Franco Ferrini

With over 50 screenplays and scripts to his name, Franco Ferrini was a key member of the influential Italian giallo movement; giallo, which comes from the Italian word for "yellow," was named after the cheap paperback thrillers from which the genre emerged. Frequently collaborating with renowned Italian horror director Dario Argento, one of the fathers of giallo cinema, Ferrini played a large part in shaping the movement with his layered, original, and often chilling stories. His first credit as a writer came in 1978 on the self-explanatory "Virgin Killer." From there his career took off; he rarely penned less than two scripts a year throughout the 1980s and '90s. His first collaboration with Dario Argento was 1985's "Phenomena," about a young girl who uses her ability to talk to insects to solve a rash of murders. This thoroughly unique plot exemplifies the style of Ferrini, who went on to work with Argento on several more films of equally bizarre and brilliantly original plots, among them "Demons" (1985), "Opera" (1987), and "The Stendhal Syndrome" (1996). Not solely a writer of giallos, Ferrini worked on plenty of successful films in other genres, most notably Sergio Leone's epic crime-drama "Once Upon a Time in America," starring Robert De Niro. The new millennium saw Ferrini join forces with Argento again on 2004's "The Card Player."