I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale is a worthy representative [of a] later vein of the giallo genre, where strict lines of realism crumble under the weight of delirium and propulsion, paving the way for a form of psychedelic vertigo that would find its zenith in Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975). I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale takes its lead from Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood (released two years earlier), with its deadly marshlands trapping the first victim – but from that point on, the duo of obsession and sexual compulsion seem to be the only forces driving the narrative. This incredibly unsavoury vision of an Italy reeling from the hangover of the 1960s economic boom, congealing in an unreal villa overlooking a small village, can be seen as the wild, deranged reaction of giallo to the wry comedies of Dino Risi.

Vincent Malausa, “Cahiers du cinéma”, no. 706, December 2014

The use of location in I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale divides it into two parts: the first, in the medieval university city of Perugia, follows the pattern of many gialli set in urban centres; the second, shot in the small rural town of Tagliacozzo in Abruzzo, isolates representatives of globalised modernity in a remote backwater with a typically “rural giallo” thematic structure.
The plot follows a group of young international students, who attend parties with drug-taking hippies and in their sexual behaviour enact the giallo’s usual conflation of promiscuity, homosexuality and prostitution. When a detective addresses their class in an appeal for information, his brief, dismissive reference to the tendency of students to “protest and riot” in an attempt to “dismantle the state” implicitly places recent youth protest movements alongside such licentiousness in the melting pot that comprises a generic “modernity”…

Austin Fisher, Blood in the Streets. Histories of Violence in Italian Crime Cinema, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2019