Dario Argento

C O N T E M P O R A R Y
F I L M
D I R E C T O R S
Dario Argento
L. Andrew Cooper
Dario Argento
Cooper_Argento.indd 1
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Contemporary Film Directors

Edited by James Naremore
The Contemporary Film Directors series provides concise,

well-written introductions to directors from around the
world and from every level of the film industry. Its chief
aims are to broaden our awareness of important artists,
to give serious critical attention to their work, and to illustrate the variety and vitality of contemporary cinema.
Contributors to the series include an array of internationally
respected critics and academics. Each volume contains
an incisive critical commentary, an informative interview
with the director, and a detailed filmography.
A list of books in the series appears

at the end of this book.
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Dario Argento
L. Andrew Cooper
Universit y
of
Illin o i s
Pr e s s
U r bana ,
C h icago,
and
S pr ing field
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2012 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cooper, L. Andrew, 1977
Dario Argento / L. Andrew Cooper.
p. cm. (Contemporary film directors)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978-0-252-03709-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-252-07874-3 (pbk.)
1. Argento, DarioCriticism and interpretation.
2. Argento, DarioInterviews.
I. Title.
PN1998.3.A74C66 2012
791.4302'33092dc23 2012018395
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Contents
Acknowledgments | ix
Dario Argento:
Doing Violence on Film | 1
Against Criticism:
Opera and The Stendhal Syndrome 5
Opera 8
The Stendhal Syndrome 17
Against Interpretation:
The First Five Gialli 23
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage 26
The Cat o Nine Tails 37
Four Flies on Grey Velvet 43
Deep Red 52
Tenebre 62
Against Narrative:
The Three Mothers Trilogy and Phenomena 73
Suspiria 75
Inferno 94
Mother of Tears 107
Phenomena 119
Against Conventions:
From Trauma to Giallo 127
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Trauma 129
The Stendhal Syndrome (Revisited) 133
Sleepless 134
The Card Player 137
Do You Like Hitchcock? 140
Giallo 142
Interviews with Dario Argento | 149
Filmography: Feature Films and

Television Directed by Dario Argento | 155
Bibliography | 173
Index | 181
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Acknowledgments
The thinking behind this book has spanned almost a decade, and thanking everyone who has influenced me through discussions of Dario Argento would stretch these pages and my memory beyond their capacities.
First, Id like to thank the students who took my course Dario Argento
in Context at Georgia Tech in the fall of 2010. I hope I influenced their
thinking as much as they influenced mine. Colleagues at Georgia Tech
also provided substantive input: Jay Telotte gave me several pointers,
and after a presentation based on the Against Interpretation section
of this book, Phil Auslander, Blake Leland, Janet Murray, and Jesse
Stommel asked questions that led to refined claims. Janets suggestion
about Argento inhabiting the role of the Italian villain from eighteenthcentury British gothic influenced the Against Criticism section, and
Blakes thoughtful discussion of nihilism influenced Against Narrative.
I especially want to thank Paulette Richards, who reviewed and edited
my translations of the French-language interviews at the end of this
volume. lie Castiels interview is translated and reproduced with the
permission of the original author and publisher. Georgia Techs Library
and Information Center, particularly the indefatigable staff handling interlibrary loans, also deserves tremendous credit. During the final phases
of manuscript preparation, Tom Byers and my other new colleagues in
film studies at the University of Louisville were extremely helpful and
encouraging. Above all, without Bryn Gravitts help as research assistant
and reader, this project might not have materialized.
The discussion of Opera derives from my essay The Indulgence
of Critique: Relocating the Sadistic Voyeur in Dario Argentos Opera
(Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22.1 [2005]: 6372). It appears
here by permission of Taylor and Francis Ltd. Wheeler Winston Dixon
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and others at QRFV were very supportive. My first presentation about

Argento occurred at the 2002 meeting of the Southwest/Texas Popular
Culture Association, where Steffen Hantke and others provided helpful feedback. Throughout the development of this project, my partner
James Chakan has been a constant reader, advisor, and editor. Watching
and rewatching films, weve come to many of the same conclusions,
most of all sharing a conviction that Argentos works contain a genius
that others would be fortunate to discover.
Acknowledgments
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Dario Argento
Doing Violence on Film
Dario Argentos films push the limits of visual and auditory experience;
they offend, confuse, sicken, and baffle. Never complacent, Argento
approaches each work as an experiment, and over more than four decades of filmmaking, his commitment to innovation has produced a
broad range of styles applied almost unwaveringly within two closely
related genrescrime thriller and supernatural horrorwith results
that are sometimes brilliant, sometimes muddled, and sometimes both.
The films are not to everyones taste. Their violence is often so extreme
that even hardened horror veterans will avert their eyes. The extremity
goes beyond gore, reaching previously unrecorded levels of pain, suffering, and mental anguish. Even more disturbing than the extremity is
that Argento makes the combination of carefully arranged details, from
the sets colors and shadows to the cameras angles and movements, so
fundamentally pretty. Viewers who can stand to look at one of his films
once might very well want to look again.
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The problem of looking, of the desire to see, is central to all of Argentos films. From his directorial debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), in which a man watches helplessly as a woman is apparently
attacked, to Giallo (2009), in which cop and killer both appreciate photos
of murder victims a little too much, characters watching violence reflect
viewers watching the film, and nobody involved in the exchange escapes
complicity in the horrific spectacles. Argentos films challenge a viewers
accepted ideas about film spectatorship, meaning, storytelling, and genre.
The violence they do reaches beyond their minced murder victims: they
do violence to film itself.
Argento has worked as a writer, producer, director, composer, and/or
editor on more than forty films. He comments in an interview included
on the Blue Underground DVD of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, I was practically born into the cinema because my father was a
producer. His initial exposure to the chaotic world of film production
lacked appeal, so he became a film critic instead, a role that taught him
all the theories about cinema and thus provided a foundation for the
critical engagement with cinematic conventions that this book traces
throughout his oeuvre. Argento enjoyed working as a critic, but gradually opportunities lured him into screenwriting. His most notable early
effort was collaborating with Bernardo Bertolucci on the screenplay for
Sergio Leones classic western Once upon a Time in the West (1968).
This success helped to create the opportunity for Argento to direct
Bird, which his father, Salvatore Argento, produced. He continued to
collaborate with his father as producer or executive producer on all of
his features through 1982s Tenebre, and his younger brother, Claudio
Argento, has served in production roles in the majority of features since
1973s The Five Days of Milan.
Through the production company Opera Film Produzione, Dario
and Claudio Argento have produced a number of features that the elder
brother did not helm, including the directorial debut of Darios daughter
Asia Argento, Scarlet Diva (2000). Asias own career as an actress began
in the Argento-produced film Demons 2 (1986); she later led the casts of
the Argento-directed features Trauma (1993), The Stendhal Syndrome
(1996), The Phantom of the Opera (1998), Mother of Tears (2007), and
Dracula 3D (2012, projected). Although she has pursued a career in
fashion rather than film, Darios elder daughter, Fiore, debuted as an
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actress in the Argento-directed Phenomena (1985) and had major roles

in the Argento-produced Demons (1985) and Argento-directed The
Card Player (2004). These familial connections suggest a thin, permeable boundary between Dario Argentos personal life and his artistic
work. Indeed, he has often commented on the pleasure of seeing his
daughters grow up on film, and as this books discussion of The Stendhal
Syndrome suggests, Asias identity as his daughter becomes a crucial
aspect of the films rhetorical challenges to film norms.
While the collaborative roles of his father, brother, and daughters
are important aspects to consider when approaching Argentos works
as a whole, the most significant collaboration of his career has arguably been with Daria Nicolodi, his onetime girlfriend, Asias mother,
and the star of many of his most successful films, including Deep Red
(1975), Tenebre, Phenomena, and Opera (1987). Nicolodi also cowrote
Suspiria (1977), considered by many to be Argentos masterpiece, taking inspiration from rumors of witchcraft in her own family history.
She continued to be a creative influence on Suspirias sequels Inferno
(1980) and Mother of Tears, both of which feature her as an actress.
This book does not focus on the sort of biographical criticism that Argentos collaborative relationships invite, but observing the centrality of
collaboration, particularly with family, in Argentos work could help to
qualify any illusion of the film director as a solitary author responsible
for the works that this book associates pervasively with a possessive
form of his name. The works that bear the Dario Argento brand are
in some ways profoundly cohesive, which justifies approaching them
as a meaningful collection, but the approach of Dario Argento should
not occlude considering that Argentos works contain facets that far
exceed the efforts of Dario Argento the man.
To establish the cohesiveness that makes Argentos oeuvre meaningful as such, the critical essay that forms the bulk of this book examines
sixteen films that feature Argento as writer and director. While it includes
a fairly comprehensive overview, with discussions of stories and performers as well as details about production, it does not attempt exhaustive
treatments of these works, all of which deserve further scholarly attention. In focusing on how Argentos films function as rhetorical interventions against dominant views on film criticism, interpretation, narrative,
and conventions, the essay aims to open up interpretive possibilities that

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connect the films to broader tendencies in film history. Even as it shows

connections between Argentos works and works by canonical filmmakers, the argument relates the films to a broader turn away from the
high-art and high-theory traditions of film and film studies. Argentos
films inhabit the cinematic worlds of the popular director Mario Bava,
Argentos closest predecessor in Italian film, and of the canonized artists
Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini. Thus they have helped
reevaluate cinema, especially genre cinema, in terms derived outside
traditional aesthetic and critical paradigms. As this essay demonstrates,
the films have strong roots in romanticism and aestheticism, but their
relentless self-reflection also makes them distinctly postmodern, so even
in their most traditional moments of aesthetic flourish, they wield an
iconoclastic, deconstructive edge. The present argument differs from
other studies that have influenced it, especially Maitland McDonaghs
groundbreaking Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds and the collection of
essays published in the journal Kinoeye, through a consistent focus on
the films overarching tendency to challenge the norms of film as an art
form. This tendency emphasizes Argentos status as a sensationalist and
provocateur whose work uses aesthetic impact to create, comment on,
and at times resolve contemporary controversies.
The essay begins where Argentos films depart from some of the
normative assumptions that have driven film criticism throughout his
career, particularly those derived from psychoanalysis. It then explores
the films aesthetic challenges to narrative structure, and finally, it considers how Argentos later works respond to the new norms that his earlier
works helped create. Although the essay explains these norms through
emphasis on films bearing the Argento brand, it could just as easily
illustrate them through discussion of the many films and filmmakers
Argento has influenced, including the acknowledged masters George
A. Romero (who has collaborated with Argento on multiple projects),
John Carpenter (who pays homage to Argentos 1975 Deep Red in 2005s
Cigarette Burns, an episode of the TV show Masters of Horror), and
Quentin Tarantino (who thanks Argento in the credits of his 2007 film
Death Proof). Argentos international influence is also clearly visible in
the aesthetic excesses of Japanese horror, exemplified in the works of
Takashi Miike (Audition; 1999), as well as in works by a new generation
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of filmmakers represented by the French filmmakers Alexandre Aja

