Samm Deighan at The Current:
An ominous figure with an obscured face, clad in a trench coat, fedora, and leather gloves—all black—stalks a young model through a gloomy antique shop packed with statues, lamps, and ornate furniture. Though the store is in near darkness, pink and teal lights flash inexplicably in the background. Dramatically canted camera angles emphasize the model’s growing panic and confusion as she crashes around in the dark, desperate to escape. But the killer sneaks up on her, just as she reaches an exit door, and smashes a cruelly hooked gauntlet from a nearby suit of armor into her face, instantly killing her.
This sequence from Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964), generally regarded as the first giallo film, set the template for a type of highly stylized, lavishly decorated murder set piece that would be replicated in hundreds of Italian horror movies to follow throughout the 1970s and early ’80s. Bava established many of the subgenre’s visual and thematic tropes, while helping cement the giallo plot formula as a perverse, violent variation on the classic murder mystery.
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