Giallo stylings for literature

[Phyrebrat]

I’m writing a prequel to a cult Giallo movie and something about word choice and structure has just occurred to me.

It’s to do with phrases and words that evoke Gialli. For example reading a hard boiled noir has such a specific style that you’d never go all Hardy when describing something in nature (if the natural world is even talked about in noir!).

I like to use lyrical and poetic description in my prose and am realising this might be antithetical to the style of Giallo. Even tho it’s only a film style and not a literary one.

I used a phrase about long marsh grasses painting the sky like calligraphy pens but realise this is incongruous.

So, whilst knowing that Giallo is a movie style and not a literary on, what kind of syntax etc would you anticipate?

 

[msstice]

Not knowing what Giallo is (I thought you misspelled Gallileo) I am a tabula rasa that will accept what ever style you inflict upon me.

 

[Swank]

Apparently Giallo is also a novel form.

I wonder if a more noir-ish form would work? "Skies painted in by fountain-pen grass blades." You know, get rid of the simile and keep it sparse.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

How do the characters in the movie speak. Maybe you can take your cue from them.

 

[tinkerdan]

from Wiki-pedia

Giallo films are generally characterized as gruesome murder-mystery thrillers that combine the suspense elements of detective fiction with scenes of shocking horror, featuring excessive bloodletting, stylish camerawork, and often jarring musical arrangements.

I had to look that up for me.
And yes there is a novel form:

The term giallo ("yellow") derives from a series of crime-mystery pulp novels entitled Il Giallo Mondadori (Mondadori Yellow), published by Mondadori from 1929 and taking its name from the trademark yellow cover background. The series consisted almost exclusively of Italian translations of mystery novels by British and American writers. These included Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Edgar Wallace, Ed McBain, Rex Stout, Edgar Allan Poe, and Raymond Chandler.[4][5][6]

 

[Ursa major]

I'm already imagining what Phyrebrat might do with Agatha Christie's hard-boiled prose.

​

 

[Phyrebrat]

Mrs McGinty lay afloat the one surviving door of her armoire. Rococo waves ushered her on to the bigger Blue. then something about pike or tench and b-wings

 

[The Big Peat]

I'm thinking you have quite a lot of freedom if you're allowed anything reminiscent of Poe, Chandler, or Christie.

That said, I guess if there's one thing I'd expect from that list, it's succinct. I think you're allowed to be lyrical, but nine times out of ten you want to be do so in a succinct, laconic manner.

edit: I remember once reading that one novelist used "the sun pounded me like a gorilla with a banana" or something for their Chandler-esque writing. Pithy and graphic lyricism, that's the key.

 

[Le Panda du Mal]

As someone else mentioned, giallo began as a pulp book format (name after the yellow covers). In fact many of them were translations of Spillane, Chandler, Agatha Christie, Poe, and other English writers and the directors of the films would have been familiar with these (I recall Spillane being name-checked in Argento's Tenebrae). Anyway if you want to see giallo in novel form see, for instance, Cornell Woolrich's Rendezvous in Black or The Bride Wore Black.

Edit: That said, there are a lot stylistic flourishes in the films that wouldn't necessarily fit in what's normally considered noir fiction... they reach more toward gothic fiction- for instance The Red Queen Kills Seven Times has that theme with the painting and the family curse, which is very Poe but not very Chandler... likewise I can't imagine Chandler or Spillane coming up with something like The House with Laughing Windows.