(High Tension; 2003) and Pascal Laugier, who acknowledges his debt
to Argento through the dedication of Martyrs (2008).
Despite its emphasis on the unity and influence of Argentos oeuvre,
this essay eschews a traditional auteur approach: beyond those already
mentioned, biographical details are relatively few, as the extent to which
the films express Argentos personal vision is not a primary question.
When the essay cites interviews, it treats Argento as an interpreter
rather than the authoritative voice on what his films mean. Implicitly,
it demonstrates the usefulness of approaching film as rhetoric and the
cinema as a public and intellectual forum, but the essays construals of
specific films should not limit their possibilities for additional or even
contradictory significance. Ultimately, the films speak for themselves,
but they say things that are often ambiguous, equivocal, and difficult.
If they were susceptible to a final word, they would not be as worthy
of consideration as they are.
Against Criticism:
Opera and The Stendhal Syndrome
Accusations of sadism have condemned people who create and enjoy
horror fiction, no matter the medium, for as long as horror fictions have
existed, or at least since the Marquis de Sade put his stamp of approval on
Matthew Lewiss eighteenth-century splatterfest novel The Monk (Cooper,
Gothic, 48). Contemporary critics who want to frame horrors viewers as
sadistic voyeurs often turn to Laura Mulveys foundational 1975 article
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, later incorporated into her book
Visual and Other Pleasures, which explores the way the unconscious of
patriarchal society has structured film form (14). Using the films of Alfred Hitchcock as a model, Mulvey describes how, in the representational
strategies of many films, the power to subject another person to the will
sadistically or the gaze voyeuristically is turned onto the woman as the
object of both (23). By interrogating ways that film reinforces patriarchal
norms that objectify women, Mulvey seeks a break, an alternative that
uses the language of patriarchal oppression in a gesture of resistance. She
proposes an alternative cinema [that] must start specifically by reacting
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against these obsessions and assumptions (1516). By reacting against

these norms, Mulveys alternative would expose, condemn, and ultimately
replace the perverse gaze of the sadistic voyeur.
Over time, critiques of this kind of perversion have risen to a position of dominance through the works of feminists who have taken up
Mulveys call. For example, Mary Ann Doane considers Mulveys scant
treatment of female spectatorship and concludes that certain films by
Hitchcock and others summon female subjectivity only to negate it, condemning female spectatorship to a state that is merely virtual, an absence
(8081). Also focusing on Hitchcock and seeking a habitable position
for the female spectator, Tania Modleski acknowledges Mulveys essay
as the founding document of psychoanalytic feminist film theory but
argues for more variable gendered identifications with onscreen violence
against women (1). Modleski sees a thoroughgoing ambivalence about
femininity manifested through the misogyny and the sympathy [that]
actually entail one another in murderous male characters like Norman
Bates in Hitchcocks 1960 film Psycho (34). Building on her own earlier
work, Mulvey provides a more nuanced view of female spectatorship,
which she claims is masculinized through identifications with the cinemas endemic male gaze (2930). While these theoretical approaches to
spectatorship suggest possibilities and pleasures beyond the misogynistic
sadism Mulvey originally described, they still affirm the dominance of
sadistic male voyeurism in representations of violence against women.
In Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Carol Clover explains that people
rarely challenge claims about sadistic voyeurism in the horror film because to do [so] would be to take on one of the most entrenched ...
and status-quo-supportive clichs of modern cultural criticism (226).
Clovers work takes on this clich, arguing that the horror film allows its
viewers to identify with both killer and victim, sadistically and masochistically, regardless of gender; she does not, however, believe that sadistic
voyeurism is the first cause of horror, favoring instead both male and
female masochistic identification with the victim (19). In keeping with
Clovers assertion, Dario Argentos films contradict anyone who claims
that they predominantly rely on the audiences sadistic identification with
the violence his camera captures. Two years before Clover first published
her ideas about sadistic and masochistic identification, Argento made
Dario Argento
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a similar argument in the 1985 documentary Dario Argentos World

of Horror. Speaking of his point-of-view cinematography, he explains,
I want the spectator sucked into the scene. I want him to approach
objects, or people. In the end it is you, the spectator, who kills or who
is murdered. Argento expects his audiences to identify with his films
in varying and multiple ways that go beyond simple determinations of
gender. Discussing how Argentos films reflect on gender through the
identities of their killers, Adam Knee concludes, Argentos killers, in
their variety and obscurity, tend to frustrate most such generalizations
about gender (215). With his characters as well as his camera, Argentos
films represent gender and gendered identifications self-consciously,
seldom making them simple or predictable.
Critical responses to Argentos work provide one explanation of this
self-consciousness. As Chris Gallant states, Accusations of misogynist
characterizations ... have surrounded Argentos output since the beginning of his career (65). Increasing self-consciousness does not, of course,
exculpate Argento from charges of misogyny. Though she gives Argento
little specific treatment, even Clover includes him in the company of
Hitchcock and Brian De Palma as an artist who has made misogynistic
statements about the roles of women in his art. Argentos own words seem
particularly damning and have reappeared in many critical assessments
of his workClover takes them from William Schoells Stay Out of the
Shower (1985): I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a
good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered
than an ugly girl or man (Clover 42). Argento might very well have been
thinking of one of his heroes, Edgar Allan Poe, who, after considering the
importance of beauty in poetry as well as the supremacy of melancholy
as a poetic quality, concludes, [T]he death, then, of a beautiful woman
is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world (Philosophy
425). The idea that a man attracted to women would prefer to represent beautiful women is not necessarily misogynistic, but having roots in
Poes aesthetic philosophy does not make Argentos representations of
womens death (and what Julia Kristeva would call womens abjection)
any less problematic. However, Argentos awareness of his critics charge
of misogyny serves as a starting point for considering how his 1987 film
Opera works against such criticism and responds to horrors detractors.
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Opera
Operas storyline is partially a reimagining of Gaston Lerouxs 1910 novel
The Phantom of the Opera. It centers on the experiences of Betty, a
young opera singer who unwittingly rises from the rank of understudy
to a lead role through the intervention of a killer. On the night of her
successful debut, after an aborted attempt at sex with her boyfriend
Stefan, Stefan steps out to fetch some tea. Seconds later, a hand grabs
Bettys mouth from behind; the killer binds her hands and places tape
over her mouth. He ties her to a pillar and takes out two sets of needles
held together by strips of tape. When he fastens the needles beneath
Bettys eyes, they extend perfectly from lower to upper eyelids. Wide
with terror, her eyes, in extreme close-up, dart back and forth behind
the almost evenly spaced rows of needles (figure 1).
Take a good look, the killer says, brandishing a mirror. If you try
to close your eyes, youll tear them apart, so youll just have to watch
everything. When she hears Stefan returning, Betty squeals an ineffective warning; blood drips down the needles in places where they have
scratched her upper eyelids. Taking Bettys point of view from behind
the needles, the camera shows Stefan approaching, and the killers arm
Figure 1. In Opera, the opera singer Betty

(Cristina Marsillach) watches in terror as needles
taped to her lower eyelids force her to witness
her boyfriend being stabbed to death.
Dario Argento
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shoots from the side of the frame and drives a blade into the flesh beneath
Stefans jaw. A close-up shows the bloody tip of the blade emerge inside
Stefans gaping mouth. The sequence cuts back and forth between Bettys
face, which registers each of the killers vicious stabs as the needles force
her to watch, and the stabbings themselves. Finally, a shot through the
needles shows Stefans gouged, motionless corpse. The killer sets Betty
free and exits.
In this scene the murder victim is, contrary to Argentos preference,
a beautiful young man who appears shirtless and vulnerable before the
phallic blade penetrates him. In the choice of an eroticized male victim, the scene makes a gruesome counterpoint to the charge that the
pleasures of the horror film are inherently or exclusively misogynistic.
Though emphasizing female abjection may or may not make Argento
himself complicit in patriarchal oppression, this instance of male abjection offers an alternative to an exclusively patriarchal structuration that
depends on the subjugation and destruction of female bodies. At the
most basic level of the gendered appearance of its characters, Opera
begins its response to the tradition of criticism that labels horror enthusiasts as sadistic voyeurs.
Stefans murder challenges critical norms through his gender. The
scenes other victim, Betty, offers a critique through her position as witness to the brutalitylike the films audience, she passively watches the
carnage unfold. Knee observes this correspondence of Betty with the
audience and remarks, The opera singers situation in particular appears
structured as an allegory for that of the modern horror film spectator,
compelled to witness scenes of unspeakable gore, truly pained by the
act of looking, horrified yet also complicit (229 n.12). Chris Gallant
refers to her simply as the captive audience, our diegetic stand-in
(16). Bettys allegorical significance makes her gender another refutation
of the primacy critics give to male sadistic identification. The scenes
cinematography privileges Bettys point of view and her emotional responses: formally and thematically, the films viewers are identified as
female and strongly connected to the victim, not the killer.
Betty reacts to the murder in a way that also reflects on the films
viewers. Terrified and confused, she feels guilty because she believes her
place as a spectator has resulted directly from the killers interest in her
success at the opera. Referring to her performance as Lady Macbeth in

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Verdis opera Macbeth, the role of a sadist who watches from the sidelines, Betty wonders, Why did I sing that role? I shouldnt have. It was
my fault. As witness to the attacks, she feels morally responsible, so she
accepts the blame that horrors critics often assign to horrors audiences.
Jonathan Lake Crane observes, Enjoying endless reels of gratuitous ultraviolence is taken by critics of recent shockers to mean that ... woefully
impressionable viewers endorse the heinous acts committed by countless
avaricious psychos (3). Betty falls victim to the same logic that conflates
watching something violent with a wholesale endorsement of violence;
her psychological distress testifies to the damage such criticism can do.
Whatever she might feel, Betty is not at fault for the scene she witnesses: her choice is either to watch or to go blind (and probably be
murdered as a result), which is not really a choice at all. Bettys lack of
a choice complicates viewers identification with her. While Betty must
watch, the filmgoer chooses to watch. The critics who condemn horrors
creators and fans, then, could keep making their judgments, proclaiming Bettys innocence while excoriating the audience. The similarity
between Bettys position and the filmgoers is not perfect; there are no
needles over the audiences eyes. However, emphasizing the difference
between Betty and the filmgoer in order to maintain the innocence of
the former and the guilt of the latter constitutes a refusal of masochistic
identification with Betty, the audiences stand-in. The argument necessary to maintain a condemnation of the films audience on the grounds
of this difference must ignore the point-of-view shots that encourage this
identification. It must forego a metaphorical approach to the image of
Bettys compulsion that would enable the viewers complete identification in favor of a highly literal and exacting approach to how identification must operate. The critic who makes such an argument dismisses the
possibility that Bettys compulsion stands for the inevitability of seeing
horrors in everyday life, or that, as Argento claims, it allows audiences
a positive confrontation with their fears (qtd. in Jones 158). To support the judgment of sadistic voyeurism, the critic must close off every
alternative to identifying as a sadistic voyeur.
Operas presentation of Betty as a figure for film spectatorship suggests that critics in effect dictate viewers sadism in order to condemn
it. Following the scenes logic, critical condemnation would distance the
critic from Betty by refusing masochistic identification and from viewers
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Dario Argento
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by judging them from the height of critical authority. The critic seems to
exercise a destructive and arbitrary power, seeking control of the scene
and its viewer. The viewer is, in a sense, the victim of the critics power
just like Betty is the victim of her attacker. At a distance from the two
victims in the scene, one analog remains for the critic: Operas sadistic
psychokiller, Inspector Santini.
Aligning the monstrous psychokiller with normative criticism is
not one of Operas innovations. Indeed, the subversion or enforcement of norms is a central concern in many horror filmsone might
even claim that it provides a formative impetus for the entire genre.
In his essay An Introduction to the American Horror Film, Robin
Wood offer[s] a simple and obvious basic formula for the horror film:
normality is threatened by the Monster (175). Woods formula applies
best to early horror films like F. W. Murnaus Nosferatu (1922) and
James Whales Frankenstein (1931), which can be claimed as implicitly
(on certain levels) identifying their monsters with repressed homosexuality (172). Antagonists like Frankensteins monster threaten the
function of normative sexuality. The protagonist, often with the help
of her or his community, tracks down the monster and destroys it so
that normative forces can prevail. With the advent of slasher films like
those in the Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth series, in which the
monsters are usually psychokillers who dispatch miscreant teens, the
forces of normativity changed orientations. In Returning the Look,
Wood describes
a sinister and disturbing inversion of the significance of the traditional
horror film: there the monster was in general a creature from the id,
not merely a product of repression but a protest against it, whereas in
the current cycles the monster, while still produced by repression, has
become essentially a superego figure, avenging itself on liberated female
sexuality or the sexual freedom of the young. What has not changed
(making the social implications even more sinister) is the genres basic
commercial premise: that the customers continue to pay, as they always did, to enjoy the eruptions and depredations of the monster. But
where the traditional horror film invitedhowever ambiguouslyan
identification with the return of the repressed, the contemporary horror film invites an identification (either sadistic or masochistic or both
simultaneously) with punishment. (80)
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In these films the monster punishes people who defy the demands of
traditional normativity. The monster is no longer the disruptor of
norms in the slasher film, of which Argentos Opera is a close relative;
it is the enforcer.
While the transformation of the monster from a protest against normative repression to an advocate for such repression signifies a shift of
emphasis in the direction of punishment, this shift is not necessarily as
disturbing as Wood claims. After all, slasher films represent the enforcers of norms as monstrous. While murderous acts of enforcement may
provide the majority of the films pleasures, their telos, and arguably
their greatest pleasure, is still the destruction of the monster. If in the
earlier films the destruction of the monster is the (usually temporary)
triumph of repression, then in these later films the destruction of the
monster is the (almost always temporary) triumph of liberation. The
return of the repressed gives way to the return of the repressor. Frankensteins monster and Halloweens Michael Myers are both likely to
come back again in a sequel, and in doing so they demonstrate two sides
in the same cycle of repression and liberation. The protagonist of the
traditional horror film and the antagonist of this new form of horror are
both enforcers of oppressive norms. The enforcer who polices peoples
pleasures to make sure they fall within normative constraints, then,
can correspond figuratively with the critic who hurls condemnations to
maintain the status quo.
Operas human psychokiller, Inspector Santini, does not fit the vaguely
supernatural mold of slashers like Michael Myers. Though he stages his
death and is thus able to return in what seems like a resurrection for the
films final showdown, like most of Argentos killers, he is mortal, which
makes him a weak cipher for an endless cycle of psychic repression and
liberation. Though Santini carries on the new horror-film tradition of linking normative critics and psychokillers, the ways in which he resembles
the normative critic differ from the ways of his mostly American slasher
cousins. While the typical slasher is a figurative policeman who punishes
perverts for their illicit pleasures, Inspector Santini is literally a police
detective. He is assigned to solve the murders he has committed, which
gives him a chance to forestall his detection and strengthen his control
over Betty, the main target of his crimes. The inspector abuses his power
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Dario Argento
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as a policeman, and if he is an analog for the critic, he suggests that critics

