In the late ’60s and early ’70s, while Hollywood was in the throes of the Easy Rider movie-brat revolution, six thousand miles away, the Italian film industry was too busy ripping off Hitchcock and splashing the screen red with blood to take much notice.

Dismissed by American critics at the time as low-rent imports barely deserving of the bottom half of a 42nd Street double bill, the lurid genre known as giallo (with its convoluted Freudian plots and liberal dollops of kink and nudity, all smothered in the red sauce of over-the-top violence) took 50 years to finally come of age in the U.S.