January is many things to many people, from the beginning of a new year to the annual horror dump. For creatures of the repertory cinema, however, it means one thing: January Giallo, a yearly month-long celebration of the lurid Italian proto-slashers of the 1960s and ‘70s. Practiced by such horror maestros as Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and Mario Bava, giallo (Italian for yellow, after the garish covers of the paperbacks of the time) is an unmistakable, mystery-tinged strain of horror featuring black leather gloves, seemingly phosphorescent stage blood, and complex-to-the-point-of-nonsensical plots. In short, they are a perfect time capsule of a grimy, decidedly European 1970s.
Of course, this is not to say the genre is dead; indeed, its influence looms longer than the ominous shadow of a knife-wielding madman, inspiring homages which continue to this day. It’s certainly found a pair of devoted students in Emerson undergrads Justin Landsman and Charlie Compton, whose new short The Five Fingers of a Dog is such a pitch-perfect simulacrum of those blood-soaked thrillers of old that it screens tonight as part of the Coolidge’s Giallo January programming (preceding the wonderfully titled prep-school shocker What Have You Done to Solange?). On the eve of its Coolidge debut, I spoke to Compton and Landsman about their inspirations, the challenges of giallo on a shoestring budget, and inventive uses for Twizzlers and pizza dough.
BOSTON HASSLE: How did this idea originate?
CHARLIE COMPTON: Justin and I both started rooming together last year—our sophomore year at Emerson. We both immediately had a lot in common, really stemming from both of our fathers introducing us to horror (albeit different kinds) at a very young age. We naturally got to talking a lot, and knew we wanted to make something, as we hadn’t had the chance during freshman year due to covid.
JUSTIN LANDSMAN: In most of our casual conversations, giallo was brought up a plethora of times because of our shared love for the subgenre.
CC: The timing was strangely good; it seems that giallo was in the air in some way, because Malignant was released, followed by Last Night in Soho (which neither of us liked, nor is it giallo, but it certainly evokes a love for Argento).
JL: We eventually just said, “Let’s make one.”
BH: Are there any particular films you had in mind?
JL: One of the biggest for us was one of my favorite filmmakers, Lucio Fulci’s 1982 film, The New York Ripper. In that film, the city is a character in and of itself, isolating its characters into a nightmare logic based landscape that is inescapable and not exactly based in reality.
CC: I’m a big Argento fan in terms of the Italian filmmakers, and Bava, so a big one for me was The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. It’s amazing how hard he nailed it on the first go, and the Morricone score and mood were more similar to what we aimed for than some of his later work like Tenebre and Opera. We also took a lot of inspiration from some early surrealist films, such as Meshes of the Afternoon. We wanted the story to be based around a mystery, but almost to be unsolvable due to how nonsensical everything is– different time periods merging, perpetual nighttime, lots of strangeness that meshed (ha) well with the general traits of a giallo.
JL: Many non-giallo favorites such as Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck’s 1973 Lovecraftian coastal horror Messiah of Evil and Doris Wishman’s 1983 fever dream A Night to Dismember, and much, much more became a blueprint for our anachronistic goals with the film.
BH: It’s a great-looking film– how did you go about recreating that very particular giallo look and feel?
JL: Working with our entire crew, we fully embraced our low budget and set out to capture the visual language of a giallo as authentically as possible– that being an uncanny nightmare. The film was shot on our director of photography Grant Morris’s Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4K camera and subsequently colored by our opticals & titles artist Kevin Fermini, emphasizing the grainy, three dimensionally lit extended shots we had become accustomed to over our many years of consuming the subgenre. To further embellish that uncanniness, we strictly chose explicitly gothic and isolated locations all around Boston, evoking this feeling of a place that is out of both time and space. As for the visceral look of gore in giallo, we worked closely with our makeup & effects artist Lauren Ward to replicate that, utilizing acrylic paint for blood and an eclectic source of food such as ground beef, pizza dough, peppers, Twizzlers, and anything that could pass as a human innard.
CC: We really wanted this to be an authentic incarnation of giallo, warts and all. We also were aware of the budget we were working with, and so we based many of the aesthetics around what we knew we could accomplish logistically. Giallo seems to be most known for the neon lights of Argento’s films (although he really uses those more in his supernatural horror films), and so we wanted to go beyond the obvious there. A lot of it was studying how the cameras moved and where they tended to be placed—lots of slow, lingering pans, anamorphic lenses, longer takes, deeper focus, etc.
BH: Do you have any future projects in the pipeline?
CC: We’re both working on a couple of things at the moment, although we haven’t written/directed together since Five Fingers. Justin helped produce another short that I made and am editing at the moment, called Broadcast After Midnight (which deals with AI art and London After Midnight).
JL: Both of us are currently in pre-production/funding for our individual BFA Thesis films. While we are individually directing them, we are on board as producers for each other (Charlie is even the lead actor in mine), as we both have individual projects we also want to create and don’t want to just limit ourselves as co-directors in our collaborative endeavors. My BFA Thesis film is a southern gothic horror film titled Invaders From Within! The proof of concept short follows Paul Cody, a folk musician who isolates himself at an old house in the hot summer woods, struggling with both tinnitus and writer’s block. But when he starts hearing strange noises, he begins to uncover what creeps and crawls within the house’s walls.
CC: I’m working on my own, which I’m planning to be a dreamy sci-fi feature, tentatively titled Tiresias.
JL: Charlie and I also have a pitch brewing for a recently announced horror film that would be a pipe dream for us to co-direct, something that we plan on using The Five Fingers of a Dog as a proof of concept for.
CC: Maybe we’ll hear about it in the future!
BH: Finally, the title of the film is such a perfect play on the lurid excess of giallo that I have to ask: did you brainstorm any other potential titles, or did you hit on it right away?
CC: Yes, we worked quite a bit on the title, taking from Argento’s animal trilogy and many of the traits of typical giallo titles.
JL: That was an incredibly fun and rewarding process in and of itself. One thing we knew from the get-go was that we wanted the film to have a textbook giallo title, one that is simultaneously extraneous and alluring with its extended use of numbers, animals, etc. I can’t find it anymore, but we made a huge list of potential titles, mixing and matching a plethora of terms that we saw fit, or in this case fittingly unfit. Finally landing on The Five Fingers of a Dog felt like a true “Eureka!” moment for us.
CC: I honestly feel silly saying it, but that’s the case with most of my titles, and I’m glad everyone’s enjoyed it—I think it’s a big reason for the amount of attention it’s been able to garner.
The Five Fingers of a Dog
2022
dir. Justin Landsman & Charlie Compton
24 min.
Screens Saturday, 1/21, 11:59pm @ Coolidge Corner Theatre (preceding What Have They Done to Solange?)
Part of the series: January Giallo
