Here are 100 books that Italian Giallo in Film and Television fans have personally recommended if you like
Italian Giallo in Film and Television.
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I'm a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television with a particular passion for the horror genre – the first film books I ever read were about Horror. I'm also a confirmed Italophile. I became fascinated by Mario Bava – and later, Italian horror more broadly – before I saw his films from accounts and images of them in books and magazines. The films weren’t easy to see before video, DVD/blu-ray or streaming, and so I was on a mission over time to track them all down. This is how cult reputations often develop – from obscurity to re-evaluation – and that was one of the things I wanted to address in my book.
This is one of the first books to introduce me to Horror films beyond Britain and the US – it might even have been where I first heard Mario Bava’s name alongside directors like Jess Franco and Jean Rollin.
It obviously looks at vampire films more broadly but introduced me to a body of films I wanted to know more about. It’s also a beautifully illustrated and intelligent book, essential reading for anyone interested in vampires.
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I'm a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television with a particular passion for the horror genre – the first film books I ever read were about Horror. I'm also a confirmed Italophile. I became fascinated by Mario Bava – and later, Italian horror more broadly – before I saw his films from accounts and images of them in books and magazines. The films weren’t easy to see before video, DVD/blu-ray or streaming, and so I was on a mission over time to track them all down. This is how cult reputations often develop – from obscurity to re-evaluation – and that was one of the things I wanted to address in my book.
This is possibly the film book I flick through more than any other, usually to check a review.
Again, it covers the Horror genre broadly (year by year) but introduced me to a lot more European entries that I had never heard of, as well as horror films from Japan and other countries. I disagree with many of the critical opinions in the book but that doesn’t make them any less interesting.
This is the best single volume book on the horror film, the definitive reference work devoted to the subject. It contains entries on every movie even remotely connected to the genre, whether it is a 19-century silent, a grade "Z" schlocker, or an "art" film by the likes of Fritz Lang or Ingmar Bergman. Each entry contains a full list of credits and a descriptive review. Hardy writes about horror movies with such enthusiasm and intelligence that you feel you're getting the low down on the genre from a sincere and learned friend.
I'm a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television with a particular passion for the horror genre – the first film books I ever read were about Horror. I'm also a confirmed Italophile. I became fascinated by Mario Bava – and later, Italian horror more broadly – before I saw his films from accounts and images of them in books and magazines. The films weren’t easy to see before video, DVD/blu-ray or streaming, and so I was on a mission over time to track them all down. This is how cult reputations often develop – from obscurity to re-evaluation – and that was one of the things I wanted to address in my book.
An engagingly written, erudite, and intelligent critical history of horror films made in Europe from silent cinema to the modern day.
Rigby is one of the best scholars of the horror genre and gives closer critical attention to some of the classics produced in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany. You may not agree with all of his critical opinions, but his expertise is never in doubt.
Euro Gothic is the most extensive survey of Continental horror cinema ever published. From the Expressionist reveries of the Weimar Republic to the transgressive nightmares smuggled past the Franco regime, via surrealist Gallic fever-dreams and psychedelic shockers from Cinecitta, Jonathan Rigby applies his incisive scrutiny to the most important European horror films, ranging from the early years of the 20th century to the video revolution of the 1980s.
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I'm a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television with a particular passion for the horror genre – the first film books I ever read were about Horror. I'm also a confirmed Italophile. I became fascinated by Mario Bava – and later, Italian horror more broadly – before I saw his films from accounts and images of them in books and magazines. The films weren’t easy to see before video, DVD/blu-ray or streaming, and so I was on a mission over time to track them all down. This is how cult reputations often develop – from obscurity to re-evaluation – and that was one of the things I wanted to address in my book.
At 1128 pages, you are unlikely to find a more thorough or lavish account of Mario Bava’s career from his early days as a cameraman to his classic Horror films – the book is huge.
Lucas spent decades researching Bava and it shows in this monumental volume. How was I going to compete with this when I wrote my own book on Bava? I didn’t try – I took a different approach, but obviously this was an essential reference source for me.
