Slant Magazine are definitely fans of Dario Argento. I thought I'd post a few of their reviews for the films of the greatest director in the horror genre's history.
Deep Red (1975) -
"Deep Red was Dario Argento's first full-fledged masterpiece, a riveting thriller whose secrets carefully unravel via a series of carefully calibrated compositions that become not unlike virtual gateways into Freudian pasts. Like Argento's ever-flowing camera, Deep Red's killer is everywhere—the protagonist's claustrophobia becomes a physical response both to the film's oppressive mise-en-scène and Argento's formal framing. Unlike The Cat O' Nine Tails, there's no silly scientific rationale here for the film's murders (indeed, there are no easy answers). Argento delicately grapples with issues feminism and masculinity within Deep Red's meticulously visual exegesis of a troubled psyche. If the truth in Antonioni's Blowup was inscribed in a photograph of a potential crime scene, truth in Deep Red is stamped in the memory of pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings, also the star of the Antonioni classic). The film's murders are gorgeous to the point of distraction. This is Argento's intent though—to scare and awe the spectator so that he or she won't see the obvious. The film's final piece de resistance evokes the elusiveness of memory but, more importantly, shows that the identity of the film's killer was always available to the careful spectator.
If Ennio Moriccone's lullabies from The Cat O' Nine Tails seemed discordant, Deep Red's Goblin score is the perfect compliment to Argento's id-driven narrative. The film's recurring lullaby is one from the killer's troubled past, chillingly played on a handheld tape player before every crime. As the film progresses, the airiness of this music gives way to retro organ sounds that owe plenty to the legendary underground soundtrack to Vampyros Lesbos. A remarkable tableaux mort punctuates the film's opening credits as the menacing Goblin score is overwhelmed by the sounds of the lullaby. Argento's subversive static shot could be a snapshot torn from the pages of a Grimm photo album. A murder is committed (evoked merely by the dueling shadows of the victim and killer) in a room containing a table, a record player and a garish Christmas tree. A bloody knife falls to the floor and a child's feet step into the frame. (Interestingly, the scene brings to mind the opening sequence of John Carpenter's Halloween, released three years after Deep Red.) The lullaby fades out and the credits—here, standard white letters on a black background—recommence. Is this a scene from the past? Is it a dream? Is the child a girl or a boy? Did the child commit the murder? But even before you ask these questions, you might forget you ever witnessed this distant memory.
Argento's camera hypnotically zooms in on Marcus (Hemmings) after an unsuccessful jam session. Standing up, he utters: "Too clean. Yes, too precise. Too formal. It should be more trashy. This kind of jazz came from the brothels." This is perhaps the first instance of self-reflexivity in Argento's films. Indeed, part of Deep Red's success is Argento's ability to transcend the trashy material with the remarkable formalism of his camera. Before Marcus can even finish his speech, Argento begins to zoom into a room where a parapsychology conference is taking place. This steady accumulation of shots zooming in on their subjects is strangely unnerving, as if Argento is stealthily luring us into his world. Three figures are seated at a table on the auditorium's stage: the telepathic Mrs. Helga Ulman (Macha Méril), animal-enthusiast Professor Giordani (Glauco Mauri) and the supposedly clairvoyant Mario Bardi (Piero Mazzinghi). While Giordani's discussion on telepathy in animals may amount to little more than gibberish, it seemingly prefigures the themes that highlight and undermine Argento's Phenomena. Helga "can see thoughts just as they are formed" and is suddenly overcome with intense emotions. She mumbles something about a nursery rhyme, a house and a hidden body while envisioning a sharp knife entering her torso. There's a killer in the room (perhaps the killer from the film's opening flashback scenario?) and he/she will commit more murders. Joyously aware of his cinema as a kind of performance art, Argento zooms out of the conference and the door's surrounding red drapes close before the camera.
The film's camera pans over objects lying on a black table: a miniature crib being toppled by a marble, a voodoo doll made of red yarn, a child's drawing depicting a murder and a series of knives. More remarkable than the rich colors that highlight this scene and others like it are the psychoanalytic nature of Argento's close-ups. Argento likens the innocence of youth with killer objects, evoking the murder's troubled past. In one repulsive close-up, the killer applies mascara to one of his or her eyes. Is the killer a woman or, as a later scene may suggests, a transvestite? Helga is speaking on the phone with a friend when she hears the sounds of the film's nursery rhyme. Then, a knock on the door—it's the killer, who barges into the apartment even before Helga can run away. She is axed with such brutal and expert precision that Argento doesn't even allow her to ponder just how expertly he predicted her own demise. Argento's camera crawls over Helga's fabulous furniture (there's a table in the shape of the Star of David in one part of the room—during her funeral, it's revealed that she's Jewish) before the killer's gloved hands enter the frame and settle on Helga's notes. The killer must erase all evidence of the woman's premonition.
Just before Helga is killed, Marcus is seen having a conversation with his alcoholic best friend, Carlo (Gabriele Lavia). The men discuss politics, music and human survival before the grotesque statue of a Greek God hovering above a fountain. Marcus walks past the bar where he works as a performer, which Argento purposefully and eerily models after Helnwein's "Nighthawks" (a.k.a. "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams"). It's no coincidence that Argento chooses the Helnwein painting to emulate. Not unlike the painting's famous stars (Marilyn Monroe, James Dean), Argento's characters resemble ghosts. Not only does most of the film take place at night and the streets are barely populated. Even the few people that walk through the streets of Argento's ghost world come to resemble mannequins trapped in time. The Greek statue separates Carlo and Marcus during a conversation later in the film. Not only does the statue's nakedness serve to emphasize the honesty of their relationship but also seemingly anticipates the revelation of Carlo's homosexuality.