abuse their power as well.
A short conversation between Betty and the inspector held before
he is revealed as the killer makes explicit the link between policeman
and critic. When Betty learns of the inspectors profession after he has
expressed admiration of her debut performance, she remarks, So youre
a policeman, not a fan. He responds, Cant a policeman be a fan?
Considering the inspectors question in light of his attacks on Betty, the
answer is not the implied yes but a resounding no. Contrasting a
policeman with a fan suggests that a policeman is a more hostile kind of
viewerlike a condemning critic. The policeman, or the condemning
critic, is not a fan but an attacker. From his first intervention in Bettys
life, disabling the lead opera singer so that Betty can take her place, the
inspector tries to control who and what Betty will be. When he wants
her on stage, he puts her on stage; when he wants her tied to a pillar, he
ties her to a pillar. The inspector watches Betty not to enjoy her performance but to shape and evaluate her as a person. By analogy, the critic
who denounces sadistic voyeurism joins the audience to judge it, assuming mastery over a horde of contemptible sadists. Early in the film, the
inspectors binocularswhich he uses to scrutinize Bettyare splashed
with blood, figuring the violence of his critical gaze. Unlike the typical
slasher, the inspectors critical emphasis is not punishment but the power
he wields over the witness to scenes of horror.
Santini uses his power to prove a critical commonplace related to
the claim that people who enjoy horror in fiction will enjoy horror in
real life. Crane provides another concise synopsis: Present-day horror films, if one believes the public guardians, stimulate the desire for
real bloodshed as they enthrall witless audiences (vii). If viewers are
exposed to enough horrifying images, the images will supposedly infect
them with a desire to create actual violence. Santinis attacks on Betty
add up to a critical experiment that would affirm this infectious view of
violent imagery. As Leon Hunt remarks, The spectator is placed as the
object of sadistic instruction (73). The inspectors own bloodlust began
when Bettys mother, his lover and a self-avowed voyeur, encouraged
him to kill for her pleasure. He believes that by forcing Betty to watch
enough murders, he will awaken the mothers bloodlust in the daughter,
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achieving what critics promise will result from horror enthusiasts exposure to violent imagery. If he can turn Betty into a sadist by exposing
her to violent imagery, the inspector will prove the claim of critics who
condemn horror for its destructive influence.
Critical anxiety about the effects of violent imagery has a history that
goes far beyond the present-day horror film. Concern about the degradation of character that could result from exposure to violent entertainment predates the history of the cinema, earning a mention in Platos
Republic (Cooper, Gothic, 23). A common strategy in contemporary
arguments for and against horrors evil influence is to refer to scientific
studies that demonstrate, or fail to demonstrate, such causality. Michael
Medved claims that more than two hundred recent studies show that
prolonged exposure to brutal imagery in the media leads to more hostile,
violent, and aggressive attitudes and behavior on the part of those who
consume such material (23). Joan Smith questions this claim:
Even the much-vaunted studies proving the link between screen violence and criminal acts turn out, when you look at them more closely, to
establish something rather different: that violent offenders, like many
law-abiding citizens, enjoy recreational violence at the cinema and in
the comfort of their own homes. Who can say which came first? (2023)
In addition to claiming that violent art stimulates violent behavior, detractors of screen violence have denounced it for desensitizing viewers
and creating mean world syndrome, a perception of real-world violence that reinforces the worst fears and apprehensions and paranoia
of people (Gerbner). While scholars such as Jonathan Freedman would
debunk claims about the conclusiveness of studies that correlate media
violence with real-world violence, scholars such as George Comstock
now take this correlation as a given (Cooper, Gothic, 16275).
Examining Operas rhetorical position does not need to involve the
Sisyphean task of arguing either side of this debate. The point is that Inspector Santini, and through him Argentos film, does take such a position.
The inspectors intent becomes clear when Betty catches on to his design.
Frustrated by his failure to change her and by the threat of imminent
capture, the inspector tries to kill her. Betty wards off Santinis final attack
by claiming, I am like my mother ... I realize it now, implying that
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his experiment has worked. The inspector lowers his weaponand his
guardand for the moment, at least, he and Betty walk side by side, a
happy sadistic couple. The policeman-critic finds satisfaction in thinking
that his murders have finally proven his assumption about the effects of
horror on its viewers.
Moments after she saves herself by convincing the inspector that his
experiment has worked, Betty turns on him, and after Santini is apprehended, she triumphantly shouts, Its not true! Im not like my mother,
not at all! An American cut of Opera, known as Terror at the Opera,
ends shortly after Bettys claim. Douglas Winter finds Bettys claim in
this cut to be less than convincing in contrast to the optimistic ending of the original Italian cut, in which Betty falls to the ground and,
on hands and knees, embraces the flowers, the grass, the dirt, finally
urging a salamander to go free (28384). Indeed, Argentos original
finale is almost too convincing: its sincerity approaches the absurd. If the
hyper-sincerity reads more like irony, then the scene becomes opaque, a
nod toward the difficulty of reaching a conclusion about the influence of
violent imagery. If, however, the optimism of the scene is sincere, then
the film argues strongly that violent imagery need not create sadists.
Betty has seen horrors beyond description, but she still embraces flowers, showing that she retains an appreciation for nonviolent aesthetics;
she has literally watched a ruthless killer without blinking, but she still
pities the wee things of the earth, showing that, if anything, her ordeal
of violence has awakened deeper feelings of sympathy.
The inspectors experimenthis attempt to prove critics assumptions about the infectiousness of violent images in horror filmsbackfires. The end result of his violent attacks is a sense that critical biases
against horror films are questionable, if not entirely wrong. By aligning
the assumptions of horrors detractors with the mission of a murderous madman, Opera suggests not only a potential for brutality within
the critical enterprise but also the desperate measures necessary for
maintaining the critical status quo against the evolution of new ideas.
On the one hand, the battle between Santini and Betty dramatizes the
battle between the critics and horrors enthusiasts; on the other hand, it
suggests the struggle of entrenched critical assumptions with an artistic
sensibility that refuses to be cowed by criticism.
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Like the critic and the viewer, the artistic sensibilities behind Opera also have a diegetic stand-in. Inspector Santinis test of his critical
assumptions fails, but not before he takes his final victim: Marco, the
director of the opera at the center of Opera, Verdis Macbeth. While
Santinis staging of the murders for Betty to watch gives him qualities
in common with a film director as well as a film critic, the presence of
a director-character whose life directly mirrors Argentos mutes the inevitable resonance between the perpetrator of violence and the creator
of violent art. In 1985, Argento was invited to direct Verdis Rigoletto,
but scandalous reports of his innovative plans led to his ouster in favor
of a director with a more classical adaptation (Jones 159). In Opera, Marcos girlfriend (one of them, anyway) reads from a newspaper,
Advice to the director: go back to horror filmsforget opera. Like
Marco, Argento tried to move from horror films to opera and got an icy
reception. After Marcos girlfriend finishes reading the terrible review
of his take on Verdi, she exclaims, Theyre pulling you to pieces!
Marco ironically responds, At least its only on paper, foreshadowing his fate: the critical inspector slices and dices him in the final reel.
The cost of normative criticism registers highly with the director, who
either dies at a policeman-critics hands or, more likely, ends up facing
a different horror, such as a reporters suggestion that Argento might
have been a serial killer had he not gone into the movies (Mietkiewicz
D19). Marcos fate suggests that criticism has consequences, and while
they may not be as ghastly as murder, they can nevertheless take a heavy
toll on artists and their art.
The ultimate power of the condemning critic is containment: the
critic maintains the status quo by attacking those who would challenge it,
trying to lock them within a derogated status by declaring them unworthy
of anything else. Opera represents critics efforts of containment directly
in the newspaper critic who would block Marco from moving into the
high-art terrain of opera as well as in Inspector Santini, the policeman
recognized as anything but a fan. The film allegorizes the critics effort
of containment in the image of a viewer bound, gagged, and placed at
the mercy of someone who wants to prove critical assumptions about
sadistic voyeurism. The films strategies for representing critical violence
are, of course, extremely violent. It is a critique of critics in their own
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terms, a violent demonstration of how watching horror films to condemn

