Delivered at “The Place of Memory and the Memory of Place,” 17th – 18th June, 2023, at St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford.

After decades dismissed as a ‘low’ genre of film embodying the worst excesses of ‘bad’ filmmaking by critics, the Italian giallo has undergone something of a critical re-examination. Once dismissed as formulaic and repetitive, the soaring film scores and bright colours which gave the genre its name have been reclaimed by theorists, who praise their ability to command an immediate sensory response from their audiences. The repetition within the films, however, has largely evaded critical attention.

While giallo films had been around for a decade prior, Dario Argento’s directorial debut The Bird With the Crystal Plumage was the first to garner mainstream success. Stylish, Hitchcock-inspired and more distinctly psychological than its predecessors, it helped to re-vitalise and legitimise the genre as an art form. It set the tone for both the film’s imitators and Argento himself, whose later films also utilised the dizzying flashbacks used to convey Sam’s descent into obsession following the film’s initial traumatic event.

Argento, more than any other director working within the genre, perfected the use of repetition to convey the aftereffects of trauma. From flashbacks of the incident to physically revisiting the scene of the crime, the films capture the repetition compulsion which often plagues a witness to the inexplicable. This paper will examine repetition in Argento’s gialli, focusing on the final confrontation’s setting at the site of the original incident. Only by revisiting and confronting the event at the location it took place can the protagonists vanquish their own psychological haunted houses and recover.