Marcus watches as Helga's face is thrust through a window and her neck is pierced with shards of glass. Marcus enters Helga's apartment (she lives below his own apartment) and pulls Helga away from the window. The hallway in Helga's apartment is lined with a series of small Munchian paintings. It is here that Argento forces the spectator to take on Marcus's point of view as the camera begins to track down the hallway. A small niche to the side of the hallway reveals a series of pale, gruesome portraits. Staring out onto the promenade below, Marcus sees a figure clad in black running from the building. Carlo drunkenly walks by the bar, seemingly oblivious to what has just transpired. Once the police arrive and Marcus makes his way down Helga's hallway, he comes to believe that a painting has been stolen from the apartment but seemingly pays little attention to this suspicion. Later, when Marcus and Carlo discuss the events, Carlo suggests the obvious: "But maybe the painting was made to disappear, because it represented something important." This missing painting, of course, is the ultimate clue to solving the identity of the film's killer though Argento doesn't call too much attention to David's trip down the hallway should the spectator solve the mystery entirely too early.
At the crime scene, Marcus is introduced to an overzealous reporter named Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi), who publishes his picture in the local newspaper, thus perpetuating the killer's pursuit of Marcus. Throughout the film, Argento seemingly challenges Marcus's masculinity through a series of comic encounters with Nicolodi's feminist construct. Carlo has already built a wall between himself and Marcus when he says, "I am the proletarian of the pianoforte while you are the bourgeois. You play for the sake of art and you enjoy it. I play for survival." It's no coincidence then that a police officer seems to ridicule Marcus for being a pianist. Marcus is defensive, saying: "You think playing the piano isn't a job? What is it then, a joke?" Marcus later tells Gianna that artists are very sensitive people while reporters have the hides of elephants. Gianna proclaims that she became a reporter in order to be independent from men while Marcus humorously acknowledges the source of his musical talents: "My psychiatrist would say that it's because I hated my father, so when I bang the keys I'm really bashing his teeth in." Though Marcus sets himself up as a sexist and a self-acknowledged weakling, Argento is more than willing to deflate his fragile ego. Gianna challenges Marcus to a round of hand wrestling—she beats him twice though he calls her a cheater on both occasions.
Looking for Carlo, Marcus makes small talk with his friend's mother, Martha (Clara Calamai). Before disclosing her son's location, the woman rambles on about an acting career that she once had to put on hold. On the walls are pictures from her supposed film career (the stills, in fact, are those from Calamai's early career in Italian cinema). Marcus finds Carlo inside his lover Massimo Ricci's (Geraldine Hooper) apartment. Carlo's secret is out and he's clearly resentful: "Good old Carlo, he's not only a drunk but a faggot as well." Since Marcus is so used to having his masculinity called into question, he barely bats an eye when he discovers Carlo's secret. Gay characters figure prominently in Argento films though they've never been revealed to be the film's killers. Since Argento suspects everyone equally, the spectator has to turn to his mise-en-scène for clues. A lesser director may have pegged Massimo as the Deep Red killer. Seeing as he is a transvestite, this would explain the earlier close-up of mascara being applied to an eye. Interestingly, Massimo is never heard from again. He is merely Carlo's considerate lover who just happens to be effeminate.
Argento's camera zooms back from an archway, pans up the outside of his stage-like apartment and zooms into his rehearsal studio. The camera then pans across the staff on Marcus's sheet music, revealing that the pianist is currently composing a song. Argento's hideously silent cinematic language remarkably evokes Marcus's claustrophobia. Marcus doesn't notice that plaster dust has fallen from the ceiling and onto his piano. Once Marcus realizes that someone was walking on the roof and has invaded his space (he knows because he can hear the lullaby), he continues to play his music in order to give the killer the illusion that he's lost in his music. With one hand he locks the door to his studio and calls Gianna for help. From outside the door the killer is heard whispering, "This time you're safe. But I'll kill you sooner or later." Once Marcus manages to secure an LP that contains the killer's lullaby, Professor Giordani recommends that Marcus read "Ghosts of Today and Legends of the Modern Age," by Amanda Righetti. Sitting inside an unusually spacious library chamber, Marcus reads from the book's first chapter ("The House of the Screaming Boy") and comes across a ghoulish tale of ghostly wails and haunting lullabies. Marcus believes this is a clue and begins to search for the house pictured inside the book.
Amanda Righetti is about to pay the price for transcribing the killer's dangerous past. Stepping into her country house, she notices a toy baby hanging from a rope. Perturbed though not quite scared senseless, Amanda decides to stay inside her home. Soon the lights go out and Amanda's precious birds turn against her. Argento remarkable use of widescreen teases the spectator with the possibility that the killer can jump into frame any second—most remarkable is that the killer doesn't! Amanda dies inside her bathroom during a set piece that arguably remains Argento's greatest to date. Amanda's death is Argento's ingenious wink at the spectator. Emphasizing the nature of Deep Red as a literal puzzle, Argento fashions the woman's demise as a virtual clue waiting to be cracked. After smashing Amanda's teeth against the bathroom counter, the killer turns on the bathtub's hot water and gives the woman a deadly facial. Amanda falls to the floor and is left to scribble a last-minute note on her steam-coated linoleum walls.
Marcus stumbles on Amanda's body and informs Giordani of the bizarre positioning of the woman's finger, almost as if she were pointing to something. Giordani doesn't give Marcus's observation a second thought until he arrives at Amanda's house. There he meets Amanda's maid, who cleans the blood off the bathroom sink. The anticipation is unnerving—how long will it take for Giordani to break the linoleum code? As the bathroom fills with hot steam emanating from the sink, the message on the wall reappears: "IT WAS." As if this anticipation weren't grueling enough, Argento continues to daringly leave the spectator in the dark. Argento's long shots truly evoke the pervasiveness of killer's reach. From the library to the Amanda's home, the killer is seemingly everywhere. Regardless of whether the killer spent the night at Amanda's or not is beside the point—Giordani is a dead man. Sitting in his study, Giordani witnesses a mechanical doll advancing in his direction. Why would the killer go to such bizarre lengths to kill Giordani? No matter. The doll shocks Giordani into submission—perhaps more frightening than his death is the way his bold-faced horror turns into smug self-satisfaction. Curiously, the doll's gangly movements seem to call attention to the rigorous nature of Argento's camera and Giordani's formal death.
