The forgotten Italian giallo that built Hereditary
Ari Aster did not invent slow-burn family-curse horror. He inherited it, almost frame for frame, from a 1972 film almost no one in his audience has seen.
If you've seen Hereditary (2018) you remember the dollhouse. The film's opening shot is a slow zoom into a model of the family's house, which dissolves at the right moment into the actual house. The dollhouse is a thesis statement: this family has no agency, they are figures in a model someone else is operating. It's a brilliant opening. It is also not Ari Aster's invention.
The model-house opening — almost shot for shot — is in La Casa dalle Finestre che Ridono (The House with the Laughing Windows), directed by Pupi Avati in 1976. It is in Profondo Rosso (Argento, 1975), in a different but recognizable form. The convention runs back further still, to a Mario Bava giallo from 1963.
Aster has spoken publicly about Don't Look Now (Roeg, 1973) and The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973) as direct influences. He hasn't, that I can find, named The House with the Laughing Windows specifically. But the bones are unmistakable.
What giallo actually is
Most contemporary audiences encounter "giallo" as a vague genre label that means "Italian thriller with bright primary colors and a killer in black gloves." That's not wrong, but it's reductive. Giallo originally referred to a paperback publishing line — Mondadori's Giallo Mondadori series, launched in 1929, with distinctive yellow (giallo) covers. The novels were translated American and British mystery thrillers, primarily. By the 1960s the term had absorbed an indigenous Italian film tradition that took the source material and twisted it into something more visually elaborate, more violent, and more interested in atmosphere than detection.
The films that defined the genre — Bava's Blood and Black Lace (1964), Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling (1972) — were the rough drafts for everything that became American slasher cinema in the 1980s and what would now be called "elevated horror" in the 2010s. The lineage is documented. The connection runs through John Carpenter (who knew the Italian films well), through Wes Craven, through Brian De Palma (whose Dressed to Kill is almost a giallo cover song), into the modern American horror canon Aster works in.
The specific case: family-curse horror
The giallo sub-current most relevant to Hereditary is the family-curse strand. The House with the Laughing Windows, Don't Look Now (a UK-Italy co-production deeply invested in giallo conventions), Fulci's The Beyond (1981), and Pupi Avati's later Zeder (1983) all share a common structure. A family or household inherits a place. The place contains a wound or a debt that the previous generation incurred. The film is, formally, the working-out of that debt. The horror is not external invasion — it is excavation of the inherited site.
That is the structure of Hereditary. It is also the structure of The Witch (2015), of The Babadook (2014), and — going wider — of Get Out (2017), where the inheritance is racial rather than supernatural. The "new wave of horror" critics named in the mid-2010s has its formal grammar set in Italy 1972-1983.
Why the giallos aren't on streaming
This is a real problem. The Italian films that hold the keys to a generation of contemporary horror are stuck in licensing purgatory. The House with the Laughing Windows has had exactly one English-subtitled DVD release in the United States (Image Entertainment, 2003, long out of print). Arrow Video's UK Blu-ray restoration from 2017 is the only currently-purchasable version with English subtitles. Streaming availability is roughly zero in the English-speaking world.
This matters because the criticism around Hereditary in 2018 was almost entirely contextless about its forebears. Reviews praised the film for inventing a tone (the "dread without a body" register) that was, in fact, fifty years old. Aster, to his credit, has been generous in interviews about his influences. The audience that praised the film as breaking new ground was an audience denied the option to see what came before.
What to watch in what order
If Hereditary is your benchmark and you want to understand its DNA, the rough viewing order I'd suggest is :
- Don't Look Now (1973) — the easiest to find, the most British, the most polished. A bridge film.
- Profondo Rosso (1975) — Argento at his peak. The aesthetic vocabulary modern horror still uses.
- The House with the Laughing Windows (1976) — the structural blueprint. Track down the Arrow Video disc.
- Suspiria (1977) — Argento again. Aster's Hereditary and Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria remake share an audience and a grandmother.
- Zeder (1983) — Avati's late return to the form. Pre-figures Pet Sematary in detail.
The case I'm making isn't that Hereditary is unoriginal — it isn't, the film is a real achievement and Aster brought specific gifts to old material. The case is that the originality is grammatical, not structural. He speaks the language of late-70s Italian horror with new conviction. Knowing the language doesn't reduce the film. It increases it. There's a 50-year conversation Aster is part of, and his contribution is improved by seeing the room he's in.
Sources & further reading
- Koven, Mikel J. La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film (Scarecrow Press, 2006).
- Newman, Kim. Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s (Bloomsbury, revised 2011).
- Arrow Video — The House with the Laughing Windows Blu-ray (2017)
- BFI Sight & Sound — primer on giallo
- Hutchings, Peter. The Italian Horror Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).