Deep Red (1975, Dario Argento), Part Two

Turn your poundcake to red velvet.

Originally published 1/29/2023 on Substack

Hello folks! This is the second part of my Deep Red post, the first of which can be found here. If you’ll recall, that one was long, even by my standards, so I restricted it to just an analysis of the movie, and saved part two for game-related material. And here we are, seven months later. What kind of game-related material have I cooked up? Read on and find out!

What can we take from it? I’m going to use this opportunity to move away from talking just about Deep Red specifically and into giallo more generally. For those just tuning in, giallo is, per Wikipedia, a “genre of mystery fiction and thrillers that often contains slasher, crime fiction, psychological thriller, psychological horror, sexploitation, and, less frequently, supernatural horror elements.” My preferred, simplified description is that it takes Agatha Christie-style whodunnits, where the killer is eventually unmasked as one of the known characters, and adds a red splash of slasher-type suspense and gore¹. 

I’m going to use my writeup of martial arts in the Cypher System from my post on Master of the Flying Guillotine as the basis for this exploration. Like martial arts, this is a huge topic, one that could fill a whole book, so this will be more about a general overview and spitballing and less about specific rules. As in that martial arts writeup, I’m going to focus on how this genre feels and try to capture that feeling. 

NOTES ON PLAYING A GIALLO-INSPIRED SESSION IN THE TTRPG SYSTEM OF YOUR CHOICE²

Background

The first thing you should ask yourself is, Am I using the right tool for the job? That is, if you wish to play a giallo-inspired ttrpg session, would it make more sense to use a system designed for just that? Admittedly, there aren’t many on the market designed for that specific job³. But there are at least three that can work⁴

Blurred Lines by Guilherme Gontijo is a solo rpg with some journaling elements that puts the player in the role of a photographer who stumbles upon evidence of a serial killer at work, and must identify them before time runs out, which is about as giallo as anyone could ask for. What’s more, this book is absolutely gorgeous. I have yet to play this myself, but if you’re the kind of GM who’s not afraid to get their hands dirty, there’s a lot here to take apart and reconstruct for the game system of your choice. Or, you could play it as a group, everyone contributing to the decisions of the photog protagonist. 

Fear of the Unknown by Thomas Eliot is a new release that aims to deliver a one-session ttrpg horror story, in any specific subgenre (slasher, ghost, Lovecraftian, SF, etc.), all with zero GM prep — the players create their characters and the town the adventure is set in, and the GM comes up with a secret (what’s actually going on) and an inciting incident to get the party started. The rest of it is discovered through play. As of this writing, I haven’t finished reading it yet, but what I’ve seen is very exciting, with some really terrific ideas about how to improvise an adventure that naturally raises tension to a big climactic encounter. (Which, if you’ve been reading me, you know is one of my hobbyhorses.) It looks like it lends itself to solo play, so I’ll be trying that at some point this year. If you’d like to preview it, you can find a “pay what you want” quickstart version of the rules here.

Finally, while this choice isn’t designed for giallo play, I feel like it could be a contender. Fiasco, by Jason Morningstar, is a GM-less ttrpg about “ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control;” or in other words, characters in a Coen brothers film. Everyone at the table makes characters, but no one really “owns” them; they’re more of a group resource. It’s expected you’ll force these characters into deadly situations that not all, if any, will survive. (You can probably see why I’m thinking of it.⁵) Fiasco has a number of “playsets” that let you focus a session on a particular genre or setting. There isn’t a giallo playset to my knowledge, but there are alot of playsets out there, so I could’ve easily missed one. But the way the system is constructed would, I think, help obviate a number of problems that would come up in a giallo-style ttrpg (see Problems, below). Hell, I’ve half a mind to make one myself if it doesn’t already exist. The original single book version is here, and the deluxe boxed version with cards and a playmat can be found through Amazon here⁶). 

Assumptions

But let’s say you want to use a ttrpg system you already know. Great! But what exactly are you looking for when you want a giallo game? For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to tell you what I’d want, and work from there; I suggest you make your own list. At the same time, I think both of our games are going to have similar issues to deal with (see below). 

For a game to be giallo-like, I would need three things:

1. The protagonists, which I assume would be the player characters, are not in law enforcement. My preference is for ordinary people who are thrusted into extraordinary circumstances and learn that their world is stranger, more absurd than they realized. Cops and police detectives have a reason to investigate murders, have likely been exposed to weirdness, depravity, etc., and have institutional backup should shit hit the fan. For me, there needs to be a stark difference between the player characters’ normal world and the world they enter when the adventure starts; for most fictional law enforcement-types, that line is blurry.

2. One of the non-player characters that the player characters meet in the beginning is the killer that they will have to survive, identify, and catch. Furthermore the killer should have a coherent reason to kill. I prefer my giallo killers to not be motiveless psychopaths⁷. 

3. There needs to be an outré visual element to the session. Gialli are often noted for their loud colors, extreme camera angles, expressive clothing and forbidding architecture. Put another way, gialli have a style requirement along with a content requirement. This is a difficult one to incorporate, and it’s an issue any of my Against the ’70s game ideas bump up against as well, but we’ll talk about it further in the Problems section. 

Problems

Creating a giallo-style session for a ttrpg presents a number of problems. None of them are unusual in of themselves, but when combined, create some unique difficulties. 