the art and its fans can itself become a kind of sadistic voyeurism.
The Stendhal Syndrome
Although Opera makes a strong statement about sadistic voyeurism and
the potential of violent spectacles to create violent spectators, it is not
Argentos final word on the subject of arts influence on its audiences,
which has been a lifelong interest. In an interview translated for this
volume, Argento describes a childhood experience visiting the Parthenon in Athens. Surrounded by sublime art from a bygone era, he felt
so overwhelmed that he became ill. Many years later, while casting for
Two Evil Eyes (1990), a project he shared with the American director
George A. Romero, he came across The Stendhal Syndrome by the Italian psychoanalyst Graziella Magherini, which describes a psychological
condition triggered by exposure to art, an experience of overwhelmingly powerful emotions. Magherini and her colleagues named it after
the French writer Stendhal, who wrote about such an experience in
one of his early nineteenth-century journals. In an interview on the
Blue Underground Blu-ray of Argentos The Stendhal Syndrome (1996),
Magherini associates the condition with fear of death ... feelings of
alienation ... forms of depression, excitement, or also misperception
of reality. Across cases, she points to an underlying crisis of identity, a
loss of ones self due to the power of images. The book helped Argento
to name his potent childhood experience, an influence that has stayed
with him throughout his life.
Magherinis book also inspired Argentos The Stendhal Syndrome,
which he made with his daughter Asia in the lead role of Anna Manni,
a police detective who suffers from the titular condition. Argento has
described the allure of the syndromes danger: The possibility of Art
being deadly really interested me. Violent images in film and on television are supposed to cause violence in viewers. The opening of Suspiria
is often cited as causing people to faint, yet this is art too. These are the
questions I raise in The Stendhal Syndrome (qtd. in Jones 22829). His
emphasis on raising questions reflects his refusal to provide a definite
answer about the veracity of claims about violent art causing real-world
violence. The film uses wild visualssuch as spinning shots of classic
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paintings and CGI doorways that appear inside artworks and draw the
heroine into establish that art has powerful effects, but it leaves questions about the causation of violence, and related questions about the
culpability of art, at least partially unanswered.
What is clear, however, is that the misperception of reality depicted in
The Stendhal Syndrome stems from a disorder: the Stendhal syndrome
is an illness confined to a small minority of people who suffer in the
presence of art. Argentos film reflects on the illness by taking it to the
utmost extremes. When Anna Manni travels from Rome to Florence
to pursue a serial rapist and murderer, she visits the Accademia Gallery
as well as the Uffizi Gallery, where, in front of Brueghels The Fall of
Icarus (which is perhaps on loan from the Muses Royaux des Beaux
Arts in Belgium), she falls into a trance and collapses. She merges into
the paintings depiction of the sea that engulfs tiny Icarus, and swimming
through the water, she encounters and kisses a large fish. She regains
consciousness at the center of a curious crowd, her lip bleeding from
the impact of her fall. Dazed, she exits the museum, leaving her purse,
which carries her gun, inside. The man who turns out to be the killer
retrieves the purse, returns it to Anna sans weapon, introduces himself
as Alfredo, and asks her name. When the question puzzles her, he says,
It was the paintings, wasnt it? Works of art have power over us. Great
works of art have great power. Most of them, theyll never understand,
but I do, and I think you do, too. Alfredo connects with Anna over her
illness, suggesting that the two of them have an understanding of art
from which the majority of people are barred.
The killer uses this understanding to exploit Annas weakness. He
attacks her twice. The first attack occurs while she is still disoriented
from her experience at the Uffizi. Back in her hotel room, her Stendhal syndrome draws her into a reproduction of Rembrandts The Night
Watch. She enters the world of the painting, which blends with her own
memory of the events leading up to her trip to Florence. Crossing into
this blended world brings her back to her identity as a detective; the
paintings crowd becomes a crowd gathered around the scene of one of
Alfredos murders. Her interactions provide exposition about who she
is and why she is in Florence, and then she returns to her hotel room,
where Alfredo is waiting for her. This scene illustrates that the Stendhal
syndrome causes not only a misperception of reality but a blurring of the
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border between the real world and the world of art: Anna passes from the
hotel, through the art, into her own memory, back through the art, and
back to the hotel room as if they all have the same status as reality. In the
Uffizi Gallery and in her hotel room, this blurring causes a loss of self,
a loss of identity and memory that she struggles to regain after Alfredo
tortures and rapes her during the debilitation that her illness causes.
Alfredos second attack illustrates how well he understands the impact of Annas illness. As part of her recovery, Anna takes up painting,
creating abstract works (actually created by Asia Argento) that express
her anguish and victimization and that do not trigger her Stendhal syndrome. The second attack begins when she enters a room where her own
works are displayed. Over Annas images, Alfredo has placed prints of
Brueghels The Fall of Icarus, which immediately trigger the disorientation that begins an episode of her illness. For Anna, art becomes a trap.
Alfredo kidnaps her, takes her to a remote area, ties her to a mattress,
and again tortures and rapes her. He confines her in an outdoor area
where concrete-reinforced walls are covered with grotesque graffiti.
The graffiti supports Annas imprisonment: when Alfredo leaves her
alone, it triggers an episode of her illness with overwhelming chatter
from the images and one image in particulara demonic figure with a
giant, bloody phallusthat comes out of the graffiti to menace her. Art
and Alfredo work together to make Anna a victim.
Each of these attacks destabilizes Annas identity. After the first, as
she works to recover the sense of self she has lost, she cuts off all of
her long dark hair. During an awkward family reunion, Annas father
mentions the haircut, and her brother observes, You look like a boy!
This physical transformation reflects an emotional change as well. She
tells her boyfriend Marco, Im not your woman anymore, and when
he persists in trying to initiate sex, she becomes aggressive. She unfastens his belt, turns him around so that his back is to her, and shoves
him against a wall as if she intends to rape him from behind. He resists,
and she continues to abuse him physically until he flees her apartment.
These changes in her appearance and personality suggest that as a result
of her traumatic encounter with Alfredo, she is identifying with her attacker and becoming a sadistic rapist. After the second attack, she kills
Alfredo and escapes. She changes again, adopting exaggerated femininity symbolized by a long blonde wig that she wears as she pretends to

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be an art student. In her new guise, she begins a romantic relationship

with Marie, a Frenchman whose androgynous name becomes a subject
of conversation. The confusion of identity encapsulated by his name
reflects Annas own confusion. She believes Alfredo is still alive, and
when Marie and her psychiatrist are murdered, she blames Alfredo.
The film ultimately reveals that Anna has become Alfredo, developing
a split personality that makes her both man and woman and leads her
to kill. Her identification with Alfredo, begun after the first attack, is
thus complete.
If art and Alfredo are accomplices in Annas victimization, and if
Annas victimization transforms her into a murderer, then through a
causal chain that begins with exposure to art, The Stendhal Syndrome
might seem to suggest that art can lead to murder. If this film makes
such a claim, then it agrees with Operas Inspector Santini, turning Anna
into the sort of killer that Santini seeks in Betty. This line of reasoning
would seem to incriminate Argento and other creators of violent art: if
art creates murderers, are artists not culpable for the influence of their
art? Worse yet (following this line of reasoning), Argentos film risks doing
to its viewers what the art in the film does to Anna. About The Stendhal
Syndrome Argento has said, Its my intention to try and engender the
same accumulation of weird sensations and unsettling emotions in the
audience that Anna is feeling. How can I do that without going to visually shocking extremes? (qtd. in Jones 230). The visual shocks of this
film are indeed some of the most extreme in Argentos oeuvre. At one
point during Alfredos first protracted assault on Anna, she lies helplessly bound while, right beside her, Alfredo rapes and murders another
woman. The violence culminates in Alfredo shooting the other woman in
the face. The bullet passes in slow motion through one cheek, across the
interior of the womans mouth, and out through the other cheek; Anna
is splashed by the blood that spews from the exit wound. In a disturbing
close-up, Alfredo looks at Anna through the line of sight created by the
bullet holes in the womans face.
The violence is not the only extreme to which Argento exposes his
audience. Beginning with the opening credits, which show a scrolling
strip of some of the Western worlds best-loved paintings, The Stendhal
Syndrome barrages viewers with potent imagery. Even relatively mun-
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dane actions receive extreme representation: for example, when Anna

takes pills, they tumble in extreme close-up through the interior of her
esophagus. Worse still (from the perspective that blames art for murder),
the films greatest extreme arguably lies in its casting. By the time of the
films release, Asia Argento, who plays Anna, had a growing international
reputation as the actress daughter of one of Italys best-known filmmakers. Even viewers who do not know that Asia Argento is Dario Argentos
daughter might draw conclusions from the similarity of names in the
opening credits. While watching Anna being raped and tortured, viewers
might be unable to escape contemplating that these atrocities are being
committed against the directors own daughter. Argentos camera shows
his own daughters body stripped and violated. The artist behind the film
not only works to subject audiences to the artistic barrage that, according
to a line of reasoning that the film suggests, makes people into murderers;
he also makes his own daughter a victim. What sort of monster is he?
Through the combination of disturbing elements that is The Stendhal Syndrome, Dario Argento seems to become the sort of person that
the reporter who asked if he might have been a serial killer would have
him be. He inhabits the monstrosity of the gothic villain, perhaps one
of the Italians vilified in the aforementioned eighteenth-century novel
by Matthew Lewis or by Ann Radcliffes sinisterly named 1797 novel
The Italian. In an interview with Francesco Locane on the Argento fan
Web site Dark Dreams, Argento explains about the inclusion of nude
scenes in his films: I am not embarrassed in shooting them, not even
when they involve my daughter Asia. On the Blue Underground Blu-ray
of The Stendhal Syndrome, Argento discusses his working relationship
with his daughter and how it developed on this film:
I had no problems before, but I did while we were shooting. That is,
the film is very strong, graphic, expressive, and it features nudity. She
suffered at times for this. I didnt try to do anything. If I did, Id have
reduced the drama in the scene. I explained the scene and said, We
need to do it, as it is important for the film. So we did it. She did it,
then cried, sometimes.
Dario had problems, which his tone frames as personal rather than
logistical, treating his daughter in the ways his script required; Asias
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tears suggest that she suffered as well. While what Asia endured suggests
that, during filming, art became a higher priority than the well-being
of his daughter, Argentos problems contradict the image of him as a
monster like the killers in his films.
Asias reflections on her fathers work offer further contradiction.
In an interview with Billy Chainsaw reproduced on the Dark Dreams
Web site, Asia explains, I watched my fathers films when I was very
young, I started when I was six. ... I wasnt so scared by my fathers
films. I never had so-called bad dreams ... when I was a kid I wanted
to watch them again and again. In an interview by Nick Dawe on the
Dark Dreams site, Asia says of her father, We are very close. We are
able to work together and create something as eternal as film. From a
very young age, Asia came into contact with her fathers films, and she
understood them as stories to be enjoyed repeatedly, phenomena separate from the reality of her everyday life with her father. If the claims
of this successful actress, writer, and director who has worked on more
than forty films are true, she was not ruined by exposure to her fathers
films or to his camera. She appreciates his works as films.
The monstrosity that Dario Argento risks associating with himself by
subjecting his audiences and his daughter to extremes of film violence
depends on an inability to distinguish art from life, film from fantasy
an inability of the sort associated with Stendhal syndrome, which The
Stendhal Syndrome clearly marks as an exploitable illness. To condemn
The Stendhal Syndrome for damaging audiences by exposing them to
the conditions of Annas illness is to suggest that all audiences have this
rare illness. To condemn Dario Argento for the rape of his daughter is
to assume the illnesss symptoms; ultimately, Argento exposes his audience and his daughter not to rape and violence but to representations of
rape and violence. In effect, the critics who condemn Argento and his
works either see the Stendhal syndromes unique pathology everywhere
or, more likely, fall victim to a version of the syndrome themselves, going so far into the world of artistic representations that they begin to
confuse them with reality. Once again, a member of the police force
Detective Anna Manni, following Inspector Santinis examplestands
in for the critic. Here, however, the critic is also the victim, a sufferer
from a horribly confusing condition that afflicts only a small number
of viewers when exposed to violent art. In being about a condition that
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blurs the boundaries of art and life, The Stendhal Syndrome is about
the misguided critics who condemn horror fictions for creating horrific
realities. The film argues that only viewers as unstable as Anna run the
risk of becoming killers in her footsteps.
Nevertheless, The Stendhal Syndrome does not close down that
risk completely. Like Operas doubled ending, which first suggests that
Betty has succumbed to the critical imperative of sadistic voyeurism
and then suggests that she has not, The Stendhal Syndromes fantastic imagery makes the titular phenomenon accessible to all, so just as
anyone might succumb to the disease, anyone might confuse art and
reality. Argentos film attacks critical assumptions about the sadism and
dangerousness of violent cinema, but it does not make cinema safe, and
it does not provide easy answers to the questions it raises. In Argentos
films, interpretation is always vexed. Although The Stendhal Syndrome
uses the ideas of a psychoanalyst at the heart of its story, psychoanalytic
interpretationlong the dominant critical approach to horror films, a
dominant approach to film in general, and the basis of theories about
sadistic voyeurismis no more a key to a clear truth in Argentos films
than any other approach.1 The Stendhal Syndrome reflects Argentos
long-standing interest in psychoanalysis, which supplies another object
for his films oppositional strategies.
Against Interpretation: The First Five Gialli
Ready for release in 1969 but held back until 1970, Argentos directorial debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, entered the cinema
world under the shadow of a film that had hit a decade earlier, Alfred
Hitchcocks Psycho. Hitchcocks work demonstrated that films focused
on maniacs who kill beautiful women could reach artistic heights and
also thrive outside the B-movie circuit, and in doing so, it redefined
the thriller and horror genres. For years, producers around the globe
searched for the movie that would be the next Psycho and the director
who might be the next Hitchcock. If a thriller had a comparable premise, critics rushed to make the comparison, so when ABC-TV remarked
in a review of Bird, Remember Psycho? There are scenes with that
kind of impact! the adulation found its way to movie posters and other
ads hoping to win some of Hitchcocks mainstream audience. After Bird

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became an international success, Argento quickly earned the title of

