Many of us spend the Halloween season revisiting our favorite horror movies or tracking down hidden gems. Often, our watch lists are filled with the familiar names of directors who have shaped the genre from North America: Carpenter, Craven, Cronenberg, Romero. But the release this weekend of Luca Guadagnino’s remake of “Suspiria” recalls another group of filmmakers who were just as influential: Italians working in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, whose fingerprints can be seen all over recent horror films like “Hereditary,” “The Nun” and “Apostle.”

Italian horror borrows heavily from giallo, or the Italian thriller — a genre term that repurposes the Italian word for yellow, a reference to the cheap paperback crime novels of postwar Italy. To the giallo, Italian horror directors added surreal and supernatural elements: masked stalkers, witches’ covens and blood by the bucketful.