Footprints in Delirium: Exploring the Art Giallo, Part 1
In episode fourteen, Kat and Samm begin a three-part look at the art giallo film, the more unconventional cousin to everyone’s favorite Italian horror genre, popularized by directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento. This episode begins with a look at Tinto Brass’s Deadly Sweet (1967), with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin as two young lovers trying to outrun a killer in swinging London. Trintignant and Aulin return for what is probably the only chicken-themed giallo, the totally bonkers Death Laid an Egg (1968), about murder and backstabbing in a poultry factory.
Also explored is Elio Petri’s gloomy, beautiful A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), starring the great Franco Nero as a painter who rents an abandoned villa that might be haunted by the ghost of a nymphomaniac countess who died during WWII. War themes also trickle into the completely insane In the Folds of the Flesh (1970), about a family living in a mansion on top of an Etruscan burial ground. They have a nasty habit of gruesomely dispatching anyone who tries to visit them. Finally, Kat and Samm also explore one of the only Soviet-set giallo films, Aldo Lado’s grim Short Night of the Glass Dolls (1971), about a man who wakes up paralyzed, on a slab at the morgue and must try to remember how he got there before it’s too late.