July 31 2024, 17:48
Opera
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 1987
Opera is the last of what’s regarded as Argento’s unimpeachable run of giallo-horror-thrillers he made through the seventies and eighties. For me, there are hits and misses (Phenomena was not my bag), but Opera is one of his best.
Betty, understudy in a version of Verdi’s opera Lady Macbeth, makes a name for herself stepping into the lead role when the famous singer Mara Cecova is hit by a car. That night, a masked figure murders Betty’s boyfriend Stefano at his apartment, making her watch. Betty becomes suspicious of everyone, and as she is made to watch more killings, she must work out who to trust before it’s her turn to die.
The world of opera, with its costumes, mannequins, stage lighting and imposing architecture, is perfect for the heightened world of giallo’s black-gloved killers, secret passageways, uncertain allegiances and naked ambition. The soundtrack uses opera music, of course, but still has Argento’s trademark heavy metal. The deaths are violent and shown in explicit detail, and like Betty, we are made to watch.
Cristina Marsillach as Betty is perfect as the insecure, vulnerable, talented and resourceful Betty. There are plenty of playful cinematic touches on display, and using ravens from the opera’s avant-garde production as a central plot point is a supremely gothic touch.
July 28 2024, 11:09
Phenomena
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 1985
Like in Suspiria, a young woman arrives at a female-run school where students are being murdered by an unseen killer, but there are no witches in Zürich—instead we have a girl who has an unexpected telepathic connection with insects.
Jennifer Corvino, daughter of a famous actor, is sent to a Swiss boarding school for the summer. On her first night she sleepwalks and witnesses a student being murdered before being led by chimpanzee Inga to the house of her owner, forensic entomologist John McGregor. There are more murders, and Jennifer comes to realise she can use her growing psychic connection with insects to discover the bodies of victims, as well as protect herself from attackers.
Donald Pleasance plays the wheelchair-bound McGregor, who is trying to find out what happened to another student of his, Greta, who he suspects was also murdered. He has the chimpanzee trained as a nurse so he can live in his secluded home cum laboratory. Jennifer’s burgeoning power over insects is implied to be linked to her coming of age, and McGregor encourages her to use a Great Sarcophagus fly, whose larvae feed on dead bodies, to lead her to Greta.
It’s all completely mad, and the final fifteen minutes throws gore and weirdness at the story faster than makes any sense. People rave about this film, but I struggled with it. It’s a mash-up of everything that’s come before in his filmography—the first-person camerawork for a killer, an occasional heavy metal soundtrack, the magical powers of Suspiria, the whodunnit of his giallos, but the pacing is off, the acting is bland (until the ending), and the story borders on incoherent. And he’s said it’s one of his favourite creations. Hm!
July 24 2024, 14:28
Something new
It’s almost the end of July. What’s been happening? The X-rays have confirmed I have moderate-to-advanced hip arthritis, but the physio has discharged me because I’m doing well enough to be left to build strength alone. My son has a “proper job” in his field in Australia, so he’ll be living there for the foreseeable future. I’m trying not to dwell on that, but he’s living the life he wants which makes me happy. Something else that makes me happy is that I’m not going to lose my job in the current wave of redundancies afflicting universities in the UK. Thank fuck. And we’re hoping to complete the sale of Dad’s house at the end of August.
Selling the house has become the marker for the end of the slew of unasked for changes that have come from the first half of the year. We’ve lost too many of our elders. Summer helps in the transition.
On the creative front, I dug out a short story I wrote for my Masters application in 2014, and I’m reworking it to publish on Patreon for those subscribed to the paid tier. I want to be true to its original energy and intention, but I’m a much better writer now, and I’m having fresh ideas about it. It’s exciting. I understand why I haven’t been writing, but now that I am engaged in a project again I can see the cost of having to put my attention elsewhere. Writing a story fulfils a part of me that can’t be satisfied any other way.
Much of this fresh energy comes from buying an iPad with an Apple Pencil. (I gave my father my last iPad because he wouldn’t buy another when his broke. That’s a nice circle to close.) It’s helped me think again about how I organise myself, take notes, do research, capture my thoughts, everything. I will always use a physical notebook and pen, but the iPad is giving me a new space to work in, between digital and analogue. Something new.
July 12 2024, 21:45
Tenebre
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 1982
You see different things in a good piece of art as you get older. I wrote about Tenebre in October 2020 for the #31DaysofHorror challenge. I loved it then, and I love it now, but the protagonist is far less likeable than I remember, and the twists more surprising.
Back then, I wrote:
Tenebre is set in Rome, but we could be anywhere, because the story stays in hotel rooms, suburban streets and modernist buildings made of concrete and glass. There are artfully sculpted gardens of stone, water and trees. These locations lend themselves to the roving camera, and Argento likes to play the voyeuristic killer. The most famous scene has the camera drift slowly around the outside of a home, music blaring from a woman’s bedroom, focussing on the roof tiles, the walls, and the window slats, moving from room to room, as the killer takes two victims.
