ABSTRACT
Giallo means “yellow” in Italian, but in cult cinema discourses the term refers to a group of violent, highly stylized Italian crime films. Some of the most commonly identified markers of the Italian giallo film include: the presence of an amateur detective and a traumatized killer, the stylization of violence and a tendency towards narrative incoherence. Giallo films have been called “spaghetti nightmares”, evoking their crossover with the horror film, and “Italian film noir”, emphasizing their crime narratives and formal stylization. In Tarantola dal ventre nero/Black Belly of the Tarantula, for instance, the killer uses acupuncture needles and then a knife to mimic the way the black wasp kills tarantulas: after paralyzing his victims with the insect’s venom, cuts open their bellies. The giallo fascination with the conditions of late modernity means that it has a lot in common with art cinema produced during the same period, particularly in terms of the way it uses formal strategies of modernist cinema.
