8. Footprints On The Moon (1975)
The saddest and most melancholy Giallo ever made, Footprints on the Moon features two greats of Eurotrash cinema - Florinda Balkan and Klaus Kinski. Balkan plays Alice, a translator who is haunted by images of a film she saw as a child of Astronauts being subjected to horrible experiments on the moon. She develops a serious addiction to sleeping pills and due to her erratic work performance she is fired. Alice goes to stay in a rundown tourist resort called Garma where she is told by a young girl that she is the spitting image of a woman named Nicole who lives in a hotel. Alice is bombarded by all sorts of strange and terrifying events and revelations and it all ends up going horribly wrong for her. The film is a slow burner which takes its time to build up an atmosphere of paranoia and menace. There is virtually no blood and the director builds up the momentum of claustrophobia extremely well. Alice is a very lonely character with not many people she can relate to - this makes her an isolated figure. The scenes of the astronauts on the moon are very well filmed and they build up to the crescendo at the end of the film where Alice gives in to her latent psychosis and experiences trauma on a scale that most people would lose their minds too. The final images of Alice being taken away by the astronauts is highly bleak and depressing.