Introduction by Martin Scorsese. Foreword by Italian Horror Pioneer Riccardo Freda. This is the Complete Story of Mario Bava's life and careers as director, cameraman and special effects artist. Interviews with more than 100 actors, co-workers, friends and family members. The Definitive Study of each of his films: production histories, cast biographies, critical analysis, and video information. Never-before Published Photos including the only color shots taken on the set of BLACK SUNDAY. Original Mario Bava Storyboards - including the boards for the unfilmed project BABY KONG. Original Mario Bava Artwork - Some in Full Color! Bava's Secret Filmography: His uncredited…
I’ve been creating female-fronted Science Fiction stories since I was a child. My love for Star Wars motivated me to go to film school and then spend years working on the representation of women in Science Fiction movies, TV series, and video games. I’ve written about characters like Leia Organa and Hera Syndulla in Star Wars,Dana Scully in The X-Files,Sarah Connor in The Terminator, and Elisabeth Shaw in Prometheus. I have recently started sharing some of my research on Medium. Some of the books on this list have supported my research for over 15 years while I discovered others during my doctoral studies.
This is a must-read if you are interested in women investigators in mainstream film, B movies, niche genres, or television.
Gates studies over 300 films and goes back to not only early cinema but even to 19th-century fiction that brought certain figures such as the sleuth, to the screen several decades later.
By exploring the evolution of women detectives, Gates addresses various topics such as women in the workforce, intellectual women, age, race, and sexuality. This historical analysis played a key role in my research on Scully beyond the chapter on women criminalists such as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs.
I’m a professor of Classics at Rutgers University, where I’ve taught since 2000; before that, I spent a decade on the faculty of Bryn Mawr College. For three years I served on the staff of the American Academy in Rome, a somewhat frenetic experience that prompted me to shift my focus from ancient Roman history to the history of the city of Rome. Since 2010 I’ve been managing a private family archive in Rome, that of the papal Boncompagni Ludovisi, which covers the period from the early 1400s to the 1940s. Now completely digitized, the archive has much new material to offer, not least on the era of Mussolini, including resistance to his regime.
In her decades of work on Italy’s Fascist era, Marla Stone has shown an especially keen eye for the development of the regime’s policies and ideologies, whether in the sphere of art and culture, or that of political violence and imperialist aggression. Here Stone offers a succinct and penetrating overview of the origins, rise, consolidation, and eventual crash of Fascism in Italy, followed by a translation of some three dozen primary documents—about a third of which were otherwise unavailable in English—to illustrate her narrative. Particularly chilling are the propaganda texts from 1938 on, when Mussolini’s grandiose claims to the legacy of ancient Rome took a back seat to full-blown racial politics, “as Italians were declared ‘Aryans’ and biological anti-Semitism became part of official ideology.”
As the first mass movement of the radical right to assume power in the wake of World War I, Italian Fascism became the model and inspiration for violent anti-democratic and anti-socialist forces that swept Europe between 1919 and 1945. In this volume Marla S. Stone provides an essential introduction to the rise and fall of Benito Mussolini's Fascist dictatorship. Drawing on the most recent historical scholarship, Stone explores the multifaceted nature of Fascist rule, which drew strength not only from its terror apparatus but also from popular support for its social programs. More than 35 primary sources, including speeches, decrees,…
Resonant Blue and Other Stories
by
Mary Vensel White,
The first collection of award-winning short fiction from the author of Bellflower and Things to See in Arizona, whose writing reflects “how we can endure and overcome our personal histories, better understand our ancestral ones, and accept the unknown future ahead.”
The financing of private firms is fascinating and a bit mysterious. It remains misunderstood and regularly gives birth to hype and excesses. I started my career working for a venture capital fund at the top of the Internet financial bubble, in 2000. This experience has imprinted my career and derailed my ambitions. It also fueled my thirst for knowledge. I started from essentially a virgin theoretical and academic land. I developed a body of practical and academic knowledge. Writing and publishing my books seemed to be the next logical step. I enjoy reading books on the sector and recommending them.
It might seem odd, but there is no real better book than this one to illustrate the challenges of private equity. I use it as an example in my training sessions regularly.
The Merchant of Venice is not only one of the best plays on finance and ethics, but also the perfect illustration of the challenges of start-up investing before it became a profession. This play illustrates how venture financing differs in practice from bank financing. It also conveys the uncertainties associated with entrepreneurship, and how some capital providers are not able to take such a risk.
Shakespeare masters the art of contrasting the perspectives of an entrepreneur and a banker in a short and powerful format. It is a masterpiece and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the philosophy of start-up investing.
In The Merchant of Venice, the path to marriage is hazardous. To win Portia, Bassanio must pass a test prescribed by her father’s will, choosing correctly among three caskets or chests. If he fails, he may never marry at all.
