8 - The Case of the Spanish Gialli: Crime Fiction and the Openness of Spain in the 1970s

Summary

Giallo (Italian for ‘yellow’) cinema was a cycle of films made in Italy beginning in the late 1960s and through the 1970s. The term derives from the yellow covers of the paperback mystery novels the Italian publishing house Mondadori sold cheaply after 1929. The paperbacks were so popular that the in ‘Italian usage the term can apply to any crime fiction’ (Dyer 2015: 204), including crime cinema. The Italian cycle of crime films known as giallo (or gialli, in plural) was one of the most stylistic corpora of films ever made. Filled with strident colours, black-gloved killers, red herrings, confusing plots, jazz soundtracks, art-house sensibilities, beautiful women, very long titles and spectacular murders, the cycle tapped into vernacular social and cultural anxieties of the era. The corpus ‘represents the encroaching hegemony of modernity on the private’ (Koven 2006: 58) when Italy became modern and cosmopolitan almost overnight.

As Mikel Koven argues, the giallo is a vernacular cycle, deeply embedded within the social fabric of its time and geography. Paradoxically, it triggered a transnational trend. Furthermore, the italian giallo itself was a product of cross-fertilisation. As Austin Fisher explains, the giallo plugs into a ‘rich vein of transcultural borrowing in Italy, through which foreign narrative models offer a filer for the familiar locale’ (2017: 260). The giallo derived heavily from the German krimi films based, in turn, on crime novels wrote by British author Edgar Wallace (Koven 2006: 5). ‘The Italian giallo mixed the krimi with the police procedural and added a twist of its own; an almost fetishistic attention to the murderer and the killings’ (Fisher 2017: 260). The Italian cycle ended in the earlier 1980s, not before serving as inspiration to one of America’s most renowned cycles: ‘the giallo might usefully be seen as the missing link between the protoserial killer narratives of Frederic Brown and Cornell Woolrich and the American slasher’ (Hunt 2000: 330).

There is a resurgence of interest on the Italian giallo cycle, with new studies such as Alexia Kannas’ Giallo!: Genre, Modernity, and Detection in Italian Horror Cinema and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema published in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Still understudied, however, is the Spanish gialli, a cycle of films made in Spain through the ‘tardofranquismo’ (late Francoist period, roughly from 1960 to 1975).