Thriller writer Peter Neal travels to Rome to market his latest book, Tenebrae (which means ‘darkness’), but he arrives to find a serial killer is mimicking in real life the murders in his book. The killer leaves notes under his hotel room door, and Neal gets drawn in to the killer’s game.
Argento knows films are inherently voyeuristic, and is aware of the criticism against him, and while the men die, the women do die in much more elaborate ways. He plays with our expectations, and has a protagonist who takes on the charges of misogyny directly. Giallo films usually have convoluted plots that lose me by the end, but this one makes sense. The set pieces are impressive, the story moves at a pace, the locations are fantastic, and the ending works — this is now one of my favourites.
I would add to this that Peter Neal isn’t interested in helping the police catch the killer at any point until he realises that it might make him look good as a crime writer. He’s another one of Argento’s male, egotistic, emotionally distant antiheroes, although some of the later plot twists make sense of that. There is also in the final scenes one of the all-time great reveals of the location of a killer.
July 10 2024, 21:40
Inferno
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 1980
If Suspiria was a step away from the narrative rigours of a whodunnit, Inferno is a giant leap, with four (four!) protagonists in two cities — but it starts with a woman, Rose, being sold a rare occult book called The Three Mothers.
Rose wonders if the glamorous but dilapidated New York apartment block she lives in is one of three built for three powerful witches, the others being in Rome and Freiberg (location of Suspiria). She writes to her brother David, a musicology student in Rome, but by the time he arrives she has gone missing, and he sets out to find her.
Inferno looks gorgeous, and it has the signature Argento set pieces, but it’s a big departure from his previous films. The score is less coherent, the events are even more surreal, and the pace is slower, with much time spent following people wandering through baroque hallways. It’s wondrous and frustrating.
The buildings are the real stars of the film. They’re filled with arcane objects, uncanny happenings, collapsed basements, spooky acoustics and levels between levels. The ending is fun, but the beautiful characters are one-dimensional, and the story is ponderous compared with everything that’s come before.
July 07 2024, 10:35
Suspiria
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 1977
Suspiria is a vivid, colourful dream where death stalks us, out of sight but ever-present. Characters die in complicated and fantastical ways to Goblin’s driving mix of Moog synths, bells, whispered vocals and a drum beat for the ages. And it’s a film filled with strong women. The men are all ineffectual side characters.
Suzy Bannion, an American dance student, arrives on a stormy night at the Tanz Academy in Freiberg, Germany. Initially turned away, she passes a woman fleeing the building who ends up elaborately and gruesomely murdered. Suzy’s attempts to be independent at the Academy don’t last long, and she is quickly sucked into the sinister baroque world of a coven of witches.
The Goblin soundtrack is lauded as one of the greatest of any horror film, and it injects itself aggressively into the story, not just complementing it but as a multiplier, lifting the experience to giddy heights. Argento wanted to do something radical after the murder mysteries he’d become known for. The human killers from previous films are replaced with supernatural ones, and Argento’s artistic ambitions are given full rein, using architecture, lighting, music, camera lenses — whatever he could find to fulfil his vision. It’s completely captivating.
The characters are enjoyably odd, but Alida Valli is sensational as the amusingly-named Miss Tanner, the strict dance instructor who drives the ballet students on, barking orders with sadistic glee. Valli was the luminous Anna Schmidt in The Third Man, and also Louise, the complicit assistant to Dr. Génessier, in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face. It’s a fun reminder of the variety of roles actors can find themselves taking, for many different reasons, over long careers.
June 23 2024, 08:11
Deep Red
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 1975
After making a couple of thrillers for television and a hard-to-find historical comedy that was a commercial flop, Argento returned to Giallo with a twisty, colourful, Goblin-scored mystery. Whenever the killer is about to strike, the bass jumps in and things get funky. It’s completely charming and made me smile every time.
David Hemmings plays pianist Marcus who sees the psychic living in the apartment below him murdered. He teams up with Gianna, a reporter, to investigate (played by Daria Nicolodi, who would become a creative and life partner to Argento, including mother to their daughter Asia), while also trying to look out for his troubled friend Carlo.
Marcus has more personality and humour than Michael Brandon’s Roberto in Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and his relationship with Gianna is played for laughs at times. There’s more comedy here than in Argento’s previous three Giallo films. Dolls are a recurring motif, even though the killer doesn’t have a particular connection with them — I suspect they just fitted with the aesthetic Argento was after.