Bassanio and Portia also face a magnificent villain, the moneylender Shylock. In creating Shylock, Shakespeare seems to have shared in a widespread prejudice against Jews. Shylock would have been regarded as a villain because he was a Jew. Yet he gives such powerful expression to his alienation due to the hatred around him that, in many productions, he emerges as…
Very little has been written in English about Sicilian women. Most of the studies written in English about the women of southern Italy are the work of foreigners who discovered our region in adulthood. While some non-Italian colleagues have produced fine work, my books reflect the perspective of a scholar who, being Sicilian, has been familiar with the region and its people all her life. This is seen in my knowledge of the Sicilian language, from which I've translated texts, and even the medieval cuisine mentioned in my books. Viva la Sicilia!
This is a different story about a different kind of woman. And no, it's not about the Mafia; that's only a peripheral theme.
The typical novels written in English about Sicily by women are built around themes like a foreign girl going to Italy to find love. This one breaks that mould into a thousand pieces, dealing with familial history and tradition in the context of Sicilian and American society. It actually held my interest.
Leigh Esposito's complex story eclipses most of what came before.
As someone who’s had a lifelong interest in psychology, especially abnormal psychology, I’ve always been fascinated the small destructions some people inflict on others – sometimes even on themselves. For me the greatest crime is not to kill someone but to reduce them by making their life uncomfortable or unwelcome. The ability to do this is what I would call a “negative skill.” It’s not easy, but some people do it uncannily well, and without caring. Perhaps because this is so alien to me, I remain riveted by stories that portray it, and some cases attempt to explain it. These are a few of those stories.
It’s criminal that Celia Dale’s books are almost all out of print.
Dale dwells in the world of people you wouldn’t look at twice – nice old ladies, sympathetic homemakers, slightly out-of-date romeos – who practice a kind of cruelty that isn’t necessarily obvious to the outside world, but that is nonetheless terrible.
Helping Hand deals with a couple who hurry old ladies to their deaths by means of kindness that’s actually cruel, and a young relative of one of those old ladies, who is herself grotesquely self-centered and uncaring.
Fortunately, the book is saved by the presence of a decent young Italian woman, who provides hope in a black world.
In the past months Mrs Fingal’s legs had grown very weak. She could move from the bed to the chair only if she held on to the furniture. ‘Be careful, dear,’ Mrs Evans would say, beating up the pillows and clearing away all the oddments hidden under them, ‘you don’t want to fall and break your leg.’
This is a tale of ruthless greed, exploitation and suffocating, skin-crawling terror.
Middle-aged Josh and Maisie Evans lead a seemingly unremarkable life. When their elderly lodger Flo dies and leaves them her Estate, they head to Italy on holiday, to take in the…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
Growing up I was fanatical about football - playing, watching, reading and talking about it. I was also a little obsessed with its numbers, and apparently liked to recalculate league tables and goal differences in my head as the results came in on the BBC vidiprinter. Fast forward to University in the 1980s - a time when studying football’s business aspects was not common - I wrote my dissertation on the ‘Capital structure of Scottish football’. A Scottish perspective has remained present in much of my work, and I hope it also allows a little more distance when reflecting on the success and challenges faced by football in England.
I was fortunate to be on sabbatical in Italy in 2005, not long after thesalva calcio (save football) decree was passed by Silvio Berlusconi, then Italian Prime Minister and owner of AC Milan.
The legislation was essentially a form of legalised creative accounting which sought to legitimize clubs’ poor financial positions and performance by inflating player asset values on balance sheets.
Jones’ book is not just about football.
But within a fascinating critique of Berlusconi’s Italy, there is brilliant insight into calcio in all its forms – the beauty and joy of what happens on the field, the poetic and intelligent language with which frequently it is discussed in stadiums, cafes, and TV stations, its cultural significance, and, of course, its myriad of political, financial and governance scandals. Andiamo.
An essential guide to the strange, sometimes sinister culture of contemporary Italy.
When Tobias Jones first travelled to Italy, he expected to discover the pastoral bliss described by centuries of foreign visitors and famous writers. Instead, he discovered a very different country, besieged by unfathomable terrorism and deep-seated paranoia, where crime is scarcely ever met with punishment.
Now, in this fascinating travelogue, Jones explores not just Italy's familiar delights (art, climate, cuisine), but the livelier and stranger sides of the bel paese: language, football, Catholicism, cinema, television and terrorism. Why, he wonders, do bombs still explode every time politics start…
