Dario Argento's movie, Non ho sonno (Sleepless) is a giallo and a particularly gory one. The film is divided into two parts, each of which corresponds to a particular year: 1983 and 2000. Police Commissioner Moretti (played with understatement by Max von Sydow) consoles an teen whose mother has just been brutally murdered: it is only much later that we see her being stabbed repeatedly and graphically in the mouth with a musical instrument, an English horn.

This murder and two others are laid at the door of a writer whose fiction has the nasty habit of turning into fact and who commits suicide, thus "proving" his guilt. However 17 years later in the year 2000, the murders start up again, leaving the commissioner to go on the hunt yet again.