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La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film, by Michael J. Koven (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow, 2006), 195pp., $30 pb; ISBN 0-8108-5870-1.
The genre of Italian giallo film stems from a popular genre of literature: giallo literally means 'yellow' and relates to the uniform colour of the covers of pulp crime and mystery paperbacks that enjoyed enormous popularity in Italy from before the Second World War onwards. The term crossed over to film, where it is applied to examples of, broadly speaking, Italian crime and thriller movies - although many examples clearly belong to the genre of horror and are precursors to the 'Slasher' genre - which feature audacious and even virtuosic sequences of murder and are often laced with a measure of titillation and eroticism. This genre forms the focus of Michael J. Koven's stimulating new volume in Scarecrow's increasingly impressive catalogue of film studies titles.
The giallo film genre arguably reached its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s with the films of Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci and Koven's chosen form becomes more and more interesting with the passage of time just like other 'lost' and unabashedly populist - and critically neglected - forms which have explored the broadly gothic such as Grand-Guignol horror theatre or live horror radio drama. Koven's book is subtitled 'Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film' and the phrasing of this is all-important. Koven's work throws necessary light on a neglected area of Italian film, but it is also a great deal of use in the study of vernacular cinemas as a whole....