Marcus stumbles upon "the house of the screaming child" pictured inside Amanda's book. After meeting the home's elderly caretaker, Rodi (Furio Meniconi), Marcus witnesses a strange transaction between the man and his young daughter. Slapped for what appears to be no reason, Olga (Nicoletta Elmi) laughs ghoulishly in appreciation. Argento pans down Rodi's legs and reveals a lizard struggling against death. Pierced by what appears to be a small sewing needle, the lizard seemingly dies as a consequence of living next to a house of demons. Some have made a connection between the lizard and Giordani's study of animal telepathy though I'd wager that the animal is little more than Argento's favorite reptile. (Lizards appear in Opera, Trauma and, most curiously, in Inferno while animal telepathy plays a key role in Phenomena.) Making his way into the house, Marcus discovers a child's gruesome drawing concealed on a wall covered in plaster. The drawing depicts the film's opening tableaux mort: a bloodied older man screams as a smaller figure prepares to stab him. In the background a Christmas tree keeps watch. To Marcus, the image suggests that the small child must now be the hatchet murderer.
While Marcus certainly has enough to go on, Argento once more winks at his audience. After Marcus leaves the room of the screaming child, a small portion of the wall's plaster falls to the ground revealing a missing piece of the puzzle: next to the dying man appears a third figure that seemingly partook in his Christmastime murder. Argento cleverly sets up a later set piece when Marcus drives past a group of trucks from the Road Assistance for Heavy Transportation. Looking closely at the picture of the home as it appears in Amanda's book, Marcus discovers that a room has been sealed off. How remarkable is it that Deep Red comes to resemble a 1000-piece puzzle slowly and coming together to reveal a horrifying secret? Marcus discovers a decayed body sitting on a chair (the man in the child's drawing) in the hidden room though he's unceremoniously knocked unconscious before he can make any sense out of this discovery. Marcus awakens with Gianna hovering above him, the mansion burning to pieces in the background. Judging by Gianna's grim expression, Argento teasingly suggests she might be the killer before she begins to take pleasure in the fact that she pulled him from the blaze. Remember: Deep Red is more than a virtual puzzle, it's also a game of sexual politics.
Gianna calls the fire department from Rodi's home and Marcus walks into Olga's room only to discover a picture hanging on her wall that is identical to the one drawn by the screaming boy. "She's a strange child. She likes the macabre," says Rodi to a dumbfounded Marcus. To Marcus, it's impossible of course for the girl to have drawn a painting so remarkably similar to that of the screaming boy's. Having seen the painting at the Leonardo Da Vinci School while she was cleaning up the archives, the girl unknowingly recreates the tortured past of the very boy who lived in the house next to her own. Once Gianna and Marcus make it to the school and find the screaming boy's sketch, a signature on the drawing seemingly links Carlo to the crimes. Even though Carlo stabs Gianna with his knife, the careful spectator already knows he is innocent. Remember: he was speaking with Marcus at the piazza during the time of Helga's demise. Standing before Marcus, a gun-wielding Carlo admits to the crimes before threatening to shoot his best friend. When the police arrive, Carlo runs into the street and is violently dragged to his death when his foot gets stuck on a hook attached to one of the Road Assistance trucks. Marcus, though, isn't convinced of Carlo's guilt and heads back to the scene of the original crime. There he comes in contact with the many faces of the film's killer but not before he's forced to displace memory into the present.
The elements of Argento's "animal trilogy" (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Cat O' Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet) don't particularly lend themselves to explanations within any system of associations implied by the rest of the filmic experience. Deep Red's elements on the other hand work as a group collective, shaping and reshaping Marcus's view of reality as the film moves along. If Blowup is a film about the impossibility of perception, then Deep Red is entirely more hopeful. Marcus solves the identity of the film's murderer as he makes one final trip down Helga's hallway. What he first thought was a missing Munchian painting was indeed the killer's reflection on a mirror that still hangs in the niche adjacent to the hallway. (This fabulous revelation was always available to the spectator should they have been unfortunate enough to replay Marcus's earlier trip down the hallway using their rewind button.) Marcus makes the final connection just as he turns to greet the film's killer: Carlo's mother, Marta. She is the deluded biddy whose acting career was put on hold because of her husband's demands. Her resentment for the man led to his Christmas slaughter. Take Marta as Argento's doppelganger—the elaborateness of Deep Red's murders have sprung forth from the mind of a stifled artist and feminist. Marta's final performance is especially gruesome not because of the fabulous nature with which she meets her demise but because Marcus is forced to stare at his reflection in a pool of blood. Once again, Argento emphasizes the relentlessness of the gaze and the importance of "looking" in order to get the supreme truth."
Suspiria (1977) -
"After the mostly international success of Deep Red, Dario Argento grew tired of making giallos. 1977's Suspiria, the first part of the director's unfinished Three Mothers trilogy, marked his first foray into the realm of the supernatural. Argento's deliriously artificial horror film owes as much to Georges Méliès and German Expressionism (specifically The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) as it does to Jean Cocteau and Grimm fairy tales. Having traveled through many European capitals (including the geographical "magic" point where Switzerland, France, and Germany meet), Argento became entranced with the Austrian-born Rudolf Steiner, whose controversial Waldorf schools had been attacked for teaching occult practices in the guise of arts-based education. Less real-world influences came from Argento's partner Daria Nicolodi, who had become attracted to various fairy-tale sources, from Alice in Wonderland and Bluebeard to Pinocchio and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Argento's visuals actively evoke a fairy-tale fantastique, engaging and toying with the Technicolor glory of Disney's cartoon version of Snow White, a film the director had been obsessed with since youth. Additional elements were filtered into the project from Suspiria de Profundis (Sighs from the Depths), a collection of essays written by Thomas De Quincey (Confessions of an Opium Eater), and Fritz Lang's little-seen The Secret Beyond the Door, a Freudian interpretation of the Bluebeard story from which the Argento film borrows considerably more than the fabulous Joan Bennett.
The delirious Goblin composition that accompanies the film's opening scene brings to mind the sounds of a little girl's ballerina music box. A narrator's voice is barely audible over the soundtrack, which plays atop the standard white-on-black credits: "Suzy Banyon decided to perfect her ballet studies in the most famous school of dance in Europe. She chose the celebrated Tanzakademie of Freiburg. One day at 9am, she left Kennedy airport, New York, and arrived in Germany at 10:40 local time." While there are few signifiers here to suggest the tale takes place in Germany, Argento subtly focuses the spectator's gaze on a poster of the Black Forest taped to one of the airport terminal's walls. Suspiria may be Argento's silliest work, but while its plot is scarcely sensible, the film rightfully earns its notoriety via Argento's fabulous and detailed engagement and reworking of fairy-tale motifs. The film's opening "once upon a time" giddily anticipates the nasty folktale that follows.