It’s a mystery. Traditional mysteries in ttrpgs are notoriously difficult to do⁸. If you set it up like a traditional adventure, you need to figure out a victim, a perpetrator, a motive, several suspects, clues, and possibly some red herrings. It’s a lot, and worth asking, If I do all that, why not just write a novel? And this is before we take into account that most ttrpgs, especially in the fantasy genre, give the player characters special powers that can short-circuit the mystery. (Who murdered the Duke? Cast “Speak with Dead” and find out!)⁹ Furthermore, most ttrpgs expect that the players might undermine the expected narrative, and thus skip past all the traps leading to the treasure room or kill the boss monster in one blow. (In fact, players often enjoy this.) In a mystery, though, that’s not only going to be deflating for the GM, that’s going to be leave a big gap where the adventure was supposed to be. Mysteries, then, can be a lot of work for very little payoff.

Multiple protagonists. Mysteries in films and novels usually feature a single protagonist, with maybe a sidekick to help out. A ttrpg game session, however, usually involves three to five (or more) players, each a protagonist in their own right. This means that a player group can cover 3-5x more ground than a single player, and can handle antagonists and obstacles as a group. That’s great for high adventure, but kinda weird for a mystery¹⁰. (The only time I can recall seeing something like this in a film was Species (1995, Roger Donaldson), where, IIRC, there’s a moment where the main characters, like five of them, interrogate a single motel clerk. This kind of thing is common in a ttrpg like Call of Cthulhu but looks wonderfully silly on screen¹¹.) Another thing you often hear is that a single GM is no match for the combined brainpower of a table of players. Whatever mystery you’ve prepared, understand there’s a decent chance the players will figure it out within the first fifteen minutes. 

Limited freedom. This is kind of a subset of “it’s a mystery.” It’s presumed that the players will want to solve the mystery presented to them. It’s also presumed that the players can have their characters do anything, if feasible, and that can mean “decide to do something else.” Locking the characters in a room, metaphorically speaking, can require a a combination of buy-in from the players (“We agree to try and solve this mystery Jeff’s designed for us”) and some kind of established fiction within the game (“Ellen, your aunt, the one who raised you after your parents died, was murdered by a serial killer. What are you going to do about it?”). Depending on whether you’re planning a giallo one-shot, or dropping a giallo scenario in the middle of your current ttrpg campaign, this could be a deal breaker.

The players get to “see” the murders. I really feel this one is a carved-in-stone requirement, and hoo boy, it’s a tricky one on a couple of levels. What I mean is: at certain points, the GM will need to describe the killer murdering their next victim, even though the characters aren’t there. It’s unusual — not unheard of, but unusual — to provide information to the players in this “non-diagetic” way. Doing so requires that the players be able to separate player knowledge from character knowledge, which is usually fine, but I always hate to do. But I think providing these kind of scenes in the game — the obscured Killer in the Black Gloves, who sometimes shares the POV of the camera — are absolutely necessary for genre emulation. 

Now, a fair question is: Why? Would you do this if the genre you were emulating was “slasher”? No, I wouldn’t do this for a slasher-style game. That’s because a slasher is normally hunting other characters, and that can provide a lot of enjoyable tension for players, knowing that the killer is out there and coming for them. (See also: the video game Friday the 13th: The Game.) However, the killer in a giallo is usually not targeting the protagonist (at least not until the end), leaving the protagonist plenty of time to investigate the mystery. If you take out these scenes, you’re left with a game that’s about bipping around, asking questions, poking through old buildings, while a dead body occasionally shows up. These murder scenes are, to my mind, core to the experience of gialli, regardless of medium. 

Therein lies the other problem: the core experience of a giallo is watching people get brutally murdered. If you’re going to do this, you must, you must, be sure your players know what they’re getting into and consent to it. This is where safety tools come in. Safety tools are techniques used before the game and at the table to make sure everyone is having fun and no one is feeling uncomfortable or disturbed by the fiction being created. Before even starting, you should sit your players down and figure out what everyone is comfortable with. A tool called “lines and veils” is useful here: lines are subjects and actions that are completely verboten in the fiction (say, killing animals) and veils are subjects and actions that are acceptable, as long as they happen “off-screen” (say, the characters hearing about an animal that was killed). There’s a lot more to this topic, and I suggest looking at this terrific safety tools explainer by Mike Shea a.k.a. Sly Flourish, which has some sample tools and links for more info. 

There’s no reason the murders in your game have to be as nasty or misogynistic as some in the more notorious gialli – done in a certain way, they could be quite funny — but it’s still an odd requirement, even to me. Nevertheless, I stand by my dictum. 

There’s a style requirement. This is probably the most peculiar of the problems on this list, as I can’t think of many genres that face this dilemma. You say “fantasy,” most people are going to think of dragons, knights, castles, magic, etc. You say “science fiction,” you got spaceships, laser guns, aliens, the like. You say “superheroes,” well, you get the idea. You say “giallo,” and what, visually, comes to mind? Blood? Black-gloved killers? Italian people in loud clothing? It’s a genre that lends itself to distinct visuals without having anything visually distinct to draw from¹². As you can probably tell from the Blurred Lines book, it’s a genre that lends itself to amazing design and font work, but amazing design and font work isn’t dramatic. To put it simply, while other genres don’t require much from players to imagine the world, a giallo game demands more. So, what should one provide? And how to provide it?

Once again, I’ve gone long. Look for the “Ideas towards Solutions” section in Part Three, coming soon.¹³