giallo

Italian paperback crime novels had yellow covers, and the term came from them. Between 1963 and 1985 Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci made murder mysteries where the solution counts for less than the set pieces: black gloves, a witness who saw something and cannot place it, prog-rock scores at full volume. Argento's camera lingers on the kill longer than the mystery needs to run. Deep Red gives a pianist in Rome the murder of his psychic neighbour and a reporter who will not leave the case alone. Suspiria drops the detective work almost entirely and lets one set piece carry the film instead, sending a ballet student to a German academy where maggots come through the ceiling and the pianist is killed by his own dog. Colour is the weapon, and you watch a killing staged like a musical number.

Distinguish from Neo-Noir shares the crime-genre roots but operates in a more grounded, psychologically realistic register. J-Horror inherited giallo's atmosphere of dread but replaced the elaborate kill sequences with ambient, supernatural menace.