Suzy (Jessica Harper) arrives at the German airport. Like a ballerina leaving the safety of her music box, she passes through the airport's automatic doors and hails a taxi in the middle of a torrential rainstorm. The lights from the taxicab chillingly illuminate the crevices between the forest trees; a flash of lightning reveals a shadowy image (perhaps a scythe or a knife) reflected on a large tree stump. All the while, Suzy is innocently bathed in the warm blue tones of Luciano Tovoli's glorious cinematography. Blink and you'll miss a subliminal superimposition—reflected on the cab's security divider is the still image of a screaming face (possibly that of Argento's). Arriving at the Tanzakademie, a drenched Suzy witnesses a terrified Pat (Eva Axen) screaming up to someone inside the school. Pat runs off and Suzy is told to leave the school by a girl talking into an intercom. Suzy is too frazzled to pay much attention to Pat's cries, purposefully muted by Argento so as to leave both Suzy and the spectator in the dark. By film's end, Suzy comes to discover that her recollection of Pat's exact words (she can only remember the words "secret" and "irises") will lead to her salvation.
Riding back into the city, Suzy watches a frightened Pat running through the Black Forest. (Compare the jaw-dropping lighting and disorienting pacing of this scene to a similar moment from Secret Beyond the Door when Bennett's character runs into a forest and believes she's being chased by her husband, played by Michael Redgrave.) Pat stays the night with a friend, whose apartment building's architecture is outrageously garish but nowhere near as unnerving as the wallpaper in Pat's bedroom. Modeled after M.C. Escher's "Sky and Water," the walls evoke Argento's signature obsession with sight and sightlessness. Birds and fish are the composite elements, uniting to form an ornate visual landscape. Separately, though, each animal forms a point of departure. The pictorial elements interlock at various points while becoming independent from each other as the wallpaper nears the room's window. Paired concepts such as dark/light and mobility/immobility come to mind as the trapped Pat is seemingly lulled to the window. Pat is hung from a telephone wire and violently thrust through the stained glass ceiling of the apartment complex; the falling glass, in turn, slices Pat's friend to death. The shattered glass, Pat's dangling corpse and her dribbling blood become glorious elements of the apartment building's already phenomenal artificiality.
An even more impressive manipulation of mise-en-scène lies in the film's door handles, another possible shout-out to Secret Beyond the Door: In their higher than usual positions, the handles emphasize the youth and stature of the film's characters in relation to their grotesquely imposing doll house. Suzy returns to the school, meeting the faculty and her fellow students. With the exception of Sara (Stefania Casini), all the girls are petty and cruel. The administrators—the miserly Madame Blanc (Bennett) and the firm Miss Tanner (Alida Valli)—are cold and suspiciously secretive. Just as Madame Blanc and Miss Tanner are the picture-perfect renditions of evil stepmothers, the school's attendees bring to mind Cinderella's bitchy stepsisters. Madame Blanc, like Snow White's jealous stepmother, is instantly aware (and wary) of Suzy's beauty: "You're pretty, very pretty indeed." More importantly, though, is the element of distance from family—Suzy's journey is similar to that of Snow White's in that both heroines left the comfort of home for the misleading solace of a dwelling in the woods. Suzy is forced to stay at the Academy after a mysterious fainting spell; like Snow White's poisoned apple, wine has been used to keep Suzy close to the enemy. Argento wallows in all sorts of weird behavior when the gossipy Olga goes on about the snake-like nature of girls whose names begin with the letter "S" while another student poetically pontificates about school procedures: "Squawk, squawk, squawk. Mata Hari is gong to make her daily report." Even the words in the film are like seductions.
The wallpaper in Pat's bedroom is also Argento's first allusion to flying in the film. Supernatural behavior in Suspiria is pervasive and inescapable, commanded by a coven of witches. Even a simple swim is seemingly chaperoned by a faceless evil. It is this otherworldly presence that perhaps explains why the rationale for death in the film remains so inexplicable: the school's blind piano instructor, Daniel (Flavio Bucci), is mauled to death by his own guide dog; and earlier in the film, Daniel is unceremoniously fired from the school after his dog is accused of taking a bite out of Madame Blanc's young, blond-haired nephew. Whether the dog intentionally attacked the child is beside the point, the animal is clearly commanded by a supernatural being when it lunges for his own master. In this, the film's signature set piece, Tovoli's camera takes on the point of view of a flying monster. Walking through a desolate Munich plaza, the helpless blind man senses evil. Shadowy figures hovering above the plaza's main building become the sole means by which the spectator can gauge the shape of this evil. Later in the film, a bat attacks Suzy in her bathroom. The animal seems to function as bait, convincing Suzy to explore the cavernous hallways of the schoolhouse.
The safety of the Freiburg airport gives way to the psychedelic terror of the Academy, where Suzy has been propelled into Alice's terrifyingly colorful rabbit hole. The film's visual palette is suggestive of a hierarchical journey through the Academy. Hallways are bathed in reds, yellows, and blues, and, in effect, different rooms in the school begin to take on a meaning all their own. Suzy meets the administrators in the garish Blue Room, where a grandiose staircase comes with a handrail made of golden snakes; Miss Tanner conducts her classes in the Red Room, where Suzy defends her right to live outside the school; and in the Yellow Room, her fainting spell gives way to a ravishing nosebleed. Journeying through the school's hallways, a poisoned Suzy seems frozen in time; she's overwhelmed by air-born dust particles and blinded by the light reflected off a star-shaped object being cleaned off by the school's kitchen woman. Every single image is ravishingly beautiful, like watching Secret Beyond the Door in Technicolor!
Traps have been set for those who should near or stumble upon the school's hidden passages—a nosy Sara meets her Grimm demise inside a room inundated with barbed wire. After her friend's demise, Suzy is forced to crack the code of the "secret/irises," imprinted on the walls of Madame Blanc's flowery chamber room and readily available to Suzy (not to mention the careful spectator) for deciphering. Once Suzy has destroyed the coven of witches, walls begin to crumble and crack. Indeed, the intricacies of Argento's mise-en-scène are as beautiful to behold as they are devastating to see falling apart. Suzy fights for balance, walking through the jewel-toned hallways of the academy so carefree she resembles a skittish, liberated diva seeking refuge from the deep recesses of her own subconscious. Once skeptical, she is now the master of Argento's magical domain. Snow White has left the building."