The Italian Hitchcock, which still appears in promotional materials
for his films today. The marketing of Argento as a Hitchcock-like figure went as far as a television show in the model of Alfred Hitchcock
Presents; the miniseries Dario Argentos Door into Darkness ran for
four episodes on Italian television in 1973, with Argento giving eerie
intros to stamp each episode with his brand. A bit of Internet lore
even claims that Hitchcock once said in response to Argentos Deep
Red, This Italian guy is starting to worry me (Alfred). If the claim
is true, then Hitchcock gave the title Italian Hitchcock an indirect
stamp of approval. If it is untrue, then the comparison has become so
powerful that fans have fantasized the relationship between the two
directors into history.
Comparisons of Hitchcocks works, especially Psycho, with Argentos
Bird, Deep Red, and other gialli (plural for giallo [yellow]; the giallo
film is an Italian thriller based on or inspired by early twentieth-century
mystery novels, which in Italy were often published with yellow covers)
go deeper than genre affiliations and superficial plot points. In several
of his films, Hitchcock popularized a transformation of psychoanalytic
commonplaces into elaborate plot devices that render aberrant human
minds as mysteries to be solved, mysteries that can supplement or even
supplant the whodunit? question that usually supplies form and interest for the mystery genre. This transformation propels Psycho, bringing all the strands of the story together, and it offers a touchstone for
Argentos departures from the Hitchcock tradition.
Psycho ends with a psychiatrist explaining the pathological process
that has led the multiple murderer Norman Bates to dress up as his
mother and kill people with a butcher knife. Today, many viewers come
to Psycho already knowing whodunitknowing about the cross-dressing
psycho-killers adoption of his mother as a split personalitys darker, dominant side. When the film was new, viewers mostly came to it unaware
of its surprise ending. Nevertheless, the surprise is not that of a typical
whodunit because offscreen dialogue and even a womanly shadow with
a knife indicate from the start that Normans mother is the killer. Thus
the primary mystery of the film is never who is behind the grisly slayings
but why they occur and which character is next. The film climaxes when
Lila Crane, the surviving sister of the woman Norman/Mother famously
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murders in the shower, discovers that the seated Mother figure the film
has offered as the culprit is actually a corpse. Upon the discovery, Norman/Mother quickly leaps out in his womanly costume to menace Lila
with the butcher knife, and almost as quickly, Lilas savior grabs him/
her from behind and, in a brief struggle, removes much of the costume.
The camera follows Norman/Mothers wig to the floor, and the shot of
the wig fades to an exterior shot of a crowd in front of a police station.
This quick twistif viewers thought Mother is whodunit, they were
wrong because Norman didis even more quickly dampened by a line
claiming that the new answer to whodunit is still not the final answer.
After a cut from the police stations exterior to a detectives office, the
first line spoken is, If anyone gets any answers, itll be the psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist, Dr. Richman, will supply the real answer. When asked
whether Norman killed Lilas sister, Dr. Richman says, Yes and no,
taking away the twists whodunit answer and leaving both diegetic and
nondiegetic audiences completely dependent on his explanation of the
yes-and-no paradox. Dr. Richman works to maintain this dependency:
when a member of his small police-station audience interrupts him to
answer, Why was [Norman] dressed like that? with, Hes a transvestite, the psychiatrist silences the interrupter with, Not exactly. Thus
Dr. Richman establishes total authority: no one but the psychiatrist can
provide answers in this film.
Dr. Richmans yes-and-no answer to whodunit shifts the mysterys
emphasis from a simple question of who to more complex questions of
why, and the doctors authority frames psychoanalysis as the only means
of making the whys appear. Why is Norman both innocent and guilty
of murdering Lilas sister? The psychoanalytic response casts him as an
improper version of one of Sigmund Freuds favorite characters, Oedipus. In part because his mother was a clinging, demanding woman
who lived with her son after his fathers death as if there was no one
else in the world, when she met a new man, it seemed to Norman that
she threw him over for this man, and that pushed him over the line, and
he killed them both. Mother clung to her son too much, so he went
through a perverse version of what Freud calls the Oedipus complex,
in which a normal boy at first identifies his father with himself and his
mother with the object of desires, and eventually the little boy notices
that his father stands in his way with his mother, [so] his identification

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with his father then takes on a hostile colouring and becomes identical
with the wish to replace his father in regard to his mother (Freud,
Group). In Normans abnormal case, his identification with the role of
his father became so hostile that he killed his father-surrogate in order
to replace him. In the process, he happened to kill his mother, too, so,
as Dr. Richman explains, he had to erase the crime, at least in his own
mind ... he began to think and speak for her, give her half his life, so
to speak. In a psycho version of marriage, the joining of two lives into
one, Norman joined with his mother, giving his uber-Freudian Oedipal
tale a sinister finish.
Hitchcocks camera stays on the psychiatrist and his diegetic audience throughout the scene, and when Dr. Richman finishes explaining
how Normans mother-half has won complete control of his psyche, the
real mystery of Psycho is solved. One of the detectives in the diegetic
audience foolishly holds on to another mystery, asking what happened to
the forty thousand dollars that Normans victim Marion Crane had stolen
at the beginning of the movie. Dr. Richman barely has time to belittle
the question, saying, These were crimes of passion, not profit, before
a uniformed policeman interrupts to ask whether he can give Norman/
Mother a blanket, which, when the policeman leaves, gives Hitchcocks
camera an excuse to abandon the irrelevant conversation about money
and find its way to Norman/Mother and his/her chilling final monologue
that substantiates everything the psychiatrist has explained.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
The ending of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is what the DVD commentator Alan Jones calls the films most obvious homage to Psycho.
That the scene echoes Psychos ending is obvious, but the significance
of that echo might not be. The scene evokes Hitchcocks transformation
of psychoanalytic inquiry into a popular plot device, but by contrast, in
Bird, the transformation appears only to be dismissed, echoing Psycho
only to contradict it. Thus while his first film established Argentos fame
as the Italian Hitchcock, it also began a project that worked against
Hitchcocks apparent elevation of psychoanalytic interpretation.
At the end of Bird, Sam Dalmas, the protagonist, confronts the killer,
who turns out not to be a man as everyone has suspected but a woman,
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Monica Ranieri. The confrontation almost costs Sam his life, but the
police arrive in time to save him. The film cuts from this quick resolution to a TV news show. Turning to the police detective who has led the
investigation throughout the film, the anchorman says, Inspector Morosini, can you explain what moved this woman to commit such horrible
murders? Morosini humbly replies, I believe that the most qualified
person to answer these questions is Dr. Renoldi, the well-known psychiatrist, our consultant during the investigation. Thus he cedes the authority
to psychiatry that Psychos Dr. Richman claims through his mysterious
answers to the whodunit question.
Like Dr. Richman, Dr. Renoldi provides an expository monologue
that replaces whodunit, which the film has already revealed, with a psychological resolution to the higher mystery of whydunit. He begins with
a reference to the killers traumatic experience with a sexual assault:
For the time being we can only say this: Ten years ago, Monica Ranieri,
who was born with paranoid tendencies, was the victim of an aggression, which traumatized her severely. Her mental disturbance remained
dormant for ten years, until she came across a painting that depicted
the horrible scene of which she had been the protagonist. Her latent
madness came to life, violent and irresistible. Strangely, she did not
identify herself with the victim but with the aggressor, maybe to rid
herself of fear.
This explanation relies on psychoanalytic theory about identification,

giving the same power to psychoanalysis as Psycho.
However, the films presentation undermines the authority of this
explanation. As the psychiatrist speaks his first explanatory line, his voice
continues on the audio while the image transitions into a shot of an airplane on a runway, preparing for takeoff. A series of quick cuts shows
the airplane in multiple positions from multiple angles; the ostentatious
editing pulls focus from the sound track, which gets diluted by rising
music from Ennio Morricones score. Sam Dalmas and his girlfriend Julia
appear, boarding the plane, getting settled, and looking relieved after
their harrowing experiences with the killer. The cameras abandonment
of Dr. Renoldi before he finishes his explanation contrasts sharply with
Hitchcocks treatment of Dr. Richman. Although Frank Burke and others
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have read Psychos ending as ironic, any irony in the ending is subtle,
and Hitchcocks camera grants Dr. Richman an image of authority, not
leaving him until after he finishes solving the psycho-mystery and exits
the room to emphasize the irrelevance of the money-mystery to which
one foolish detective still clings. Argentos camera leaves his psychiatrist
before the psycho-mystery is resolved. Psycho dismisses the moneymystery, the type of mystery most common to the thrillers of its time,
and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage dismisses the psycho-mystery,
the type of mystery that Psychos influence had made common during
the decade between the two films.
Argentos visual abandonment of the psychoanalytic explanation
ultimately frames psychoanalysis, as well as the films that rely on it as
machinery to propel and resolve their plots, with ridicule. When Dr.
Renoldi finishes his diluted audio-only monologue with an explanation
of why Monicas husband Alberto assisted with the slayings (he was
influenced by his paranoid wife to the point of becoming homicidally
psychotic himself), Sam, an American, refers musingly to a friend who
had encouraged his murder-harried trip to Italy: I can hear him saying
it now: Go to Italy. Its a peaceful country. Nothing ever happens there.
For Sam, this line is a joke about an Americans experience abroad, but
for the audience who has just finished listening to Dr. Renoldi, it is a
terse, risible coda for the very serious psychoanalysts revelation of truth.
In its position as the psychoanalytic revelations punctuation, and also
as the films final statement, the line undercuts the revelations seriousness and recasts the entire explanation with levity. Just as the camera
dismisses the psychiatrists image, Sams line dismisses the psychiatrists
words. The final impression of this film is not that of a psychological
mystery thrillingly unveiled or of a psycho-killer giving credence to a
psychoanalysts darkest revelations; it is a joke that frames the entire
film as nothing happening. The explanation replaces psychoanalysis as
the key to a mysterys meaning with a suggestion, perhaps more serious
than it sounds, that the mystery lacks meaning altogether.
Argento forecasts his turn away from psychoanalysis in the title The
Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The title Psycho takes part in the transformation of psychoanalytic theory into a meaningful plot mechanism;
if a title indicates important content, then the important content in
Hitchcocks film is not the mystery of the motel murders, which might
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be a true-to-genre title based on the weak whodunit aspect of the plot,

but the psycho-logical story hidden within the murderers mind. The
Bird with the Crystal Plumage is far more enigmatic: it refers to the
clue that finally leads Sam and the police to discover the killers whereabouts and identity. The clue is central to whodunit, but since whodunit
is not central to the film, it merits fewer than five minutes of onscreen
discussion. It appears thanks to Monica Ranieris unfortunate habit of
telephoning Sam and the police to taunt them with whispers about her
murderous plans. Sam and the police record some of the phone calls,
and the police analyze the recordings with their sophisticated (for the
late 1960s) lab equipment. In typical giallo fashion, the resources of
Sam the amateur detective succeed where the polices equipment fails.2
At a point when the recordings seem almost forgotten, Professor Carlo
Dover, Sams acquaintance, comes to Sam having figured out the source
of strange noises they had heard in one recordings background: the call
of hornitus nevalis, a rare bird found in the Siberian wild. Conveniently,
only one bird of this type exists in Italy, in a zoo just below the Ranieris
apartment. As soon as they piece the bird puzzle together, the camera
cuts to Sam, Carlo, and Julia rushing through the zoo with police in
tow. The camera pans across the titular caged bird, lingering only for
a moment on its exotic white plumage, before following the detective
team to the apartment. As quickly as it appears, the titular phenomenon
is gone. While Hitchcocks title refers to the psychological interest that
defines his film, Argentos refers to something beautiful but ephemeral,
only significant enough to interest the camera for an instant.
Giving the ephemeral bird the status of title (which it has in both
Italian and English versions, although a French-language version, Le
sadique aux gants noirs, translates as The Sadist with Black Gloves)
does not necessarily make the avian creature itself important. It does,
however, foreground the films values or, more precisely, what the film
does not value. Just as psychoanalytic interpretation appears at the end
only to be dismissed as a valueless nothing, Sam follows psychological
threads throughout the film, expecting them to lead to the solution, only
to have his expectations dashed by the bird noise that actually leads to
the films final revelations. These threads, and the entire psychologydriven investigation that they constitute, are finally as unimportant as
the mystery of the motel murders in Psycho.

