Building a bridge between noir and the then-nascent giallo genre, co-director Luigi Bazzoni’s innovative debut is an ominously atmospheric true-crime mystery. With liminal spaces reminiscent of Antonioni, The Possessed marries arthouse to grindhouse for a fevered tale of madness and murder.
Italian wildcard Giulio Questi pushed the limits (and censorship!) of what one could show in a movie in his brilliantly twisted cinema. With this, his debut, he forged what boldly stands today as perhaps the most bloody, reviled, and ecstatic of spaghetti westerns. Not for the faint of heart!
Giulio Questi’s second film is a brilliantly unidentifiable genre hybrid, combining giallo with a love triangle and sharp critique of capitalism. Giddily stylized, with an ace cast including Jean-Louis Trintignant and Gina Lollobrigida, it marked an apotheosis of 1960s modernist Italian cinema.