Inferno (1980) -
"I don't know what price I shall have to pay for breaking what we alchemists call Silentium. The life experience of our colleague should teach us not to upset laymen by imposing our knowledge upon them. I, Varelli, an architect living in London, met the Three Mothers and designed and built for them three dwelling places." This voiceover from the prologue of Dario Argento's Inferno describes De Quincey's matriarchal trinity by way of the fictional tome The Three Mothers, written by E. Varelli. With a Cassell's Latin dictionary by her side, New Yorker Rose Elliot (Irene Miracle) learns of the three homes Varelli built for the Three Mothers: one in Rome, one in New York, and the third in Freiburg, Germany. This passage seemingly explains the events that transpired in Suspiria—the witches at the Tanzakademie called on the strength of Helena Marcos in honor of Mater Suspiriorum—while setting up the events of Inferno and the yet to be produced Mother of Tears (which, according to Daria Nicolodi, has been ready to film since 1984). Without a heart-pumping Goblin score, the relatively plot-senseless Inferno—even after multiple viewings—feels like the sub-par version of Suspiria. More so than any other Argento film, this one is for the fans, especially for those interested in the details of the Three Mothers trilogy.
Rose, a poet, comes to believe that her gothic abode is a coven for Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness. Rose's building is inhabited by curious characters: her rich friend Elise Stallone Van Adler (Daria Nicolodi), her ominous manservant Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), an elderly cripple (Feodor Chaliapin), his nurse (Veroniz Lazar) and the building's landlady, Carol (Alida Valli, Suspiria's Miss Tanner). Rose's brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey), a music student in Rome, receives a letter from his sister, asking that he come to New York to help her investigate. (He will eventually come face to face with Mater Tenebrarum after toiling his way through the concealed passageways of Rose's building.) Mark lives in Rome, the dwelling place of Mater Lachrymarum. While reading Rose's letter in one of his music classes, Mark becomes entranced by a female in the class, a campy femme fatale who strokes a fluffy white cat. Played by Ana Pieroni (Tenebre), the woman makes one more appearance in the film. She rides past the apartment of Mark's murdered girlfriend Sara (Eleonora Giorgi), the first person to stumble across the secret of the Three Mothers. Pieroni's nameless character is Mater Lachrymarum herself, ridding Rome of busybodies just as Mater Tenebrarum does the dirty work in the film's New York locale. (Pieroni's death in Tenebre is perhaps a hidden reference to the unfinished status of Three Mothers film trilogy.)
Varelli's text details that "the land upon which the three houses have been constructed will eventually become deathly and plague-ridden, so much so that the area all around will reek horribly." The mothers' secrets are accessible through three keys: the first, no doubt, was the iris in Madame Blanc's Suspiria office; the second "is hidden in the cellar under their houses"; and the third key "can be found under the soles of your shoes." The smell that consumes the Inferno building is enough to convince Rose that she must be living inside Mater Tenebrarum's deadly abode. In the film's most outstanding set piece, she goes looking for the mother's key by diving through a hole in the building's cellar. There she encounters Mater Tenebrarum's underwater chamber and a hideous floating corpse to boot. Giallo director Mario Bava, whose influence on Argento is legendary, staged this sequence for his protege. Bava's presence here may explain why the film's subdued lighting brings to mind Bava's The Whip and the Body. If Inferno is remarkable to look at, Argento's use of signs and metaphors are loopy at best.
Kazanian, the antique bookseller, tries to drown a sack full of cumbersome cats in a Central Park pond. When his crutches fall to the ground, rats begin to feast on his writhing body. Undoubtedly controlled by the city's first total eclipse in almost 50 years, the rats have been seemingly controlled by a knife-wielding hot dog vendor. If this sequence comes out of nowhere then more dubious is the water imagery Argento toys with throughout the film. Consumed by the smell of Rose's building, Mark faints and dreams of crashing waves. When he awakens, Carol and the nurse stand above him celebrating the effects of their "heart medicine." If there's any logic to this peculiar behavior, it's spuriously explained by film's end. Oblivious to the fact that her building had ears, Elise is killed with little fanfare and leaves her manservant and Carol to ghoulishly salivate over her fortune. When they too are done away with, the elderly cripple reveals himself as the author Varelli (in hindsight, this isn't a particularly interesting revelations), who constructed the building for Mater Tenebrarum, his nurse. The final showdown between Mark and Death incarnate pales in comparison to Suspiria's delirious finale. Argento undervalues his material but set pieces are glorious enough that the film's plot contrivances can be forgiven."
Tenebre (1982) -
"The success of Dario Argento's masterpiece Tenebre depends on the spectator's appreciation for its rigid self-reflexivity. During the film's opening sequence, the killer's gloved hands hold a book (titled Tenebrae, a variation of the film's title) up to a flame. (These hands actually belong to Argento, no doubt a way of entering the film's narrative indirectly.) A faceless narrator reads the following passage: "The impulse had become irresistible. There was only one answer to the fury that tortured him. And so he committed his first act of murder. He had broken the most deep-rooted taboo and found not guilt or fear, but freedom. Every humiliation which stood in his way could be swept aside by this simple act of annihilation: Murder." This is a disclaimer of sorts and it offers many important hints. And while these words represent many things, mainly they serve as an unbridled apology for both the actions of the film's murderers and for Argento's very own cinema of horror. It's as if Argento is saying that he can't help himself.
One of Tenebre's greater achievements is that it demands that we work to solve the identity of the killer, all the while daring us to get it wrong. No scene better details the Genovese syndrome at work here than the strange events surrounding the death of the film's first victim. Writer Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosca) is on his way to Rome to promote his new book (the one burnt in the film's opening shot) and discovers that someone is using his novel to justify a series of murders. A bookstore owner reprimands a young woman after she tries to shoplift a copy of the tome. She's released under her own recognizance, all the while being peeped at by the film's ominous, unknown killer. A homeless man threatens to sexually assault the sexy shoplifter though it seems that a woman watching them from a window above will serve as her silent protector should the man go to far. But Argento has always been concerned with the passive gaze and he evokes a chilling atmosphere of human detachment and non-involvement when the true killer finally slices the woman to pieces.
