Shock Value Giallo

Another Hellbound Media piece from this year’s True Believers, Shock Value Giallo is a horror anthology comic with its roots in Italian horror from the ’30s – Giallo being ‘yellow’ in Italian, and Giallo being a term applied to a select few Italian horror films of the time.

Giallo, and, I assume its sister books Shock Value Red and Blue, is a far more serious affair than Mandy the Monster Hunter, if the cover image, a man in a full-head mask tied up in a spiders web of elastic wasn’t making that clear, and it can be a bit jarring if she’s all you’re used to, but it’s clear that the folk at Hellbound Media – and there’s a lot of them – know what they’re talking about and really do care about it.

Each of the nine stories has a different artist and each of their styles is elegant and fitting the aesthetics of that story and the theme of the anthology in general. From Ed Machiavello’s Blood Tears for the Catholic’s Daughter and its dark, noir-ish stylings of  photographer trying to find The Perfect Shot for his photographic display and stumbling on a murder spree in the process, to Ahmed Raafat’s 3Demons, where two horror fanatics get thoroughly scared on horror movie night, with an ending that will have you chuckling with its comedic simplicity, the collection shows a selection of stories that exemplify the style and subjects of historical horror in a way that works for both the new guy finding his feet in the genre and the old hand revisiting old favourites.

It’s not just blood and guts and death here though; Mark Adams’ work on Beyond the Veil gives an Eldritch touch to the collection that will leave you very disconcerted if left alone in an old and/or quiet house, and Matt Warner’s Naked for the Whispering Killer is a tale of escaped demons and bondage that completes the collection with just the right note of chilling and discomfort.

I confess, horror is not a forte of mine – I only have a few ‘classics’ of the genre in my collection, four of them are Alien-related, and I’ve never finished Resurrection because every time I’ve tried to watch it I’ve fallen asleep. (If it’s any consolation, the other two are the The Thing double-film boxset). And frankly, my relationship with your Halloweens, your Nightmare on Elm Streets and your Living Deads could probably fill a whole other article. However, reading Shock Value Giallo does make me want to delve deeper into some areas and aspects of the genre, so if anyone has any suggestions, let me know? I’m not promising anything, but I’ll keep an eye and an ear out for it.

Shock Value Giallo was edited by Mark Adams and Matt Warner, and is published by Hellbound Media. Their website, where you can buy Shock Value Giallo, as well as the rest of their catalogue, is hellboundmedia.co.uk. They are also on Facebook as Hellbound Media and Twitter @HellboundMedia.