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[This October is "Gialloween" on Daily Dead, as we celebrate the Halloween season by diving into the macabre mysteries, bloody kills, and eccentric characters found in some of our favorite giallo films! Keep checking back on Daily Dead this month for more retrospectives on classic, cult, and altogether unforgettable gialli, and visit our online hub to catch up on all of our Gialloween special features!]

One of the defining subgenres of the Italian horror movement, the giallo film was a staple of the country’s cinema from the late 1960s through the early ’80s, when it more or less died off. For the uninitiated, the giallo is born out of a series of cheap pulp crime paperbacks published in Italy as far back as the late 1920s and known for their yellow—or, in Italian, giallo—covers. As a movie subgenre, the giallo finds its roots in the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. Mario Bava's 1963 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much (aka The Evil Eye) is widely considered to be the first giallo, as it meets many of the criteria and includes a number of the tropes that have come to be associated with the genre.

And what are those tropes exactly? I won't pretend to know all...

They’ve focused obsessively on the lurid and even saw some directors charged for murder – yet a new season of mondo movies argues for their artistic merit

Mondo Mondo, a wide-ranging repertory series of films running at New York’s Anthology Film Archives from 22-31 July, serves up a platter of grotesque, chewy and challenging work that one would be hard-pressed to label as “entertainment” in any conventional sense.

Programmed by critic Nick Pinkerton, the series is named after a genre, the mondo film (from the Italian word for “world”), which comprised globetrotting exploitation fare crafted in pseudo-documentary style, and typically depicted sensational topics and situations. The genre itself was titled after 1962’s freewheeling Mondo Cane, one of the first films of its type, directed by the Italian film-makers who would become the genre’s keenest practitioners: Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi.

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It might be missing the industry saturated Park City fervor, but the smaller, shorter, and more intimate Columbia, Missouri based True/False Film Festival is the Rolls-Royce (by way of John Deere) of doc focused cinema. Filmmaker Laura Poitras is not alone in stating that her “love for True/False runs deep – from the smart programming, passionate audiences, inspired buskers, and fabulous venues.” Time and time again, selected filmmakers throughout this year’s edition expressed their love of the fest, while plenty of filmmaker personalities from prior editions could be spotted milling around town as casual filmgoers happy to pay to relive the experience.

With a highly curated program just shy of 50 films shown on 9 different screens (each of which are walkable in just 5-10 minutes of one another) over just 4 days, True/False centers its attention on quality and community, both locally and cinematically. For a city with a...

Happy Friday, guys and welcome back for the ninth installment of Daily Dead’s 2015 Holiday Gift Guide. We’re now officially three weeks away from Christmas so let’s get right to today’s gift ideas, picked with horror and sci-fi fans in mind.

For today’s guide, we take a look at two books on very different subjects—Tremors and Giallo films—the recent expanded release of the Friday the 13th documentary Crystal Lake Memories, some Goosebumps gift ideas for the younger genre fans out there, the astonishingly great artwork featured at Printed in Blood, Horror Decor’s truly fun holiday items, and much more.

This year’s Holiday Gift Guide is being sponsored by Rlj Entertainment and their recent terrifying yuletide release, A Christmas Horror Story, and to help you guys get into the spirit of the season, we’ve put together 10 amazing prize packs filled with goodies,...

How would you program this year's newest, most interesting films into double features with movies of the past you saw in 2014?

Looking back over the year at what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2014—in theatres or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2014 to create a unique double feature.

All the contributors were given the option to write some text explaining their 2014 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch...

DVD Release Date: May 8, 2012

Price: DVD $19.98

Studio: Raro Video

Corinne Clery (r.) helps Michele Placido solve the mystery behind a series of grisly murders in Plot of Fear.

Murders begin to plague members of the jet set in the 1976 Italian crime thriller film Plot of Fear.

Told through a series of flashbacks, Plot of Fear spins a story of a group of wealthy men and women who get murdered one by one at a decadent weekend party, the killer leaving behind drawings of a famous children’s book on the victims’ mutilated bodies. In an attempt to find a connection between the victims, Inspector Lomenzo (Michele Placido) encounters a mysterious fashion model (Corinne Clery, The Story of O) who becomes his informant. She reveals that at one of the young female victims was “accidently” killed during a gruesome practical joke at the party. But that would mean that there’s...

The term “giallo” initially referred to cheap yellow paperbacks (printed American mysteries from writers such as Agatha Christie), that were distributed in post-fascist Italy. Applied to cinema, the genre is comprised of equal parts early pulp thrillers, mystery novels, with a willingness to gleefully explore onscreen sex and violence in provocative, innovative ways. Giallos are strikingly different from American crime films: they value style and plot over characterization, and tend towards unapologetic displays of violence, sexual content, and taboo exploration. The genre is known for stylistic excess, characterized by unnatural yet intriguing lighting techniques, convoluted plots, red herrings, extended murder sequences, excessive bloodletting, stylish camerawork and unusual musical arrangements. Amidst the ‘creative kill’ set-pieces are thematic undercurrents along with a whodunit element, usually some sort of twist ending. Here is my list of the best giallo films – made strictly by Italian directors, so don’t expect Black Swan, Amer or...

Along with fellow documentarians Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi, Italian filmmaker Gualtiero Jacopetti helped to birth the exploitation cinema genre known as the mondo film, which took off following the success of their 1962 shockumentary classic Mondo Cane. Jacopetti, aged 92, died this week in Rome; his most provocative films include Africa Addio and Addio zio Tom (Goodbye, Uncle Tom), the latter of which happens to earn a nod in a certain upcoming Ryan Gosling automotive thriller opening next month.

For those of you as yet unfamiliar with the genre the “giallo” (plural “gialli”) is a 20th Century Italian genre of literature and film that gets it name from its literal meaning (“yellow”) in reference to its origin as a series of cheap paperback novels with trademark yellow covers. From its birth back in 1963 with Mario Bava’s “The Girl Who Knew Too Much” (“La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo”) the genre has given birth to such colourfully monikered fare as Luciano Ercoli’s “The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion” (1970), Mario Bava’s “Twitch of the Death Nerve” (1971), Sergio Martino’s “Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have The Key” (1972) and Pupi Avati’ s “The House With Laughing Windows” (1976). Such masters of the genre as Mario Bava (and his son Lamberto), Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi and Sergio Martino have delighted fans since back in the 1970′s...