The fact that the killer photographs his crime scenes suggests that he (or she) derives pleasure from "seeing" his victims suffer. The film's elements of spectatorship are inextricably bound to and informed by Argento's compositional allowances. The old lady in the window gazes blankly at the homeless man as he hits on the young woman. Hellbent on hurting the woman, the homeless man follows her to her home only to witness her death at the hands of the film's true killer. Is he shocked by what he saw or is he dumbfounded that someone beat him to the punch? If it isn't already clear that Tenebre is very much obsessed with the nature of sight and sightlessness, Argento frequently cuts away to extreme close-ups of eyes in various states of unrest. Additionally, his audacious mise-en-scène seemingly likens his own voyeuristic gaze to that the killer's own psychological fetishes.
Since the killer's face is carefully hidden off-screen for most of the film, the audience is left to tease out the film's many ambiguities via a series of context clues. Peter arrives in Rome via airplane, takes an urgent call on a bright red-colored telephone and has his luggage stolen and ransacked by a woman we later discover to be his ex-wife, Jane (Veronic Lario). The bursts of color are most important here, because a second viewing of the film suggests that there's something more to Argento's elaborate use of color (like the spare use of reds and blues) beyond mere shout-outs to Antonioni's Blowup (the film's cinematographer, Luciano Tovoli, frequently collaborated with Antonioni).
Argento's preoccupation with architecture-as-terror-mechanism is ritualistic in nature and, despite the grotesque results, is ravishing to behold. The interior décor of many rooms compliments the death of the film's victims with great symmetry. A sharp object in Peter's hotel room prognosticates doom while the dead bodies of Tilda (Mirella D'Angelo) and her girlfriend fall to the ground in such a way that their corpses become symbiotic elements of Argento's mise-en-scène. A panoramic shot outside Tilda's home prefaces the woman's death—Argento's camera fluidly hovers up the home's outer walls, across its roof and down to the ground. The psychological result is a claustrophobic one and evokes the pervasiveness of the killer's reach. Before dying, Tilda stares out her window, seemingly unaware that her thoroughly modern home has turned into a deathtrap.
Tilda, the daughter of one of Peter's longtime friends, bumps into the author inside a hotel lobby. She calls Tenebrae a sexist novel. "Why do you despise women so much?" she asks, as if speaking to Argento himself. Critics have suggested that Argento is hostile to his female characters, a theory the director deems bogus. Like magpie visionary De Palma, Argento is first and foremost a man fond of female beauty. Of course, Argento has said he prefers to kill beautiful women instead of ugly ones. But this response is less sexist than par for course coming from a very heterosexual director whose made a career of building and destroying beautiful things. The fact that Argento uses his own hands as substitutes for those of his killers has also lent fire to these sexist claims. Argento refuses to discuss the rationale behind this "hands-on" approach, though he's more than willing to put himself on the line and suggest that the horror director (not unlike Peter) is perhaps subconsciously oblivious to the moral implications of the art they create.
Both Peter and Argento's moral scruples are called into explicit question when a book critic, Christiano (John Steiner), interviews Peter. Christiano finds it coincidental that Peter's fictional victims are all deviants of some kind—that each murder can be read as an attempt at ridding society of a so-called pestilence. It bears mentioning that Argento himself was a critic for the Rome daily Paese Sera and is therefore hyper-conscious of the paired rivals battling it out during this scene: murderer/victim, critic/creator, fan/author. Christiano is in fact Tenebre's copy-cat killer, proactively using Peter's book as a means to justify his crimes (he thinks he's cleansing Rome's moral ailments).
When Christiano calls Tenebrae a book about human perversion, Peter scoffs. Not only is Peter oblivious to the moral implications of his novel, he fails to understand why Detective Germani (Giluliano Gemma) must question him when pages of Tenebrae are found stuffed inside the mouth of the film's first victim. Peter asks, "If someone is killed with a Smith & Wesson revolver, do you go and interview the president of Smith & Wesson?" It's a valid point that he himself fascinatingly subverts by film's end, when he is revealed to be the film's second killer. Even more successful than Deep Red, Tenebre evokes the chilling evolution of altered states—here, though, Peter adopts his madness not merely from his own fractured past but also from the mind of someone else.
Before Argento discloses the identity of Tenebre's psychopath, all signs seemingly point to Jane. She make's frequent crank calls to Peter's hotel, all of which following the deaths of many of the film's characters, and she's always in the vicinity of the hotel whenever the killer's letters arrive. Jane's phone calls are first perceived as threats from the killer when in retrospect they are nothing more than the emotional rants of a bitter ex. When Germani, a fan of Peter's works, finally reads Tenebrae, he takes pride in telling Peter that he discovered the identity of the book's killer by page 34. As a labyrinthine study of "wrong man" theory, Tenebre may owe plenty to North by Northwest but it's far superior to Hitchcock's pop classic. Though more user-friendly than Tenebre, Northwest never involves or implicates the spectator in its on-screen mayhem. Anyone whose watched Tenebre more than once has no doubt noticed how everything is so precisely spelled out—it's just a matter of putting the pieces together in the right order. It's no coincidence then that Argento's masterpiece plays out like a cinematic rendition of a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
Undoubtedly annoyed by the detective's educated guess, Peter looks to outwit the detective by catching Rome's runaway killer on his own. If Peter is the film's Sherlock Holmes, local youth Gianni (Christian Borromeo) is his Watson. The teen inexplicably leaves the hotel owner's daughter, Maria (Lara Wendel), alone in a deserted city street after a furious bike ride through the streets of Rome. The girl is eventually chased by a rabid, quasi-bionic Dohberman through a field and seeks refuge inside the nearest home which, ironically, turns out to be that of the film's killer. She stumbles into the basement and discovers the photographs taken by the killer of his victims. Until now, Christiano was little more than an overzealous, prodding critic. Now he's something else entirely.
