Hybrid format: in-person and virtual presentations welcome

This panel invites papers that slash into the seductive language of giallo film titles and their often uncanny English translations. Somewhere between a whisper and a scream, titles like L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, Sette note in nero, or La morte cammina con i tacchi alti titillate, obscure, and seduce. But what happens when these titles cross linguistic thresholds—becoming The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Psychic, or Death Walks on High Heels? This panel considers giallo titling as an aesthetic, affective, and translational act: where genre, violence, and eroticism become tangled in the work of naming.

We invite work that reads the giallo title not merely as marketing, but as poetic gesture, affective trigger, and site of cultural transformation. How do these titles encode (or lose) genre expectations in translation? How do wordplay, euphemism, or seduction travel—or falter—across languages? What meanings shift when translated for different publics, markets, or sensibilities?

Possible paper topics include (but are not limited to):

• Translation as a site of genre-making or distortion

• Comparative analysis of Italian vs. English title structures

• The erotic, euphemistic, or exploitative aesthetics of giallo titling

• The translator or distributor as co-author

• How titling mediates audience expectations around gender, violence, and excess

• Cultural anxieties in naming horror and desire across borders

• Titling as intersemiotic translation: the linguistic meets the visual

This session considers the strange poetry and cultural stakes embedded in giallo titling—how translation shapes genre, mood, and meaning. From the blunt to the baroque, we’ll explore how these names construct a lexicon of murder, seduction, and spectacle. Sometimes the title is a spoiler, sometimes a misdirect. Always, it matters.

Proposals of 300–500 words and a short bio should be submitted through the NeMLA portal by September 30, 2025: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21646

Questions? Contact chair Mara Mbele at marambele.docx@gmail.com