Giallo Essentials: Black Edition Blu-ray explores the range and perversity of Italian giallo beyond the familiar templates established by Dario Argento, presenting three lesser-seen but deeply representative murder mysteries from the genre’s early-1970s golden age. Rather than simple imitations, these films reveal the stylistic experimentation, moral decay, and narrative audacity that defined giallo at its most provocative.
 
Silvio Amadio’s Smile Before Death opens the set with a twisted tale of family dysfunction and repressed desire. When teenage Nancy returns home to discover her mother’s apparent suicide, suspicion quickly falls on her stepfather and his lover. As secrets surface, the film descends into a dark spiral of obsession, betrayal, and taboo relationships, pushing domestic melodrama into outright psychological horror.
 
In Francesco Mazzei’s The Weapon, the Hour, the Motive, police commissioner Franco Boito investigates the brutal murder of a young priest, only to become entangled in an illicit affair with the victim’s lover. Mixing eroticism, religious guilt, and procedural intrigue, the film stands as one of the genre’s most morally confrontational entries. Giuseppe Bennati’s The Killer Reserved Nine Seats completes the trilogy with a baroque, Agatha Christie–style chamber thriller, trapping a group of wealthy degenerates inside a decaying private theatre as a masked killer eliminates them one by one.
 
With graphic violence, sexual transgression, and unpredictable narrative turns, all three films exemplify giallo’s capacity for excess and invention. Arrow Video presents the collection with multiple 2K restorations from original camera negatives, including Arrow-exclusive restorations of Smile Before Death and The Weapon, the Hour, the Motive, alongside an extensive suite of scholarly and archival bonus features.
 
1972 / approx. 289 min total