When Peter flips through the local phone book, he discovers that Maria's body was found near Christiano's backyard. As far as the spectator is concerned, the case is solved when Christiano is indeed revealed to be the film's killer moralist. (It's impossible to ignore the critic's religious moniker, especially since Tenebre functions in many ways as a Christian allegory.) Taking Christiano's many justifications into account, it's safe to assume that he killed the first victim because she tried to steal a copy of Tenebrae (he might say: "Thou shalt not steal!") while Tilda and her girlfriend were likely hacked to pieces for being lesbians. Maria, on the other hand, was an unfortunate victim of circumstance, punished for spying and being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
In his justification of Tenebrae as a manifesto against corruption, Christiano pointed out that one of Tenebrae's victims was a homosexual. For Peter, this is beside the point. The author goes as far as to acknowledge that his gay victim is a perfectly normal human being. In retrospect, Christiano's interview with Peter could read as the critic's own apology for the murders he himself has committed. Interestingly, though, he defends his Catholic beliefs (he's pro-choice and pro-divorce) and therefore weakens his moral justifications. If Peter's counter-argument is to be taken as Argento's own self-defense then Tenebre is really nothing more than rigorous study of moral gray areas.
Tilda's death is the film's most spectacular. She changes clothes while staring at the off-screen space directly in front of her, seemingly aware of the presence of the camera and spectator but blind to the presence of the film's killer. When the faceless Christiano lunges out at her, Argento implies that the faceless Christiano was there all along. Her "blindness" is in many ways a cultural one, but it more literally evokes Argento's obsession with the unreliability of his victims' gazes. This fabulous point-of-view perspective also has a way of implicating the spectator in Tilda's death. Through the loud score, a barely discernable whisper can be heard: "Filthy, slimey pervert." According to Christiano, Tilda is corrupt and a sad victim to her sexual weakness.
The note found after Maria's death implies that the murderer's next victim will be "the great corrupter." Before he can commit the next murder, though, Christiano himself becomes Tenebre's fourth victim. While Christiano certainly doesn't plan to die, his death still sticks to the predestined formula: the second killer (Peter) views the critic as the great corrupter and, in effect, more corrupt than himself (the creator). Before fingering Christiano as the killer, Peter says: "If Peter Neal got it right, that would be something." He does get it right but Germani thinks it's more than something, though he (and the spectator) won't realize for another half-hour that the detective is conducting a background check on the troubled author. Now that Tenebre has a second killer, the audience is forced to reevaluate everything that transpired from the point of Christiano's death onward.
If the naïve Peter is somewhat oblivious to the notion that his book is used to judge the perverse, that's merely because he's unconscious of the full force of his bubbling subconscious. Argento's extreme close-up of pills lying on a jet-black table precedes images of a mysterious shadow awakening from deep slumber. A pupil dilates on-screen and Argento takes us inside a sinewy dreamscape where four men pursue a woman through a sandy beach. After being rejected by the woman, one man slaps her in the face and runs away. The men catch up to him and the woman imparts punishment: she drives the heel from one of her red-colored shoes into his throat. (The gorgeous Eva Robins, a real-life transsexual, stars as the mystery woman, proving beyond a doubt that Argento's view of the female form isn't very easy to pin down.)
If all of this sounds eerily familiar to a De Palma hallucination, it's no coincidence. Tenebre seemingly lays out much of the groundwork for De Palma's silly Raising Cain. Tenebre is a riveting defense of auteur theory, ripe with self-reflexive discourse and various moral conflicts. It's both a riveting horror film and an architect's worst nightmare. In Tenebre, one of Sir Conan Doyle's more famous quotes is used as a point of departure: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." This is the crux of Sherlock Holmes's inductive theory. If Argento and Peter are one and the same then Tenebre is the director's confession laid bare: I am detective and victim, killer and creator, judge and executioner."
Phenomena (1984) -
"Phenomena (a.k.a. Creepers) displays what is both Dario Argento's battiest and most spiritual landscape. (Argento calls Phenomena his favorite film.) The whole of Phenomena is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are often terrifying and exhilarating. The film's "Swiss Transylvania" is virtually indistinguishable from any other Argento wonderland. Devoid of cultural markers, the town is the sleepy backdrop for a series of run-ins between insect-loving Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly) and a cast of Argento usual suspects. The film's opening set piece is legendary: a young schoolgirl misses her countryside bus, seeks refuge inside a mysterious home and butts heads with the film's faceless, chained-up killer. She flees through a stairwell that leads through a waterfall and is ultimately stabbed and decapitated by the killer. For added effect, her head is ceremoniously thrown into the river below. It's a vicious moment in an unusually tranquil film that contemplates the existential connection between humans and insects and the rifts between nature and the material world.
As Jennifer is driven to the Richard Wagner School, Mrs. Bruckner (Daria Nicolodi) hysterically overreacts to a bumblebee the young girl manages to capture with her hands. Everything and anything here is a potential clue to understanding Argento's characters. A chimpanzee approaches the home of its master, John McGregor (Donald Pleasence). Is the animal the film's killer? Is there an obvious logic to Mrs. Bruckner's fear of bees and Jennifer's love for insects? Jennifer is a somnambulist. The scenes where Argento shows her walking in her sleep are curiously inter-cut with shots of an imagined white corridor (for retro effect, the shot is scored to cheesy '80s synthesizer breakbeats). Before Jennifer's condition is diagnosed you may confuse Phenomena for a gothic rendition of Flashdance. While sleepwalking, Jennifer witnesses a murder and thus becomes a target of the film's faceless psycho. While lost in the woods, she meets John and his monkey and connects with insects near and far. She's like a wayward Gretal led into Argento's fairy-tale forest by a glowing bug. Jennifer's love for all insects makes her a particularly spiritual and complex Argento heroine.
Phenomena's paranormal obsessions are unlike anything you've ever seen—a retro-mystical tableaux of pulsating synthesizers and flying insects ready to do the bidding of their human master. When Jennifer is taunted by her fellow classmates, Biblical hordes of black bugs gather outside her school's window. The girls cringe in fear as Jennifer whispers, "I love you all." This is the extent of Jennifer's love for all of God's creatures. Argento frequently cuts to an insect's point of view, splitting his frame into six or eight segments. However obvious these flourishes may seem, Argento once again showcases his obsession with the eye and elements of sight and sightlessness. In the end, Phenomena's greatest weakness may be that it doesn't demand active spectatorship as much as it seemingly muddles our expectations.
