You may have noticed the grand tradition in giallo cinema to include animals in the title. A Lizard in Woman’s Skin, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail, Don’t Torture a Duckling, The Bloodstained Butterfly, and the amazing title The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire. This all started with the immense success of Dario Argento’s 1970 film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, the first of what would become Argento’s “Animal Trilogy.”
Giallo films are prolific in the way American slashers are – you may be the most well-versed fan and still suddenly come across a movie of the subgenre that you haven’t seen. Something deep, low budget, and outside streaming services of recent years. And now, there’s so much more to see and experience, as is the case with Paolo Cavara’s Black Belly of the Tarantula. Released in the U.S. in 1972, the 45-year-old giallo staple is a unique and vital entry into gialli cinema. It is getting a much-deserved reprisal on Shudder, finding new fans every day, with some even dubbing it one of the best gialli in cinema history.
Cavara falls into the “copycat” category of directors who, rather than existing in a single genre, found himself directing the latest Italian genre-grab, from spy thrillers to spaghetti westerns. But Cavara is no mercenary. He started in documentary films and pioneered many technologies of underwater filmmaking in the 1950s. He then conceived Mondo Cane (1962) with Gualtiero Jacopetti, a series of documentary vignettes rooted in exploitation that inspired the twisted genre of Mondo, or “shockumentary.”
Though Jacopetti attempted to take most of the credit after Mondo Cane’s critical success, having edited the film, Cavara did a majority of the on-location shooting of each vignette. His documentarian style bleeds into his fiction films, giving them a gritty, lived-in experience that deals with the more existential horror elements in the real world.
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While Mondo Cane could be his most infamous work, Black Belly of the Tarantula is truly his most established, iconic, and representative of everything Cavara had to offer in his short career as a director. He passed away on August 7, 1982, at 56 years old.
Black Belly of the Tarantula is a mesmerizing spectacle of an ensemble cast, documentary style, and ridiculous ADR (which, as I know I’ve mentioned before, I find so freaking endearing that wanting to watch films with gialli-ADR is a whole mood). The whole premise is built around a wasp that paralyzes tarantulas and guts them with the intent of propagating offspring. This basic idea spurns a paralyzing killer, but while it’s a neat set-piece, Cavara is more interested in the human struggle of his chief Inspector and the world that works to tear him down.
The film opens with Maria Zani (Barbara Bouchet) getting a very sensual massage at an exclusive health spa. It’s interrupted by her jealous husband, Paolo (Silvano Tranquilli), who accuses her of being a nymphomaniac after receiving an incriminating photo from an unknown blackmailer. After the encounter, Maria is assaulted by an unknown assailant wearing golden surgical gloves, stabbed in the back of the neck with a poisoned-acupuncture needle, paralyzing her before being gutted. Enter Inspector Tellini (Giancarlo Giannini), a homicide detective who discovers the plot of blackmail. After a second murder, the plot thickens, driving the investigation away from Paolo and into the dark underbelly of Rome. There’s blackmail, drug smuggling through tarantula imports, an attempted murder of Tellini himself, and it all comes back to this mysterious health spa and its patrons.
The film sets up a mix of two genres, both giallo and poliziotto – as many pre-Suspiria gialli are. Poliziotti cinema are crime thrillers, akin to Dirty Harry and The French Connection, where an external force drives an internal investigation, focusing on corruption and criminality of the institutions of law enforcement itself. Where Black Belly marries these genres flawlessly is Tellini’s continued exertion and ultimate conclusion that he’s not cut out for this work.
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His fellow investigators laugh at a voyeuristic snuff film meant to blackmail Tellini, amused by his torment, whereas Tellini is disgusted by it. He is not callous or removed from the pain being inflicted on these individuals and has trouble separating himself from the flawed world around him. Every turn takes him into a realm of corruption, exemplified by a routine visit to an entomologist leading to a discovery of drug smuggling. When he attempts to catch Mario (Giancarlo Prete), as the blackmailer and believed killer, he witnesses Paolo fall to his death only to see Mario get run down by a car in the immediate aftermath.
Thematically, the giallo is an internalized suspense thriller – usually taking place in a liminal space – in this case, a health spa. We have the traditional killer in a trench coat, black hat, and gloves, and the general understanding that the killer is ever-present, opportunistic, and somehow bound to the interconnected group of victims as well as investigators. Cavara weaves the giallo with the poliziotto themes to create a narrative that says more than just a standard thriller but demonstrates how disconnected we are from the world around us.
Even in the reveal of the killer, a connected yet relatively unsatisfying payoff, we see how random the abuses of humanity are. Not that the payoff isn’t satisfying for audiences, but for Tellini. In his investigation, coming across criminal blackmail and drug smuggling, the killer is today’s equivalent of an incel – outside the criminal corruption but connected in proximity alone. For this reason, Black Belly of the Tarantula has acquired a new appreciation now that it’s more widely available to giallo-lovers.
Cavara has a documentary style that examines the mundane with a critical eye. A different director may have spent their time establishing the killer, the motives, and the nuances of our connection, but Cavara sees the random disconnection with thematic interest. In the same way he established the themes in Mondo Cane, he expertly examines the underbelly of all society around the contained narrative of a homicide investigation.
Of course, the seminal Ennio Morricone lends himself to the soundtrack. He ventured from spaghetti western into giallo by way of Dario Argento, sharing a relationship with Dario Argento through Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Cavara enlisted him for Black Belly to develop a haunting and visceral sound, including vocals of heavy breathing and a mock-soft core porn synth. It’s atonal keyboards and seductive vocals, gruesome insectoid strings, and stinging percussion, and as unsettling as that sounds, it is a bit more cheese than breeze. On its own, it’s a kinetic score that is beautifully executed, but it somewhat missed the mark on the deeply personal, untoward story of Tellini’s dive into the eight-legged underbelly of society’s corruption.
Overall, Black Belly of the Tarantula is a compulsory watch for any giallo lover out there. Not only does it include an all-star cast of James Bond characters, with three Bond girls from the Connery/Moore era, and Giancarlo Gianni popping up in two of Daniel Craig’s outings (a piece of trivia worthy of any cult fandom), but it’s a bold, realistic horror that lives in the world’s gritty reality.
