slasher movie who outlasts her peers with a combination of resourcefulness, virtue, and refusal to be a victim. Suzy is a Final Girl, but also something more specific than the template Clover identified. More than just surviving, she investigates. She builds knowledge and ultimately destroys the horrific feminine power structure that has been feeding on young women, herself included.
Is Argento saying something coherent about female power here? If we’re honest, probably not intentionally. His stated goals were always more visceral than theoretical. He wanted to frighten and astonish and to create that certain vertiginous feeling of beauty and dread existing in the same moment. But coherent arguments can emerge from an incoherent intention, and whether Argento wanted it to or not, Suspiria makes an argument.
Deep Red, or Profondo Rosso in Italian, sounding like a wine you’d order with something you’d regret, is arguably the most formally perfect movie of Argento’s and definitely his most psychologically interesting in gender terms.
The movie opens with jazz pianist Marcus Daly witnessing a murder. He is played by David Hemmings in the sort of casting that couldn’t be a coincidence given Hemmings’ association with Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup, another movie about men who see things and misinterpret them. Marcus is certain of what he saw. He’s wrong, and the whole movie is about his wrongness, and the gap between what he saw and what he understood.
The journalist protagonist Gianna, played by Daria Nicolodi with an aggressive and comedic confidence that feels radical for the genre, keeps beating Marcus professionally and physically. Their dynamic is explicitly played for laughs and repeatedly deflates Marcus’s masculine assumptions. She beats him in arm-wrestling, and drives better than him. These aren’t incidental character notes; Argento is consciously building a dynamic where the male gaze is not reliable and the female character is the more competent.
Then we have the twist. I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t seen it, but the central mystery of the movie resolves in a way that thoroughly implicates the perception of the male protagonist. He couldn’t see what was right in front of him because his assumptions, specifically regarding which gender was capable of extreme violence, made him blind. Structurally, the movie is about the cost of gender essentialism. The man was unable to imagine a certain kind of woman, and it made him unable to solve the crime until more people were dead.
Is that intentional feminist commentary? I truly don’t know. What I do know is it works. The argument of the movie functions regardless of the authors intent. That’s something art does which authors often resent. This is where the feminist reassessment gets more than a little thorny, and where I found the modern critical discourse occasionally loses its nerve.
The murders in giallo movies are sexualised. Not every time, but in the majority. The camera treats the female body as both erotic and endangered in ways we can’t separate. The eroticism is a little because of the danger, and the horror is partly because the endangered body is desirable. This is disturbing, and it should be. It was disturbing to the 1970s audiences and still is now. Perhaps more so as we have more sophisticated language for what’s happening. The question is not about whether this is happening. It is. The question is more what we do with that fact critically and whether a movie that does this can also be doing something else at the same time.
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, the 1975 essay from film theorist Laura Mulvay, gave us the concept of the male gaze. How Hollywood cinema structurally positions the spectator as masculine and objectifies female characters for the visual pleasure of the spectator. In this reading, giallo is simply an exploitation cinema extreme of a tendency which is present throughout mainstream cinema. The huge difference is giallo makes the gaze uncomfortable, and mainstream cinema studiously avoids that. Alfred Hitchcock aestheticized violence against women but kept the complicity of the spectator at a comfortable distance. Argento always refused that comfort. Suspiria’s camera is so insistently, almost stubbornly attentive to the moment of death that as viewers, we can’t maintain an illusion of innocent spectating. You are watching it and are complicit. So what are you going to do with that?
There are some feminist critics, and I think they’re onto something real, who argue making complicity visible is its own kind of critique. That the viewer who is made uncomfortable by their own voyeurism in an Argento movie is going through something more ethically instructive than those who enjoy the guilt-free, smooth aestheticized violence of Hollywood. I’m not totally convinced, but I’m not unconvinced either. Any honest investigation of gender in giallo has to take into account Daria Nicolodi. But a reckoning with Nicolodi is uncomfortable if you want a clean narrative about male exploitation.
She was more than just Argento’s partner and muse. She was his collaborator. She was the co-writer of Suspiria. She brought the structure, mythology and maternal horror that gives the movie its dreamlike coherence. The story she told, that of her grandmother’s experience at a music school with a creepy hidden agenda, is the very spine of the movie, and Argento took primary credit for many years. It took Nicolodi fighting publicly and bitterly to have her contribution recognised.
So the full picture is, a woman whose ideas are taken, whose labour is appropriated and whose body is consistently used as material for art which sometimes implicates her own objectification, she is also an indispensable creative force without whom the work wouldn’t exist. This isn’t a story about a victim, or one of an empowered auteur. It’s a story about the real, grinding, ambiguous conditions under which women have always made work in male-dominated spaces. The creativity and exploitation aren’t separate; they’re the same story told at the same time.
