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“Knowing Too Much” about Hitchcock The Genesis of the Italian Giallo Philippe Met E nigmatic childhood trauma flashbacks; the fetishistic ritual of black gloved hands getting ready for the kill; point-of-view shots of a faceless murderer wearing a shiny trench coat; the flash of a blade in the dark (be it a knife, a razor, a meat cleaver, or a hatchet); scantily clad “scream queens” being stalked and subjected to shocking and sadistic acts of violence; a morally decadent and sexually deviant upper-class milieu; an inept local police force and an eye witness as impotent amateur sleuth; a deleterious atmosphere of rampant suspicion; an abundance of red herrings and twist endings (that not too infrequently lapse into non sequiturs); a baroque or mannerist use of lighting and color. Short of cohering into an elegant, formal definition, all of the above feature prominently amongst the quasi-formulaic trademarks of the giallo, a hybrid, horror-meets-crime (sub)genre that emerged in early 1960s Italy. “Giallo” is Italian for yellow, in reference to the distinctive color of the dust jackets used for a collection of lurid crime pulp novels that Mondadori started to publish in 1929. Not unlike the development of the série noire in post–World War II France, these page-turning whodunits were first translated and adapted from the English but increasingly penned by native authors. Fast-forward to the late 1950s (and well into the 1970s): in its filmic avatar, the giallo can be regarded as an integral part of a certain golden age of Italian genre cinema. Alongside such subcategories as peplums (or sword-and-sandal epics), supernatural Gothic horror, spaghetti westerns, cannibal or zombie films, mondo movies or shockumentaries, nunsploitation and the like, it arguably helped delineate and consolidate the popular underside of Italian cinema: what its numerous detractors prefer to term its “sleazy” or “exploitative” underbelly ; what one might qualify, more polemically, as the dark secret har- 196 found in translation bored behind a respectable art-house façade flaunting its officially sanctioned neorealism. In spite of the advent of DVD facilitating access to an ever increasing number of the actual films (hitherto available only on murky bootleg tapes for the most part) and spawning renewed interest in the genre at large (among fans, if not scholars), the “founding fathers” and major players of the giallo are still conspicuously absent from most of today’s encyclopedias and dictionaries of Italian film, and the generic constellation itself does not appear to be worthy of an autonomous entry. Admittedly, the issue is to a degree compounded by existing discrepancies of a semantic or taxonomic nature. It is for instance ironic to note that in the very country where it originated, the all’italiana specificity of the genre is more often than not subsumed by and diluted into a much broader understanding of the giallo designation as coextensive with crime cinema, thereby cutting across national boundaries and the typological spectrum (detection, suspense, noir, thriller, procedural, German krimi, French polar, etc).1 Stateside , on the other hand, the giallo undeniably retains its original flavor, and whether one can viably and legitimately stretch it to create an “American giallo” label is a seriously, indeed hotly, debated issue, most notably in fannish circles. In that respect, Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) and Paul Verhoeven ’s Basic Instinct (1992) are two of the usual suspects, both being equally in Alfred Hitchcock’s debt as well; lesser-known candidates would include a low-budget chiller like Alfred Sole’s Alice, Sweet Alice (aka Communion, 1976). This sort of immediate, visible connection is not, however, unaccompanied by a certain amount of denial or distraction at times. Sole, for one, recognizes only Hitchcock and Nicolas Roeg as direct models for the visual feel of his film.2 Based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier—a regular source of inspiration for Hitchcock, from Jamaica Inn (1939) to Rebecca (1940) and The Birds (1963)—and set in Venice, Roeg’s 1973 cult classic, Don’t Look Now, is a brilliant hybridization of art and horror. As such, it clearly intersects with the giallo, and indeed went on to influence several later Italian thrillers.3 Sole, however, claims he had never seen any of Dario Argento’s films, for example, at the time, and curiously represses the unmistakable traits of the genre shared by a film that, to this day, is possibly the single most “gialloesque...

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