Girls, Guts, and Giallo

Girls, Guts, and Giallo is a film show for the part of cinema culture that never quite behaves. Its center of gravity is cult, horror, exploitation, queer transgression, and the sticky moral weather around them. The show does not treat shock as an endpoint. It asks what the shock is doing. In the episodes represented here, that can mean Society and its cult reputation, Ghost World as a film the show argues can still be read through a subversive lens, or Halloween as a machine for suburbia, childhood, stalking, and dread. It can also mean Psycho's camera, where the question is not only who is looking, but how the viewer gets pulled into the act of looking. The conversation likes the concrete detail. An eye, a doorway, a key under a mat, a mask-breathing point of view: small film choices become moral and erotic pressure points. The show is also blunt about the messier edges of its archive. Nekromantik brings in censorship, obscenity, pornography, sex work, necrophilia, and real animal death as subjects that cannot be separated from how transgressive cinema circulates. The BloodSisters and Charles Pinion interviews place the show closer to makers and subcultures than to tidy canon-building. Those episodes foreground leather history, shot-on-video filmmaking, porn, sex-industry adjacency, and the practical texture of this work. The Whale episode shows another recurring interest: how bodies are framed, punished, sentimentalized, desexualized, or made into vehicles for someone else's redemption. The tone is brisk and irreverent, but not shallow. It will joke, swear by implication, pivot, and get personal, then return to a close reading with real force. That looseness matters. The show sounds less like a lecturer arriving with a thesis than a critic thinking in public with guests who can keep up. It suits a listener who wants genre cinema discussed through sex, craft, and subcultural memory rather than nostalgia alone. It is affectionate toward trash, but not gullible about it. It can celebrate the ugly thing and still ask who paid for the pleasure.