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The thread in which Sam invests the most energy stems from what
he witnesses at the beginning of the film. In Birds most celebrated
sequence, Sam walks down a dark city street and notices, through the
brightly lit glass faade of an art gallery, a struggle between two figures.
One of them, apparently male and dressed in the black jacket, hat, and
gloves that the previous Italian generations maestro of terror, Mario
Bava, made the signature costume of the giallos killers, seems to be
attacking a woman in an all-white outfit. As Sam rushes through the
gallerys first set of glass doors to intervene, he becomes trapped in a
glass cage, a vantage from which he can only watch the violence unfold
(figure 2). Sams helpless position prefigures that of Betty in Opera:
since he cannot enter the scene he is witnessing, he becomes, like the
moviegoing audience, a passive voyeur.
Sam watches the black-clad figure flee the scene, leaving the wounded
woman to writhe in agony. Surrounded by bizarre metallic sculptures,
she sees Sam and extends a hand toward him, blood dripping bright red
drops from her fingers to the stark white floor, but all he can do is press
against the glass and assure her that the police are on their way. When
the police arrive and question him, Inspector Morosini demands, What
Figure 2. In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage,

Sam (Tony Musante) becomes trapped in a
glass cage, where he takes the position of
voyeur that becomes an integral feature of
virtually all of Argentos major works.
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happened? I want to know everything you saw and heard. The stakes
are high: the attack Sam has witnessed, in which the victim has appeared
to be the beautiful Monica Ranieri, seems to be connected to the recent
murders of several other beautiful women. After a few interruptions,
Sam tells the inspector, There was something wrong with that scene.
Something odd. I cant pin it down, but I have a definite feeling that
something didnt fit. This unproductively indefinite definite feeling
that he has seen or heard something wrong and therefore remembers
something wrongly launches him on two quests. One is the typical quest
of the mystery/thriller, a journey outward through the dark world of an
unfamiliar city to follow clues toward the identity of the killer. The police
goad him onto this quest, agreeing that he has seen something important
and even giving him the address of the Ranieris as encouragement for him
to share in the detective work. The other quest, less typical of the genre
but archetypal for Argento, is a journey inward, toward the reconstruction
of Sams unconscious memory, which he believes could hold the solution.
At several key moments in the film, the scene in the gallery replays as Sam
remembers it. The camera zooms in when Sam focuses on a detail, and
in freeze-frame he contemplates what might be a critical observation.
The reconstruction of unconscious memories plays a central role
in psychoanalytic practice, as Freud explains in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1922):
At first the endeavours of the analytic physician were confined to divining
the unconscious of which his patient was unaware, effecting a synthesis
of its various components and communicating it at the right time. Psychoanalysis was above all an art of interpretation. Since the therapeutic
task was not thereby accomplished, the next aim was to compel the
patient to confirm the reconstruction through his own memory. In this
endeavour the chief emphasis was on the resistances of the patient; the
art now lay in unveiling these as soon as possible, in calling the patients
attention to them, and by human influencehere came in suggestion
acting as transferenceteaching him to abandon the resistances.
Sams quest makes him both patient and analyst in a psychoanalytic

process. He must uncover whatever his memory needs to seem right,
and he must confirm what he uncovers by unveiling the resistances that
made his memory wrong in the first place.

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Each time Sam (and the film) replays his memory of the apparent
attack on Monica Ranieri, he sees a little bit more and seems to get a
little bit closer to some kind of revelation. Before he gets there, Professor
Carlo Dover cracks the mystery of the strange noises in the telephone
recording, and the pursuit of the rare bird, which owes nothing to Sams
introspection, leads to the killer. After Sam, Carlo, Julia, and the police
race from the zoo to the Ranieris apartment, Sam and the police burst
in on a struggle for a knife between Alberto Ranieri (Umberto Raho,
who looks a little like Anthony Perkins playing Norman Bates) and his
wife Monica. Alberto wins the struggle and brandishes the knife at the
intruders. A brief scuffle pushes Alberto through a high window, where
he dangles from a ledge. Sam and a detective fail to pull him back up,
and a spectacular effect that cost Argento a camera allows the audience
to take Albertos point of view all the way down to the bounce and thump
of his body on the pavement. Dying, Alberto confesses to the murders
and begs Sam and Morosini to take care of his wife.
The film gestures toward closure, but just when the credits might
have started rolling, Sam notices that Julia is missing. In fact, she and
Carlo have not appeared since the race to the Ranieris apartment. Sams
search leads him to the back entrance of the Ranieris building. He is
concerned enough to enter the building, go upstairs, and prowl through
the Ranieris darkened apartment, but whatever suspicions he entertains
during the search do not trigger further reconstruction of his memory.
He does not seem to doubt Albertos guilt at all until he sees Carlo seated
in a chair holding a knife. No flash of memory helps him to notice that
Carlo is a corpse; only the mans dead weight flopping on top of him
when Sam tries to grab the knife stops him from blaming Carlo for the
crimes. On the floor, trying to push away the corpse, Sam sees Julia bound
and gagged, and he hears laughter from across the room. The source
of the laughter emerges from the darkness, and only then, with Monica
Ranieri standing in front of him in giallo-killer regalia, does his reconstructed memory kick in. The scene cuts quickly back and forth between
Monicas laughing face and Sams memory of the gallery where she was
apparently attacked, and this time, the clarified shot reveals something
new: as Monica struggles with the black-clad figure, Alberto, she is the
one holding the knife and attacking him. You were trying to kill your
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husband, not the other way around, Sam says, having a delayed eureka
moment that is absolutely useless.
The nature of the mental blocks, which Freud calls resistances, that
had been keeping Sam from remembering all the details of the attack in
the gallery become clear at the moment the memory does. When Sam
saw a man struggling with a woman, his expectations related to gender
and aggression (and to people who wear black versus white) made him
see wrongly, misidentifying and then misremembering the roles in the
conflict. Even though the reverse was true, Sams prejudices functioned
as resistances, making him identify the man as the aggressor and the
woman as the victim. In an interview on the Blue Underground DVD
of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Argento explains his thinking
behind this scenario:
It is a theme and one of my obsessions, psychoanalysis ... and memory
becomes the theme. ... Its the memory thats faulty. In addition, we
only remember the things that we want to remember, in every case. We
remember things that our culture wants us to remember. The rest we
remember in a different way or we dont remember at all. This is the
theme on which I based the film.
Argento slides easily from a claim about psychoanalysis, to an idea about

what we want, to an idea about what our culture wants, suggesting a
deterministic relationship not only between culture and memory but
also between culture and identity, who we are. The Bird with the Crystal
Plumage examines memory and identity through Sams misremembering and misidentification of actors in a scene of violence. Sams errors
expose the power of gender norms as so strong that they shape what
people perceive and recall, but behind this critique of normative gender
codes lies another part of the critique of psychoanalysis inherent to the
dismissal of Dr. Renoldi at the end of the film. By having the psychoanalytic thread lead Sam to a gender-bending revelation that is too late
to do any good, the film paints psychoanalysis as an obsession-worthy
intellectual pastime that is nevertheless devoid of functional utility.
Sam follows another psychoanalytic thread related to memory, gender, and identity that turns out to be equally useless. It begins when he
visits an antique shop where Monica Ranieris first victim worked. He
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learns that the victim sold a painting on the night she died; the man who
runs the shop describes the painting as primitive, very macabre, too. It
depicts a man in black clothes and a black hat attacking a woman who lies
in a bright red pool of blood that contrasts starkly with the large snowy
landscape around them. The antique dealer, whom a DVD commentator rightly describes as a gay caricature, at first refuses to give Sam a
black-and-white copy of it, but when Sam turns on the charm and says
please, the scene cuts to Sam pinning the copy on his wall at home.
When Julia comments on the image, Sam describes it as a photo of a
painting that is somehow mixed up in all these murders. He has a feeling that somehow he will find a vital connection between the painting
and the mystery. Confirming Sams feeling, the camera moves in on the
portion of the painting that features the attack and then tracks backward
as the image becomes color, finally revealing that the original painting
hangs in the killers lair. Although he lacks the audiences confirmation of
the paintings relevance, Sam fixates on it as crucial evidence, gazing at
it on one occasion and saying to himself, This damned thing is turning
into an obsession, and on another occasion saying, Damned painting,
theres got to be a lead there somewhere. Later, when Sams search for
Julia leads him back into the Ranieris apartment building, a shot of the
painting on the wall confirms that Sam has found his target.
As Dr. Renoldi explains in his audio-only monologue, the painting is a
representation of an assault that Monica Ranieri suffered ten years prior
to the films action. The painter knew about the attack because she was
a girl I knew, and he found it inspiring. The painting, in turn, inspires
Monica to kill, reopening the wounds of her traumatic experience and
sending her spiraling into psychosis. Dr. Renoldi notes that in reaction to
the painting, Strangely, she did not identify herself with the victim but
with the aggressor, maybe to rid herself of fear. Like Sam, Monica has
a problem with identification, but their problems pull in two different
directions. Sam misidentifies the gender roles in his memory because
he remembers what his culture wants him to remember. Monica, by
contrast, misidentifies with the gender roles in the painting, refusing to
identify herself with the victim, a member of her own sex who in fact is
a representation of herself, and identifying instead with the aggressor,
a member of the opposite sex.
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This misidentification works contrary to cultural expectations and

contrary to the process of identification that Freud associates with the
female version of Oedipus complex (Psychogenesis), which reverses the
gender roles in the following explanation of male Oedipal identifications:
It is easy to state in a formula the distinction between an identification
with the father and the choice of the father as an object. In the first case
ones father is what one would like to be, and in the second he is what
one would like to have. The distinction, that is, depends upon whether
the tie attaches to the subject or to the object of the ego. (Freud, Group)
Oedipal identifications, which are the prototype of all identifications,

rely on distinctions between who a person wants to be, which in normal
(according to Freud) identification is someone who shares the persons
gender, and whom a person wants to have (sexually), which in normal
(according to Freud) identification is someone of the opposite gender.
Monicas identification with the representation of her male attacker,
which leads her to assume his role and attack other women as she was
attacked, is, then, the result of what psychoanalysts would call an abnormal psychosexual process, a perversion. Considering psychoanalysis
as a cultural force, psychological processes that are normal or abnormal
according to Freud become normative and counternormative, cultural
models that dictate how a person should or should not behave and thus
inculcate certain behaviors. When Sam misidentifies roles in the struggle
between Monica and Alberto, he is only behaving in accordance with
cultural norms. When Monica misidentifies with roles in the struggle
between attacker and victim in the painting, with a representation of
her own victimization, she becomes a pervert. Sam and Monica thus
become rhetorical figures that reflect critically on Freudian notions of
gender and perversity.
Throughout the film, the presumably male killers attacks on women
are perversely sexualized, and the killers knife looks like a standard visual representation (or displacement) of phallic aggression. The knifes
status as a phallic symbol becomes graphic during the attack on the
killers fourth victim, the first murder the movie depicts on screen. The
phallic blade rips through the female victims translucent nightie, partially exposing her breasts. It slides along her flesh and hovers over her
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panties, which the killers hand rips off. The next shot shows the killers
hand lift the knife upward, and then the film cuts to a splash of blood
accompanied by a scream. The attack with the knife thus becomes simultaneous rape and murder, a figurative association that recurs during
several of the killers attacks.
Reviewing such scenes of phallic aggression in light of the endings revelation of Monica as the killer recasts the killer as a phallic
woman, a conventional representation of lesbianism in gothic and horror
fiction (Cooper, Gothic, 7273). The movie does not explicitly characterize Monica as someone who identifies with lesbianism or seeks
out sexual relationships with women and not men. The Ranieris are
gallery-owning, swinging artist-types, but their marriage seems sound
enough for Alberto to kill and die to protect his insane wife. In addition, the giallo costume obscures the killers identity, and the figure in
the dark coat, hat, and gloves is not necessarily that of Eva Renzi, the
actress who plays Monica. Creating a visual signature comparable to
Hitchcocks cameos, Argento uses his own hands in close-up shots of
the killer manipulating knives and other frightening symbols, which
means that the manliness of the killer going incognito should not be
overread. Nevertheless, Monicas identification with her male attacker
transforms her appearance, prompting her to don a masculine suit during her final confrontation with Sam, which features the costume in
full view of her pretty face and long, feminine hair. Although Monica
may not actually be a lesbian, her appearance during this confrontation and her sexualized attacks on other women make her a mannish
woman, which is consistent with what Freudians would classify as a
classic case of female inversion, a common type of perversion in the
annals of Freudian psychoanalysis.
Classification and examination of perverts are central activities in
many of Argentos films, and they are crucial aspects of his early mystery narratives. His work thus engages with Freuds proclivities in the
essay on The Sexual Aberrations in his Three Essays on the Theory
of Sexuality. In Bird, classification and examination combine when the
police attempt to have Sam pick the killer out of a lineup that Petrini,
a detective subordinate to Morosini, introduces as if he were reading
from a psychoanalysts catalog of sexual abnormalities:
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petrini: Bring in the perverts. Take a good look, Mr. Dalmas. ...
We cant rule out the possibility that he is a pervert. Aldo Sarti, forty-two
years old, eight convictions, sadomasochist. Sandro Lorrani, thirty-one
years old, exhibitionist, eight convictions. Mario Zandri, sixty-six years
old, sodomite. Giacomo Rossi, fifty years old, three sentences for corrupting the morals of minors. Rubatelli, Luigi, alias Ursula Andress,
twenty-six years old . . .
morosini: No! Petrini! ... Whats he doing here? How many times
do I have to tell you? Ursula Andress belongs with the transvestites, not
the perverts.
The men take their places in the lineup as the detective calls their names.
When Ursula Andress appears, Morosini corrects Petrinis misclassification. Ultimately, the scene plays for laughs, and not only because of the
jibes at the perverts (even though the depiction, like the caricatured depiction of the gay antique dealer, is tinged with the homophobia that pervades
the thriller and horror genres, as Harry M. Benshoff has demonstrated).
Because the lineup has no relationship with the crimes whatsoever, the
entire process of parading those whom psychoanalysts call aberrations as
criminals ends up being a farce, a sign of the polices ineptitude consistent
with Sam as amateur detective being more capable of tracking the killer
than the men who are actually trained to fight crime. Furthermore, the
misclassification of a cross-dresser as a pervert resonates with Monicas
cross-dressing and Dr. Renoldis dismissed diagnosis of her problems
with identification: identifying with the attacker in the painting may very
well be part of Monicas sickness, but to explain her behavior in terms
of psychoanalytic perversion is as misguided as putting Ursula Andress
in the lineup. The lineup leads nowhere, and so does following the psychoanalytic thread suggested by the painting. Far from sharing Freudian
proclivities, Bird actually lampoons them.
The Cat o Nine Tails
Psychoanalysis is not the only (supposed) science that falls inside the
critical frames of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Sams amateur
sleuthing (with help from Professor Dover) beats out the sound analysis
that the police demonstrate with their labs fancy equipment and the
forensic analysis indicated in the aftermath of the gallery attack at the
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films beginning, during which Argentos camera carefully notes police

