Giallo — Italy's blood-red mystery genre
Argento and Bava are the entry points. The rest of the catalogue runs deep: pulpier, sleazier, sometimes more inventive. Black gloves, neon kills, score by Goblin or Morricone.
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
Deep Red
Slap the Monster on Page One
One Way or Another
Suspiria
foreign gembody horrordread
Caliber 9
The Passenger
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
The Psychic
Theorem
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
Tenebre
Godzilla
The Cat o' Nine Tails
Opera
Demons
A Bay of Blood
Planet of the Vampires
The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue
The Whip and the Body
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
Cannibal Holocaust
The Church
Demons 2
Autres collections canon
Japanese New Wave — the essentials
80s horror everyone has forgotten
Korean cinema essentials beyond Parasite
Post-Soviet cinema — Russia & Eastern Europe after 1991
The Romanian New Wave
Essential anime that isn't Studio Ghibli
Slow cinema — the long-take canon
70s American paranoia — the post-Watergate canon
First features by directors who later mattered
Documentaries that hold up as cinema
Scandinavian noir beyond the Stieg Larsson franchises
Iranian new wave — Kiarostami, Farhadi, and the rest
Argentine cinema — beyond Wild Tales
British kitchen-sink and what it became
First features directed by cinematographers
German New Wave — Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, Schlöndorff
Hong Kong action — Woo, Lam, Tsui, To
Spaghetti westerns — Leone, Corbucci, Sollima, and the second tier
Mumblecore — the American indie movement nobody named
Czech New Wave — Forman, Chytilová, Menzel, before they fled
French New Wave — Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Rivette, Rohmer
Blaxploitation — Shaft, Pam Grier, and the 70s Black cinema boom
Dogme 95 — von Trier, Vinterberg, and the vow of chastity
Australian New Wave — Weir, Miller, Armstrong, Campion
African cinema — Sembène, Sissako, Mambéty, and beyond
Italian neorealism — the rubble and the real
Commedia all'italiana — Italy laughing at itself
German expressionism — shadows, angles, madness
Taiwanese New Cinema — Hou, Yang, Tsai, and the island's quiet revolution
New Queer Cinema — Haynes, Araki, Van Sant, and the 90s insurgency
Wuxia and martial arts — flying swords, hidden masters