It took me a while to really warm up to the work of Dario Argento, the most prominent purveyor of Italian horror films, better known as giallo. "Suspiria" intrigued me with its bright colors and deadly imagery, but the open-ended narrative left me puzzled. "The Bird With Crystal Plumage" had some fantastic suspense sequences, but didn't seem to add up to much. The films were always entertaining and inventive in their easy dispensation of horror schlock, but sometimes outlandish to the point of being bizarre.
Eventually I began to be drawn in by the unapologetic viscerality of Argento's work, the recurring themes and ideas, and the artistry of the gore. He does a few things particularly well - the depictions of the supernatural, the sinister first person POV shots of his killers and monsters, and the way he establishes this exciting mood of mystery and danger. Plot is secondary to incident - in fact Argento was known to build his films around his suspense and murder sequences. And those murder sequences still stand out as unusually brutal, bloody, and visceral even today. Rendered in vivid colors, full of mysterious symbols, and often elaborately shot with unusual angles, the deaths in an Argento film are always the main event.
"Profundo Rosso," known in the US as "Deep Red" is the Argento film that worked best for me, because it manages to maintain this thrilling, heightened atmosphere of suspense all the way through the whole film. From the very first scene, a Christmas flashback that turns deadly, we're treated to a deeply unsettling mix of the innocent and the horrific - disturbing images of nightmarish toys, scribbled children's drawings of evil deeds, and a small boy holding a very big knife next to the Christmas tree. Most of the mystery plotting revolves around David Hemmings' detective character decoding psychic visions and a ghastly picture book, but when we see a glimpse or two of the world through the eyes of the disturbed killer, and the color palette turns the red up to lurid levels, you can feel the psychopathy bleeding through the screen.
Likewise, while there are hints of the supernatural all over the film, and the killer has an obsession with toys, the actual kills in "Deep Red" are mostly very realistic and well grounded. The most we see of the killer for the bulk of the film is a pair of black leather glove-clad hands. These hands do not merely wield a gun from deep in the shadows, but reach out to actively bash victims' heads against walls, and drown a woman in a boiling bath. The murders have to play out in close-ups, because Argento shows them to us from the killer's point of view, but takes pains not to ever show us the killer. It's been widely reported that Argento was wearing the black gloves himself in all the close-ups. And it's thanks to his efforts, that the third act can present us with the rude shock of a monstrous puppet figure sprinting straight towards the next target - and for a few moments it sure seems like a possessed demon toy may have been the real killer all along.
We have to talk about the music, supplied by the prog-rock group Goblin, who Argento would go on to collaborate with on many other films. I find it difficult to think of Argento films without the work of Goblin, whose ominous, sonorous tracks are a great match for Argento's off-the-wall camera work and psychedelic mise en scene. "Deep Red" was their first project together, and it makes such a difference to the whole tone and feel of the film - adding a new layer of fantasy and psychological texture to Argento's giallo wonderland. And of all the amazing sets and settings that have appeared in Argento's films, my favorite is the decaying "Deep Red" mansion, with its ivy-covered stonework and telltale chipping plaster. Like so many other things in Argento films, it's a vision of beauty totally corrupted by the forces of evil. But it is still beautiful, if you can appreciate it for what it is.
So Happy Halloween, everyone. May all your dreams be sweet, and may all your nightmares be Italian.
What I've Seen - Dario Argento
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)
The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971)
Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971
Deep Red (1975)
Suspiria (1977)
Inferno (1980)
Tenebrae (1982)
Phenomena (1985)
Opera (1987)
The Stendhal Syndrome (1996)
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