dusting for fingerprints and gathering samples of blood. Sciences failure to reveal or establish the truth becomes even more pronounced
in Argentos second directorial feature, The Cat o Nine Tails (1971).
In an interview included on the Blue Underground DVD of the film,
Argentos cowriter Dardano Sacchetti explains the basis for a central
concept in the story:
It had a scientific angle. In Scientific American magazine there was an
article about [men with] XYY [sex chromosomes]. It seemed that in
an American study, a sample of prison inmates displayed a very high
percentage of people with an extra chromosome. It seemed that this
extra chromosome was indicative of a violent nature.
The DVD cuts to Argento, who explains, The media was talking about
it, so I made it the focus of the movie. Of course its not true, but it made
a good story. As in Bird, sexual abnormality takes center stage. While
he views the genetic theory as interesting enough to provide the basis
for a movie, Argento ultimately dismisses this development in genetics
as a falsehood. For Argento, science does not have to be true to be the
subject of film narrative. In the move from Bird to Cat, he moves from
one truth-challenged science to another.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o Nine Tails, and Argentos third film, Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), are commonly known
as The Animal Trilogy. Since the first movie was successful, Argento
claims in the same DVD interview, I thought of making a trilogy, always
putting the name of an animal in the title. This naming convention
spawned a host of imitators exemplified in the titles of gialli such as Paolo
Cavaras Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971) and Lucio Fulcis Lizard
in a Womans Skin (1971). In each of these films the title has thematic
or narrative relevance that is not immediately obvious, but the titles
significance is not always the same. Unlike The Bird with the Crystal
Plumage, The Cat o Nine Tails does not refer to the clue that thwarts
the films psychological threads; instead it refers to all the films threads
taken together. It derives from a conversation about the films mystery
between the protagonists Franco Arno, a blind former journalist who is
now a puzzle maker, and Carlo Giordani, a journalist:
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giordani: Nine leads to follow. Its a cat with nine tails.

arno: A cat of nine tails, like the old naval whip. If we could just
latch on to one of those nine tails, wed be on our way to solving the
puzzle.
giordani: Yeah, but which one?
The mystery begins with Arno and his niece Lori overhearing a snippet
of conversation about blackmail. Arno uses Lori as his eyes, telling her
to observe the people they overhear. The scene transitions to a robbery
at the Terzi Institute for Genetic Research. Not long after, a scientist
from the institute is pushed in front of a train, and a photographer takes
a picture just as it happens, providing a clue that gets him killed. The
investigation ends up involving five scientists, one daughter of the top
scientist, one fiance of another scientist, one set of missing photographs,
and one robbery5 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 9which somehow reminds
Giordani of a severely deformed feline, which makes Arno think of a
whip common in naval history as well as in contemporary fetish clubs.
Arno probably does not intend to evoke the sexual connotations of a
cat o nine tails, and since the titular phenomenon never reappears, the
connotation is never explored. However, the whips connection to illicit
sexuality makes its name more apt as a title than the bird from Argentos
previous effort because the majority of the mysterys nine threads involve
some sort of sexual aberration. Significantly, one thread expands on an
interest that appears briefly in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. On
his Bird DVD commentary, Alan Jones notes that Dario always said
he would make a complete thriller with just nothing but homosexual
characters in it. Bird only goes as far as the pervert lineup, the gay antique dealer, and the killers first victim, about whom the antique dealer
in passing mentions, It was said that she preferred women. Cat goes
further into the gay world, leading Giordani into a gay nightclub so that
he can meet with one of the five scientists, Professor Braun. For the
handsome straitlaced hero, the meeting is quite awkward. The camera
follows his slow journey through the club, capturing drag queens, a man
applying face makeup, gay friends casually touching one another, and
other spectacles that seem like part of the settings quotidian reality despite their extreme rarity in mainstream societyespecially mainstream
cinemain 1971.
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Giordani exhibits unflappable poise as he delves into the world that

his (and the cameras) lingering gaze marks as alien. He seems only mildly
uncomfortable when Professor Braun flirts with him: You know you have
very beautiful eyes. An instant before Giordani tenders his gracious
reply, You really think so? a cut leaps over the scenes axis of action,
changing the camera angle by 180 degrees and reversing the positions of
the two men on screen. One moment has Giordani in control, pursuing
a potential suspect, and then a compliment reverses the relationship,
putting Braun in the position of aggressor as he says, Blue with a touch
of red. Very rare. When Giordani identifies himself as a reporter, another cut restores the men to their previous positions, and Braun rises
to leave. The context makes Brauns impulse to flee a reporter implicitly
understandable: a gay scientist would not want public attention focused
on his nightlife, which could damage his career. (Lest there be any doubt
about gay mens fear of exposure, a later scene involves a man telling
Giordani how to relocate Braun; the man says, And for reasons that I
wont trouble you with but which you can probably imagine, I prefer not
to have dealings with the police, and then he explains that his young
male lover left him for Braun.) Giordani tries to stop Brauns flight by
grabbing his arm. A cut reverses positions again, and a young man rushes
to Brauns aid, reminding Giordani that he is not in a place where he can
assume control. Giordani backs off, Braun dismisses the young man, and
the rest of the conversation unfolds in a standard shot/reverse pattern
featuring one empowered speaker at a time. This sequences editing
calls attention to a minute drama of sexuality and power that resonates
with the larger drama surrounding the mystery of the robbery and the
murders that follow.
Brauns line about Giordanis eyes relates directly to the heart of
that drama: as a scientist in the Terzi Institute for Genetic Research,
Braun trades in genetic rarities, blue-with-red eyes and especially the
aberrant XYY chromosomes that motivate the robbery and the murders.
But Braun does not mention XYYhis connection to it only appears
through his work at the Terzi Institute and through Giordani and Arnos
bundling of nine clues. The films exposition of the (untrue, according
to Argento) XYY phenomenon falls primarily to two characters, the asyet-unrevealed killer, Dr. Casoni, and top-scientist Dr. Terzis adopted
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daughter, Anna. Anna provides one of the first dead-end threads for the
hero-team of Arno and Giordani to follow. Giordani goes to visit Dr.
Terzi, and when he meets Anna, flirting begins immediately. They drive
to a bar, where Anna starts giving her new beau information:
anna: [Father has] taken on four research assistants, specialists in
genetics. Theyre working on two parallel projects. One deals with a
very revolutionary drug, and the other is a research program for the
government. Its a highly confidential investigation into the chromosomal
alteration known as XYY, which apparently indicates a criminal tendency
in the individual. ... Its already been brought into several criminal trials
as an extenuating circumstance.
The drug, which later supplies the main topic of conversation for Giordani and Braun, is a red herring, but the chromosomal alteration relates
to the killer.
But Anna does not establish that relationship. Instead she serves
as both love interest and suspect, exciting the most suspicion when
Giordani learns that she is in a sexual relationship with her adoptive
father. The lack of consanguinity makes the incest only figurative, but
the taboo nevertheless weighs heavily in Giordanis investigative ratiocination. The combination of incriminating sexuality and incriminating
circumstantial evidenceAnna cuts herself on a broken vase, so she
appears with blood literally on her hands just after Giordani wounds
the killer, whom he of course does not seeprompts him to accuse her.
She responds, You petty, narrow-minded little reporter. You figured
it all out, didnt you? A neat equation, Italian style: whore equals liar
equals murderer. I thought Id finally run into somebody reasonably
civilized, but I was wrong. Annas rebuke spells out for Giordani and
the audience why this sexual prejudice is a dead end. Like Sam in Bird,
Giordani makes a mistake because of his knowledge of Italian-style
social conventions, and this time, the conventions are more than misleading: they are condemnable, uncivilized.
The second source of exposition about the XYY phenomenon is Dr.
Casoni, who is eventually revealed as the killer. During the robbery at the
films beginning, Dr. Casoni steals the files that would reveal his genetic
abnormality, and to keep his secret he first pushes Dr. Calabresi, the
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scientist spotted by Arno and Lori at the beginning, under a train, and
then kills a chain of others connected to the institute or to the photographers unlucky capture of the Calabresi murder on film. When Arno
gets too close to the truth, Casoni kidnaps Lori. Arno finally confronts
Casoni after a chase that leads them to a tall buildings rooftop. Casoni
explains himself with James Bondvillain flair:
casoni: I had to do it. It wasnt my fault. Calabresi was the only one
who knew I had the XYY triad. Me of all people! After all these years
of research, I would have been ruined!
arno: What have you done with my little girl? Huh? Speak up!
casoni: I broke into the lab and replaced my report sheet with a
negative one. No one would ever have found out, but Calabresi knew,
he knew, and he tried to blackmail me. I had to kill him, dont you see?
arno: Never mind about that.
casoni: And then the others . . .
arno: Never mind all that! Now tell me. What did you do with Lori?
casoni: I killed her.
Arno tells the killer and the audience to never mind about this last bit
of XYY expositionlike the psychiatrists diagnosis at the end of Bird,
Casonis explanation of his psychological motivation is irrelevant, and
that irrelevance results in the dismissal of the entire XYY plotline. What
finally leads Arno to the killer is Loris kidnapping, not some convoluted
plot about aberrant sexual characteristics, and his niece is all Arno and
the audience should care about. Infuriated by Casonis taunting claim
about killing Lori, Arno pushes him down an elevator shaft. After Casonis graphic death, the sound track plays Loris voice shouting her
nickname for Arno, Cookie, Cookie!
In the DVD interview, Argento comments on the ending: The murderer that still wants to inflict pain and lies about killing the little girl.
... I like this final ambiguity. The ambiguity of the ending is manifold.
First, killing the killer, who at that point would be easily captured by
police, thrusts Arno into moral ambiguity, which he shares with the alleged heroes of Argentos next three gialli, Four Flies on Grey Velvet,
Deep Red, and Tenebre, as well as with the victim-turned-killer Anna
Manni in The Stendhal Syndrome. Second, hearing Lori but not seeing
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her puts viewers in the same position as the blind puzzle maker, and the
films final line, Cookie, Cookie! could be an editorial amelioration of
Arnos crime, a summoning of a dead girls voice from Arnos memory
to make the vigilante slaying seem just. Argentos reference to Casonis
statement as a lie disowns this possibility, which Maitland McDonagh
calls breathtaking and sadistic, but the film does not (69).
Neither does the film overtly disown the theory that XYY chromosomes indicate a criminal tendency, as Anna Terzi claims. In fact, its
storyline seems to support the link between XYY and criminality: Casoni
is working on a project that demonstrates the link, he learns that he has
the extra Y chromosome, and he resorts to criminal behavior to conceal his condition, ironically proving his own theory. The irony is more
meaningful than tragic coincidence. Casonis fear of what his own theory
says about him leads him to kill. Having XYY does not necessarily cause
criminalitycorrelation does not prove causality, so finding a correlation between XYY chromosomes and imprisonment for crimes does not
really mean that the chromosomes indicate criminalitybut the theory
leads to the fear, and the fear leads to the crimes. While theories about
sexual aberration lead nowhere in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage,
they lead somewhere far worse in The Cat o Nine Tails. The film does
not argue that the genetic theory is incorrect (even though Argento says
it is), but it does argue that the theory has bad results.
Four Flies on Grey Velvet
Bad science suggests the storyline for Argentos next giallo as well. Like
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, the title Four Flies on Grey Velvet refers to the clue that leads to the discovery of the killer. A detective explains:
Its been recently discovered that the last image seen by the victim before death is retained for several hours on the retina. Its a very difficult
procedure, but it is possible to photograph this image. Experiments
carried out in Germany, the United States, and more recently Italy have
had surprisingly good results. In some cases its even possible to distinguish the murderers face at the very moment he committed the crime.
The image retrieved from one of the films final victims looks like four
flies on a velvet background, and when the protagonist, Roberto, notices
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that his wife, Nina, wears a very strange necklace that contains a fake fly,
he solves the mystery. Onscreen visual reasoning leads him to conclude
that the victims eye captured one fly on a dangling necklace four times,
like a piece of film exposed four times to a single moving object. Nina
is therefore the killer.
Pseudoscience thus provides a baroque clue to one of Argentos most
baroque, convoluted mysteries. Four Flies opens with a sequence that
contains intercut images of Roberto playing the drums with his rock
band and being spied on by an unknown stalker, Carlo. Along with these
images appear the credits and one of Argentos most bizarre stylistic
flourishes: an image of a beating heart that first appears next to the title,
then against a black screen, and then beside more credits. Juxtapositions
suggest that the realistic-looking heart represents Robertos mounting
anger at the stalker; rapid drumming underscores the pounding tension. In a shot of the band rehearsal, a fly lands on the rim of a drum,
and Roberto almost squashes it with a drumstick. Next the fly crawls
between Robertos cymbals (figure 3), and the scene cuts to Roberto
eyeing the stalker, who is tailing him, in his cars rearview mirror (figure 4). Editing and cinematography create a metaphoric relationship
between Robertos connection to the fly and his connection to Carlo. In
the shot of the band rehearsal, the fly appears between the cymbals in
the foreground, a potential victim of Roberto in the background. In the
shot of the cars interior, Roberto is in the foreground, a potential victim
of out-of-focus Carlo, whom the mirror places in the background. The
camera tracks in toward the mirror, and then it decisively racks focus so
that Carlo is now in the foreground of the image (figure 5). The scene
cuts back to the rehearsal, where Roberto crushes the foregrounded
fly and smiles (figure 6).
The fly shifts from being a metaphor for Roberto as a potential victim to being a metaphor for Carlo as a potential victim, and the shift
reflects Robertos desire to turn the tables on his pursuer, which he does
in the next scene. He follows Carlo to a seemingly empty music hall,
confronts him, and in a brief struggle, seems to kill him. The killing of
the fly represents the fulfillment of Robertos wish to slay his stalker, a
wish that he seems to fulfill in reality.
During the struggle with Carlo, a person in a strange mask, later
revealed as Nina, takes photographs from a high position in the music
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5
Figures 36. In
Four Flies on Grey
Velvet, intercut
scenes reverse the
relationship between
stalker (Carlo, played
by Calisto Calisiti,
visible in figure 5) and
prey (Roberto, played
by Michael Brandon,
visible in the other
three images).
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hall. Ninas voyeurism prefigures Inspector Santinis in Opera, but her

