If you missed Part 1 you can read it here!

ALL THE COLOURS OF CREATION: PART 2

In 1971, as Italian contemporaries adopted and adapted Mario Bava’s Giallo template to raise the fledgling genre to its headiest heights, Italian genre cinema’s original auteur returned to finish a job he started in 1964, and help to create a second new genre within horror. While the likes of Dario Argento, Sergio Martino and Lucio Fulci developed Bava’s coda to create a rich body of work within Giallo, Bava himself was still very much a genre-hopper. He bounced between horror, comedy, thriller and sci-fi, and by 1971 his Giallo efforts were morphing into something else entirely.

Outside of Italy, one of the most enduring and durable additions to the horror pantheon that the 1970s heralded was the rise of the slasher - a high concept horror subgenre with a simple template that almost guaranteed success: a marriage of the whodunit murder mystery, confined or remote setting, a crazed and charismatic antagonist and a high kill count (including increasingly inventive murder set pieces) were popcorn fodder in the making.