Movie Poster of the Week: Giallo Restorations at the Quad

Above: Italian poster for The Possessed [La donna del lago] (Luigi Bazzoni & Franco Rossellini, Italy, 1965). Artist: Piero Iaia.

Starting next Friday, the Quad Cinema in New York is playing five newly restored Italian gialli in "Fresh Meat: Giallo Restorations Part II," a follow-up to last fall’s "Perversion Stories: A Fistful of Giallo Restorations." Titles are very important in Italy’s giallo genre, the more baroque and evocative the better, like “Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion” and “The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire.” The Italian word for “yellow,” the term giallo was initially used in post-war Italy to denote pulp fiction mystery novels with yellow paperback covers. Within Italy today the term giallo in cinema refers to any thriller or murder mystery, but in the English-speaking world giallo has come to refer exclusively to the Italian horror-thriller genre which had its heyday in the late ’60s and ’70s. 

The posters for the five films in the series, especially the Italian ones, are as dark and lurid as you might expect, though I’ve presented them in chronological order so that you can see how they became less subtle and more sensational as time went on. As the Quad’s programmers write: “Gialli serve up lip-smacking and lipstick-smearing blends of baroque imagery, Euro chic, stalking and voyeurism, bedrooms as sensual refuge and killing ground, gloved hands wielding deadly weapons, ill-advised couplings, and lurid bloody violence.”

Above: US one sheet for One on Top of the Other aka Perversion Story [Una sull'altra] (Lucio Fulci, Italy, 1969).

Above: Italian posters for One on Top of the Other aka Perversion Story [Una sull'altra] (Lucio Fulci, Italy, 1969).

Above: Italian poster for Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion [Le foto proibite di una signora per bene] (Luciano Ercoli, Italy, 1970).

Above: Italian poster for The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire [L’Iguana dalla lingua di fuoco] (Riccardo Freda, Italy, 1970). Artist: Renato Casaro.

Above: Italian poster for The Fifth Cord [Giornata nera per l'ariete] (Luigi Bazzoni, Italy, 1971). Artist: Ermanno Iaia.

Above: Japanese poster for The Fifth Cord [Giornata nera per l'ariete] (Luigi Bazzoni, Italy, 1971).

Above: Italian poster for Strip Nude for Your Killer [Nude per l'assassino] (Andrea Bianchi, Italy, 1975).

"Fresh Meat: Giallo Restorations Part II" runs July 19 – 25, 2019 at New York's Quad Cinema.

Related Posts:

• Berlinale 2019: New Techniques in Storytelling I Was at Home, But... There is no shortage of essay films at the Berlinale, and Thomas Heise’s documentary Heimat Is a Space in Time suggests that the personal address possible in this kind of documentary can be a very power… Read More
• Review: Hong Sang-soo's "Hotel By The River" Offers Something New The oft-repeated joke about Hong Sang-soo is that he makes the same movie over and over again, but at this stage in his career there is a necessary, if often overlooked asterisk: though the start- and end-points may vary sli… Read More
• Berlinale 2019: Documenting Change Alongside Angela Schanelec's I Was at Home, But..., the Berlinale is premiering new work by another stalwart practitioner of a highly individual film language. German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz has made what seems to be the fi… Read More
• Contemporary Chinese Cinema: Lunar New Year 2019Contemporary Chinese Cinema is a column devoted to exploring contemporary Chinese-language cinema primarily as it is revealed to us at North American multiplexes. Missbehavior  This Lunar New Year season, tradition… Read More
• Berlinale 2019. Awards Synonyms Golden Bear Synonyms (Nadav Lapid) Silver Bear — Grand Jury Prize By the Grace of God (François Ozon) Silver Bear — Alfred Bauer Prize System Crasher (Nora Fingscheidt) Silver Bear for Best Director Angela Scha… Read More