In other words, Nicolodi was living the very same contradictions that her characters embodied on screen. Life as art, art as life, and the boundary between them dissolved in that particular type of acid that was the Italian movie industry in the 1970s.
By 1985, Argento had fully committed to the baroque unreality that would define his late period, and he released Phenomena. On one reading, it’s a deeply silly movie. At a Swiss boarding school, a young American girl can telepathically communicate with insects. She uses this ability to solve murders. She has a friend who is a wheelchair-bound entomologist with a chimpanzee. In her first major role, Jennifer Connolly plays Jennifer Corvino with a sincerity that the movies delirious absurdity just doesn’t swallow.
But stay with it. In the movie’s economy, Jennifer is mocked, institutionalised and punished for her gift, which is treated as powerful, real, and redemptive. The adults, interestingly mostly female authority figures, are the main villains and sources of oppression. The school, the institute, the structures of adult female power all work together to contain the strangeness of Jennifer. Her alliance is with insects and an elderly male scientist who treats her respectfully exactly because he doesn’t find her power threatening. The feminism of the movie, if you can call it that, is unconventional. It’s the girl who won’t be normalised and maintains her connection to the natural world despite social pressures. Ultimately she is vindicated not by learning to fit in, but doubling down on her difference. The final sequence, when Jennifer is avenged by a swarm of flies, summoned basically by her refusal to die and insistence on mattering, is cathartic and grotesque in equal measure. The flies are justice. They are female rage rendered in entomological ways. It’s utterly insane and utterly committed and it works.
Contemporary criticism has been doing some interesting work with giallo, and perhaps not what we might expect.
Scholars like Mikel Koven, with an ethnographic approach to Italian cinema that resists both uncritical celebration and pure condemnation, have argued that the relationship giallo has to its female characters is more complicated either than the exploitation reading or the proto-feminist reading allows. The genre emerged at a very specific historical moment. Italy in the years of political and social upheaval following 1968, the hot years of the second wave of feminism and the beginning of the end of the patriarchal social contract which had governed life in Italy for centuries.
The violence in these movies, specifically the violence against women, cannot be separated from that context. It isn’t just fantasy, it’s also anxiety. It’s palpable and graphically rendered fear of a social order that is starting to change, of shifting power arrangements and a world in which the female characters are no longer willing to accept the roles given to them. In this reading, the elaborate murders of giallo are part wish-fulfilment and part terror; the terror of men who feel, however dimly, that something is ending.
This doesn’t make the movies unproblematic. But it does make them historical documents as well as entertainment, artifacts of a certain cultural moment that can tell us a little about how gender worked and how people felt about it in ways that more respectable cinema sanitised.
The recent surge of interest in giallo, the retrospectives, the remastered Blu-ray releases, and academic journals, has coincided, not by accident, with a broader cultural reckoning with the conditions under which women participate in that culture as subjects and creators. An entire generation of female movie-makers and critics have claimed giallo as part of their inheritance, not despite its problems but through them. Directors like Ana Lily Amipour, Karyn Kusama and Julia Decournau, whose movie Titane is basically giallo by way of automotive eroticism and body horror, are making movies that take the obsessions of the genre and reroute them through a female sensibility, and ask what the camera does when the person behind it shares the same gender of the person it’s watching.
The answers are different. Not completely, the gaze is complex in every direction, but different enough to matter. I no longer believe in clean verdicts for messy things. It’s a reflex I’ve had to work on consciously, against our natural human desire for a satisfying conclusion or decisive judgement. Were Argento and Bava exploiting women? Absolutely. Were they inadvertently critiquing the same exploitation that gave their movies their uncomfortable and charged energy? Also yes. Did they give us female characters who investigate and survive, who destroy, and refuse to be reduced to a victim even as the camera tries to reduce them? Yes, and yes, and yes.
The women of giallo are freedom fighters and femme fatales. They are victims, investigators, avengers, and monsters. They’re Daria Nicolodi writing Suspiria and Jessica Harper surviving it. Or Isabella in Blood and Black Lace, carrying the secrets that got her killed and would have gotten her killed regardless in any genre and any world that assigned her value based on her looks and nothing else. The movies are uncomfortable, and they should be. If art makes you comfortable about complex things, it’s lying to you. And comfort is a luxury afforded people who have chosen not to think too deeply about what they’re watching. So watch these movies, and watch them critically. With an awareness that you are watching, and the very act implicates you. Feel the discomfort and don’t look away.
I think that’s what Argento always wanted. To make you remain in the room with something you couldn’t quite justify to yourself. The women in those movies deserve at least that much attention from us. The uncomfortable, full and critical attention that their movies demand.
The splinter is still there. And that’s good.
Adam Page is a freelance writer focusing mainly on film and literature with a special interest in all things horror related. He is in his final year studying for a BA in English Literature and Language and is somewhat obsessed with Bruce Springsteen. He plays terrible guitar and is definitely a cat person. His favourite film changes depending on what his mood is.