There are (as you’d expect) beautifully staged set pieces where people die in gruesome ways. The killer’s unmasking works brilliantly. The tone shifts between horror, mystery, arthouse and comedy, and, along with the captivating performances, this unusual mix makes Deep Red exciting, strange and singular.
June 19 2024, 06:15
Four Flies on Grey Velvet
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 1971
Roberto, an American drummer in a band recording in Milan, chases a man who has been following him and accidentally kills him. A masked figure takes photographs and begins to torment Roberto, breaking into his house and leaving behind evidence of the crime. When people begin to die, Roberto becomes increasingly paranoid, and he has to choose who to trust.
I enjoyed this. It’s common in slashers for the killer to wear a mask, but in gialli it’s more about black gloves, so it was fun to see the effectively creepy ventriliquist's dummy mask here. It’s hard to warm to Roberto, who seems to be a bit of a dick, but Michael Brandon has amazing cheekbones, and the blankness of his character is made up for by the array of eccentrics around him. Argento likes to use gay characters, which is great, but they are often portrayed in stereotypical ways. The private detective Arrosio is the most sympathetic character in the film — funny, likeable and tragic.
Argento continues the playful camerawork of The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, zooming, swooping and changing focus so things are never dull. The standout set piece comes when the live-in maid tries to blackmail the killer, but instead is chased through a park, almost trapped between two walls of rock, before being sliced up within earshot of a couple trying to help. A busy children’s play area is suddenly empty, and a late afternoon cuts to night. Argento creates a nightmare his victims can’t escape.
The surreal, unexpected choices Argento makes throughout these first films make them far more interesting than more straightforward thrillers, and some of the jumps forwards and backwards reminded me of John Boorman’s Point Blank. The identity of the killer is a surprise — the way they are caught is completely ridiculous. However, the final slow motion shot of a car being crushed under a lorry is a mark of genius. And his first three films came out within two years. That’s a hot streak.
June 16 2024, 10:34
The Cat O’ Nine Tails
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 1971
A solid Euro-thriller-giallo that lacks the flair of Argento’s debut, but still has enough ingenuity to keep things interesting. A blind ex-journalist overhears a conversation about blackmail outside his apartment. A newspaper reporter investigates a burglary in a nearby laboratory. As people at the lab start to die, the two men join forces to uncover the story, but industrial espionage is a dangerous game and the killer knows who’s on their tail.
Argento knows how to pick faces for his films — James Franciscus as reporter Carlo looks beautiful in every shot, stealing thunder even from the more seasoned Karl Malden as the blind puzzle-loving older man who the young girl in his care calls Cookie. And I love that Argento continued to include idiosyncratic secondary characters, like the burglar who always gets caught.
There’s roving first-person camera work, a handful of clever shots and a decent car chase, but it does feel like a consolidation of Argento’s skills as a director rather than a step up from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. It’s slow in places, and the ending on the rooftops with the killer’s reveal felt clumsy.
Basing the story in a genetics lab, and making the industrial espionage secret to be about a genetic marker for violence and murder, makes this a distant cousin of David Cronenberg’s more perverse surgical labs across the Atlantic a few years later. In ‘Bird’, the killer has an untreated trauma that causes psychosis; in ‘Cat’, the killer is protecting themselves from their own family’s business. What will be the killer’s motivation in the final part of Argento’s trilogy of animals?
June 08 2024, 13:10
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 1970
In one interview in Panico (2024), a documentary about Dario Argento’s life in films, Argento describes himself as being of two halves — the contented person at home, and the person who is compelled to investigate the darkness inside himself through filmmaking. When in that mode, he is completely focussed on making real the visions in his mind, and it’s clear from the interviews that, especially in the first half of his career, he had a controlling and cold edge alongside his energy and passion.
This made me want to go back to the beginning, and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a fascinating opening salvo. American writer Sam is on holiday in Rome with his girlfriend, Julia, to overcome his writer’s block. He witnesses an attack in an art gallery and gets pulled in to help investigate the case by Inspector Morosini. Other women have been attacked and killed across Rome, and the serial killer threatens Sam to not get involved, but Morosini has Sam’s passport, and Sam believes he’s getting ever closer to the identity of the killer.
Tony Musante, Suzy Kendall and Enrico Salerno make a charismatic trio. Argento makes the camera his plaything, and the cinematic flourishes are due in no small part to the editing by Franco Fraticelli who became a collaborator for the next two decades. The world of the film is vibrant and odd, with threatening pieces of art, colourful Roman characters, and the fetishistic use of gloves, knives and (of course) voyeurism.
It’s not a perfect film. The dialogue can be distractingly banal, especially at the start when the initially poor dubbing makes everything worse, and the pacing is occasionally poor, but the continual visual style, the ingenuity with the hand-held camera, and the series of imaginative set pieces make you forget the bad as soon as the film ends.