The killer's point-of-view shot, the black leather gloves, the heavy breathing behind the camera. These staples of modern slasher films were not invented in 1980s Hollywood but in 1960s Rome. This episode traces the Italian genre known as giallo back to its unlikely origin: a 1929 marketing decision by the publisher Mondadori to give its cheap crime paperbacks bright yellow covers. Those translations of Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, and Edgar Wallace sold so well that giallo became the everyday Italian word for a mystery, and when filmmakers adapted the stories, the genre inherited the name.

We follow the visual roots from German Edgar Wallace crime films to Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace, then to Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which triggered a boom of over a hundred giallo films be ...