This May, women are on the verge at midnight! Produced by independent film programmer Stephanie "La Gialloholique" Sack, Mezzanotte at the Music Box -- Women on the Verge...presents two midnight screenings emblematic of the seventies Giallo aesthetic: Giuseppe Patroni Griffi's "Identikit" (1974) and Luigi Bazzoni's "Footprints on the Moon" (1975). 

The word "giallo" means "yellow" in Italian, which was the color of the covers of the pulpy crime novels from which Gialli took their delightfully lurid inspiration. Stylistically and psychologically, the Giallo shares DNA with other European genres such as British Folk Horror, French Fantastique, and German Krimi; however, Italian directors mingled their complex murder mysteries with the occult, Gothic horror, police procedurals, and even elements of psychedelia to create a cinematic grammar all their own.

The films in this two-week miniseries explore the anxieties and insanities of women on the verge: Identikit (also known as The Driver's Seat) features the one and only Elizabeth Taylor as a profoundly disturbed woman on a hunt for something or someone, while the sci-fi framing of Footprints on the Moon traverses the claustrophobic tesseracts of women's cosmic isolation. Both films offer 20th century takes on the fathomless sadness of loss and the intense discomfort of discovery through the refractions of a female lens.