“Everything in Argento’s movies is trying to kill you.” –Guillermo del Toro in Dario Argento Panico
For the novice, tackling Dario Argento’s filmography can be a daunting prospect. As one of the pillars of Italian horror alongside Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci, Argento has multiple masterpieces to his name. He’s also the sort of director who’s had several documentaries made about him, most recently last year’s Dario Argento Panico, which premiered on Shudder earlier this month, accompanied by thirteen of his features. With so many choices, the newcomer may not know where to start, so we’re recommending three standouts from his classic period, which extends from his directorial debut, 1970’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, though 1987’s Opera.
It may be tempting to start with Bird since, with the other parts of his “animal trilogy” (The Cat o’ Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet, both 1971), it established Argento as a master of the giallo. A better entry point, however, is 1975’s Profondo Rosso, a.k.a. Deep Red, which picked up the thread after Argento set it aside to make the 1973 historical picaresque The Five Days, set in 19th century Milan and very much in the mode of Sergio Leone, for whom Argento co-wrote Once Upon a Time in the West. Getting back to the basics – an eyewitness taking it upon himself to get to the bottom of a baffling mystery the police haven’t the first clue about – Deep Red adds a wrinkle in the form of a telepath who senses the presence of a killer in the audience of a conference on parapsychology, but is unable to foresee her own demise at their black leather-gloved hands.
While the psychic element anticipates the overtly paranormal horrors of Suspiria, Inferno, and Phenomena, the rest of the plot remains grounded in reality – or at least the heightened variety Argento favored. Working with screenwriter Bernardino Zapponi (a frequent collaborator of Fellini) he teases out the kind of mystery that was his stock in trade, centered on a secret from the past that must be ferreted out. Deep Red even interrupts its opening titles for a snippet of the tragic backstory the killer is determined to keep hidden, no matter how many murders it takes. One of their potential victims is pianist Marcus Daly, who witnessed the psychic’s murder (the first of many gory set-pieces that earned the film its alternate title, The Hatchet Murders), but is more haunted by the feeling he missed an important detail at the crime scene.
As Marcus, David Hemmings is the lone foreigner in a sea of Italians, following in the shoe leather of Tony Musante’s American writer in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, James Franciscus and Karl Malden (as a journalist and crossword puzzle deviser, respectively) in The Cat o’ Nine Tails, and rock drummer Michael Brandon in Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Much as he’d prefer going it alone, Marcus reluctantly teams up with a zealous journalist played by Daria Nicolodi, who became Argento’s partner and even co-wrote Suspiria. Unfortunately, some of her scenes with Hemmings hit the cutting room floor when Profondo Rosso was trimmed from 126 minutes to 104 to make the English-dubbed Deep Red (the version streaming on Shudder). This streamlining doesn’t lessen its effectiveness, but the same cannot be said for the Unsane cut of Argento’s 1982 film Tenebre, his return to giallo and definitive statement on the genre.
“This is boring.”
“All detection’s boring, but if you cut out the boring bits and keep the rest, you’ve got a bestseller.”
In creating protagonists for his gialli, Argento gravitated toward artistic types. Without the constraints of nine-to-five jobs, they’re free to pursue leads and run down clues as they come up. Tenebre revolves around American novelist Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa), who’s in Rome to promote his latest bestseller, also called Tenebre. His press tour is upstaged, however, by a series of gruesome murders inspired by the ones in his book – and carried out by an individual in Argento’s patented black leather gloves, which the director made a point of donning himself for their close-ups. Also seen in close-up in both Deep Red and Tenebre are their killers’ fetish objects and murder weapons, which the restless camera pans around to the accompaniment of Italian prog-rockers Goblin.
Other parallels between Deep Red and Tenebre are the flashbacks to the childhood traumas that drive their respective psychopaths, plus the protagonists’ dogged insistence they’re missing an important piece of the puzzle. Peter even speculates that “somebody who should be dead is alive, or somebody who should be alive is already dead.” Additionally, casting David Hemmings in Deep Red – intended to recall his breakout role in Antonioni’s Blowup – is echoed by having John Saxon (star of Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much, considered the first giallo) as Peter’s agent in Tenebre. The true stars, however, are the camera crew that pulled off the bravura, two-and-a-half-minute crane shot that precedes one of its show-stopping murder sequences. (Dario Argento Panico includes tantalizing behind-the-scenes footage showing how this was pulled off.)
“I always think it’s unwise to use movies as a guide for reality. Don’t you, inspector?”
Unlike Deep Red, Tenebre, and Phenomena, which endured severe cuts and odd title changes for US consumption (Phenomena getting released as Creepers), Opera arrived mostly intact and bearing the title Terror at the Opera. No matter what it’s called, it was Argento’s first stab at a Phantom of the Opera-type tale (his second, from 1998, is skippable), about a nervous understudy who has to go on in place of a temperamental diva, only to attract the attention of a psycho who gets his kicks tying her up and forcing her to watch him murder people. (In addition to the leather gloves, which are wrapped in rubber for extra kinkiness, Argento also gives him a black hood to conceal his identity.) Much like Tenebre’s Peter Neal, Opera includes an Argento stand-in, allowing him to fire back at his critics through horror-filmmaker-turned-opera-director Marco (Chariots of Fire star Ian Charleston), whose unconventional staging of Verdi’s Macbeth with live ravens tees up another impressive shot depicting a bird’s-eye view of one swooping over the panicking audience.
At times, Opera plays like a Dario Argento “greatest hits” package. The ravens not only recall the bird with the crystal plumage, but also a scene with mynah birds in Deep Red where one is impaled on a knitting needle. Likewise, the requisite pan across the killer’s deadly implements is matched by a tracking shot showing all the potential weapons in the opera house’s costume shop. Then there are the flashing red and green lights in one scene, which are reminiscent of the bold colors in Suspiria and Inferno. There’s even an apology of sorts for the infamous shot of the pinned lizard in Deep Red, since Opera closes with a lizard trapped under grass being freed. One shouldn’t mistake that for Argento going soft, though. When he was at the height of his powers – as in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, Suspiria, Tenebre, and Opera – Argento was unbeatable. And even in his 80s, he’s still capable of pulling off a suspenseful thriller like 2022’s Dark Glasses – his most recent film, and possibly not his last.
“Dario Argento Panico” is currently streaming on Shudder as part of the “All Hail Argento” collection.
