Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964) is commonly considered the archetypal giallo. This book examines its main narrative and stylistic aspects, including the groundbreaking prominence of violence and sadism and its use of color and lighting, as well as Bava’s irreverent approach to genre and handling of the audience’s expectations.

Style, sex and savagery are the main ingredients of Italian giallo cinema, a highly salacious art form which thrives on fetishist images of beautiful, scantily-clad females being menaced by knife-wielding maniacs - often for the most obscure of motives! Illustrated in full-colour throughout, this exhaustive guide to the genre features full reviews, cast lists, credit information on over two hundred giallo movies, many of which have never been listed in any other movieguide.

Italian giallo films have a peculiar allure. Taking their name from the Italian for "yellow"— reflecting the covers of pulp crime novels—these genre movies were principally produced between 1960 and the late 1970s. These cinematic hybrids of crime, horror, and detection are characterized by elaborate set-piece murders, lurid aesthetics, and experimental soundtracks. Using critical frameworks drawn from genre theory, reception studies, and cultural studies, Giallo! traces this historically marginalized genre's journey from Italian cinemas to the global cult-film canon. Through close textual analysis of films including The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), Blood and Black Lace (1964), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), and The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972), Alexia Kannas considers the rendering of urban space in the giallo and how it expresses a complex and unsettling critique of late modernity.

Beginning in the 1950s, "Euro Horror" movies materialized in astonishing numbers from Italy, Spain, and France and popped up in the US at rural drive-ins and urban grindhouse theaters such as those that once dotted New York's Times Square. Gorier, sexier, and stranger than most American horror films of the time, they were embraced by hardcore fans and denounced by critics as the worst kind of cinematic trash. In this volume, Olney explores some of the most popular genres of Euro Horror cinema—including giallo films, named for the yellow covers of Italian pulp fiction, the S&M horror film, and cannibal and zombie films—and develops a theory that explains their renewed appeal to audiences today.

The Haunted World of Mario Bava has now been updated, revised and expanded by author Troy Howarth to give a better overview of Bava's remarkable legacy as a director and "cinema magician."

It's 1875 and the morals of Queen Victoria have no hold over London's debauched elite. Young and naive Clarissa is eager to meet Lord Marldon, the man to whom she is betrothed. She knows he is handsome, dark and sophisticated. He is, in fact, depraved and with a taste for sexual excess.