If there's no logical connection between the film's killings and Jennifer's relationship to the world, Phenomena is still uniquely and fabulously scatterbrained. Argento's insect fantasia is otherworldly. (Is it a coincidence that Connelly followed her role here with the lead in Jim Henson's classic Labyrinth?) Phenomena's finale is outrageous, a combination of grotesque Freudian pathologies unleashed, evocations of chimp love, a gruesome finger loss and a wicked decapitation. More important, though, Phenomena feels like a reply to Deep Red's curious insect subtext. (Deep Red's Professor Giordani said, "...butterflies, termites...all of these animals and many, many others use telepathy to transmit orders and relay information.") Jennifer's mystical gifts are undervalued by Argento. In the end, it's less an existential accouterment than a handy talent."
Opera (1987) -
"Dario Argento once entertained the notion of providing audiences for his films with rows of straight pins attached to pieces of tape, which they would place directly below their eyes. This would force the spectator's eyes to remain open during the goriest portions of his films. Argento's "Eyeorama" never came to fruition for obvious reasons though he fascinatingly incorporates this idea as a conceit in Opera, his last full-fledged masterpiece. Opera is a violent aria of memory, bad luck, the artistic drive and the horror of the stare. Betty (Cristina Marsillach) is haunted by memories of her dead mother, once an opera diva herself. Argento's flashback sequences are predictably opaque. Secret corridors and staircases run alongside both Betty's apartment and the film's opera house, evoking the secret recesses of the subconscious. An image of a pulsating brain (here, a visual signifier of the girl's Freudian despair) precedes images of a killing spree that imply that the girl's mother may have been more than a passive victim.
The film's performed opera is an avant-garde rendition of Giuseppe Verdi's Macbeth with Betty taking in the lead. She lands the part only after the great Mara Cecova fights with the film's director and breaks her leg. Cecova remains unseen throughout the film, a reminder perhaps that some divas refuse our stare. Vanessa Redgrave was to play Cecova but declined the part after her high salary demands were rejected. This is a blessing because Cecova's non-presence becomes a rich composite of Argento's fascinating attention to cinematic absence. When she falls and hurts herself before the opera house, a voice declares: "The great Mara Cecova has been knocked down by a car." Of course, she hasn't (the cab pulls up after she has fallen), but the illusion is far more dramatic than the reality. Opera itself is a film of forced illusions. The film's opening shot (a close-up of a crow's eyes) immediately establishes Argento's fascination with mnemonic despair and distortions of reality and internal spaces.
Verdi's opera is historically known for bringing bad luck to its casts, a fact that is not lost on Argento. Incidentally, Argento was advised to choose a different opera for the film but wholeheartedly refused. Though Opera was never plagued by post-production chaos of the Poltergeist sort, a series of on-set occurrences seemed to suggest that Argento's production may have been compromised by some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. The director has suggested that Opera's loveless tone was intended in part as a kind of AIDS metaphor. Ian Charleson (Macbeth's director, Marco) would tell Argento during the filming of Opera that he was HIV+. (Charleson, whose film credits included Oscar winners Gandhi and Chariots of Fire, would die of AIDS in 1990.) Betty performs her grandiose aria with faceless women seemingly hovering in the background of the stage, their frilly garbs flapping in the wind. A wayward bullet kills one of the girls. Not only has the prophecy been fulfilled but on-screen death has never looked this beautiful.
The cast of Argento's opera-within-a-film is a typically weird lot: Daria Nicolodi's stars as Betty's agent and mother substitute; Urbano Barberini as Alan Santini, the opera-loving inspector; William McNamara as Stefan, Betty's horny boyfriend; and Coralina Cataldi Tassoni as Giulia, the show's half-witted seamstress. Once Betty takes to the stage as Lady Macbeth, a monster from her mother's past is awakened and the killings begin once more. If the crows in the film only screech in the presence of a familiar evil, then the killer must be the only character here not directly involved in the production of Mabeth. If you've pinpointed the identity of the film's killer, it's of little consequence—the genius of the film lies not in such details but in Argento's operatic attention to death and the way in which the film's killer forces Betty's gaze.
The killer ties Betty up and places a row of needles below her eyes, forcing her to watch the grueling deaths of her friends. Stefan is stabbed in the throat with a sharp knife. Giulia is killed but swallows a bracelet belonging to the killer, forcing him to perform a last-minute autopsy on her body with a pair of scissors. What with the crunching sounds that imply bones being cut into, this may be one of the more squeamish sequences ever captured on film! More impressive is the fact that Betty is placed inside a glass container and comes to resemble one of Giulia's many mannequins. Mira's death also serves to reinforce Argento's obsession with seeing and sightlessness. Betty's vision is temporarily blurred after she applies drops to her dried-up eyes. This is precisely at the time when she allows a detective into her apartment. Mira enters the apartment and Argento introduces a second detective, one who stands outside the apartment. Is the killer the man outside or inside the apartment? Regardless, he has free access to the apartment (not to mention Betty's consciousness) via the corridors that run alongside the apartment. As for the film's infamous keyhole set piece, it reinforces Argento's fascination with seeing as terror mechanism.
Opera was Argento's most expensive production and it shows (indeed, the film's many elaborate compositions don't look cheap). Macbeth's crows circle the opera house in a secret plan hatched by the show's crew. When the birds spot the killer, they go directly for his eyes. While Opera's ending isn't a favorite amongst fans, Argento fascinatingly toys with the spectator's perception. The killer supposedly died in a fire at the opera house, leaving Betty and her director to enjoy life in the country. A helicopter suddenly appears in the air and a horde of dogs run wildly through the forest. Both the audience and Betty pay little mind to these otherwise strange occurrences. The killer makes one final appearance, forcing Betty to stare at death one last line. This finale may seem forced and facile but Betty's delirious romp through the countryside and her strange relationship with a lizard recalls Jennifer Connelly's transcendental relationship to animals in Phenomena. Here, though, it really looks as if the heroine has cracked. Take Opera as the last time the great Argento was cracked himself."