motivation is anything but erotic desire for the object of her murderous
gaze. Nina uses the photos not to blackmail Roberto, as their appearance
in the apartment he shares with her suggests, but to make him think he
might be blackmailed; the singular aim of her scheming is to torment
and destroy him. Twists and turns eventually reveal that Carlo did not
die at Robertos hand; Nina set up the encounter to make Roberto feel
the torments of believing he has killed a man. To cover up her scheme,
she eventually kills her maid Amelia, her accomplice Carlo, and a private
investigator, Gianni Arrosio. The power struggle and wish fulfillment
dramatized in the intercut scenes of drumming and stalking turn out to
be shams, as irrelevant to what is really going on as any of the thwarted
threads in Argentos previous films.
Four Flies blackmail-and-cover-up scenario is a red herring, and it
keeps Roberto from recognizing that he, like Sam Dalmas, is dealing
with someone who exhibits what a psychoanalyst might describe as classic signs of perverse identification and sexuality. During the films final
confrontation between killer and hero, Nina shares Casonis inclination
for villainous exposition, but Roberto does not share Arnos disinterest.
He hangs on every word as he struggles to understand his psychotic
wifes desire to torment him:
nina: I want so badly to see you die slowly, painfully.
roberto: Why?
nina: Why? Because youre so much like him ... my pig father. ...
Did you know he brought me up as a boy? He felt cheated because he
had a girl, so he treated me like a boy. And he beat me, he beat me! For
years. He was capable of everything. But I let him down. I didnt react
like a man. He said I was crazy. My mother, she died in an asylum. He
put me there too. Three whole years. Do you know what the doctors
said? They said I was insane. That I was a poor crazy. A maniac. How
could they know all I had suffered? I didnt have time to get revenge
because he died before ... he died before I could get out. Before I could
kill him. I had to find someone else who could pay for him. For everything he had done to me. I have to revenge myself. And I found him.
When I met you, I couldnt believe it. It was like a miracle. You were
just like him. I knew Id kill you.
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Interestingly, the English sound track of the Mya/Ryko DVD switches

to subtitled Italian for the lines italicized above, indicating that those
lines were cut from the original English-language release, so an English track was either never recorded or not preserved. Such language
switching is even more prominent in the Blue Underground DVD
of Deep Red, which restores more than twenty minutes of footage
from the Italian- to the English-language release. In Four Flies, these
omissions suggest that the original distributors doubted the Englishspeaking publics appetite for psychological elaboration, which only
delays Ninas just deserts.
What they omitted, however, is an efflorescence of the dark humor
that runs throughout the film. Like Casonis confession, Ninas confession foregrounds a terrible irony: she acts like a maniac because people
treated her like a maniac. The moment does not necessarily play for
laughs, but when Nina says, How could they know? about the doctors
claiming she was a maniac, the audience has a golden opportunity to
think something along the lines of, By paying attention to the things
you say and do. At a distance, the reasoning behind her elaborate
schemesince she missed out on killing her father, she planned to
marry a man who resembled him, torment her husband with the guilt
and paranoia of murder and blackmail, and then kill himis absurd
enough to be laughable.
Argentos sense of humor in Four Flies, which does not appear again
so pronouncedly until his two contributions to the Masters of Horror
television series, Jenifer (2005) and Pelts (2006), finds its greatest outlet
in the character of Godfrey, a.k.a. God, who serves as Robertos adviser
for dealing with his murder-and-blackmail conundrum. When Roberto
first goes looking for him, he finds a man, nicknamed the Professor, lying
in a hammock, and the puns begin:
roberto: Do you know where God is?
professor: You surprise me, brother. God is here, hes there, hes
everywhere. And hes fishing down by the river. Hey, buddy, you got a
hundred lira to spare?
roberto: I got fifty. [Calls toward the river] God! [Cue music: Hallelujah!]
god: Godfrey ... if youre gonna call me God, call me God Almighty.
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Luigi Cozzi, one of Argentos longtime collaborators and the author of

Giallo Argento, cleverly sums up the outcome of Robertos relationship
with God: Its God who will eventually save him (40). Taking the pun
to the level of structure, God bursts in on Roberto and Ninas final confrontation ex machina, mere seconds after she refers to finding someone
else to pay for her fathers crimes. He shouts Stop! and gives Roberto
an opportunity to knock the gun from Ninas hand.
Unlike God and the risible potential for allegory that he injects into
the story, Ninas transgendered identificationforced on her by her
father, as repeated flashbacks to childhood trauma show from the thenunidentified killers perspectiveis only solemnly ridiculous, even as
her boy-short hairdo and masculine attire belie her refusal to accept her
fathers will. Nevertheless, the sexual confusion and boundary crossing
that Nina inherits from Monica Ranieri refract through other aspects
of the film that are far less serious. At a party that Nina and Roberto
host, the sober concern the hosts express over their missing maid is
completely undercut by a nearby friend telling an off-color joke:
Come and listen to this story. The Rape of Frankenstein. This Austrian
psychiatrist is giving the baron the lowdown on why his monster is so
bloodthirsty. Its because hes got no sex life. Libido frustration accounts
for the homicidal impulse. The baron figures this headshrinker knows
what hes talking about, so back to the lab. This time his monsters gonna
have sex appeal. Unfortunately, the baron overdoes it, and the first thing
the monster does is try to rape him. The baron escapes in the nick of
time, but hes bugged by the thought, Maybe his monsters queer. No
way! Down in the village, the word is out. The Frankenstein monster
will rape anything in sight. The local farmers scour the countryside.
And so does the local schoolmarm. Not a day over seventy, she rips off
her bra and panties and rushes out, more willing than able to sacrifice
herself for the sake of science.
A cut back to Roberto engaging in a separate conversation denies the

audience the punchline, but not before the jokester has summoned a
host of resonant allusions. Frankenstein, of course, is the horror genres
most hallowed critique of scientific ambition. Significantly, the science
targeted for critique in this reworking of the classic is that of the headshrinker, the psychiatrist, who, along with other purported experts on
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things sexual, is condemned to irrelevance in the first two films of Argentos

Animal Trilogy. On top of the Frankenstein allusion, the story of The
Rape of Frankenstein comes from the novel Toi, Ma Nuit, by Jacques
Sternberg, which expresses the authors disgust with all cinema while
offering a mass-elite critique of popular culture (Sconce 274). Thus the
joke and its teller also reflect on the clash between Argentos art-house
sensibilities and the sensibilities of the giallos primary audience. As Mikel
Koven claims, This genre was never intended for the art house, but for
the grind house (19).
The titular rape of Frankenstein would be a homosexual encounter,
making Frankenstein thinkuntil he discovers what Freudians might
call his monsters polymorphous perversityMaybe his monsters
queer. The specter of queerness raised in this joke appears throughout the film. A review posted by S. J. Sondergaard on both Amazon
.com and the Internet Movie Database claims that Argento originally
intended for Roberto to be gay; if that is the case, then the only visible
scrap of that intention is Robertos somewhat androgynous appearance,
which matches well with the early-seventies androgyne chic of most
of the leading characters (McDonagh 81).
The film does not offer a gay lead, but it does feature the most prominent gay character in the unusually large population of gay people who
appear in Argentos films. Gianni Arrosio, the private detective Roberto
hires to help him figure out who is persecuting him, is neither shy about
his sexuality nor hesitant to correct the prejudices Roberto draws from
social conventions. When Roberto first enters Giannis office, he sees
Gianni wearing an apron and painting the room, broadcasting effeminacy.
Roberto mentions that he had come in search of a detective to help him
with a problem, and then he tries to back out:
roberto: Its a bit risky, and I dont . . .
gianni: And youre thinking this fairy is going to jump up on a chair
and scream bloody murder if he sees a mouse, huh, right?
roberto: Yes, thats what I thought.
gianni: [Flapping a limp wrist at Roberto] Oh, you heterosexuals!
I dont suppose youve ever had a homosexual experience?
roberto: Lets forget it, man.
gianni: Yes, we are men too, you know, just a little different.
roberto: Thats very comforting.

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Giannis first line in this part of the exchange describes the conventional
prejudice, which Roberto confirms. In a move that echoes the power
struggle between the journalist and the scientist in The Cat o Nine Tails,
Gianni turns the tables on psychoanalytically supported heterosexism,
first by referring to heterosexuals as a pathetically wrongheaded class
of people (Oh, you heterosexuals!) and then by pointing to a conventional prejudice that gay men have about straight men: very few people
in the straight category live their entire lives without going crooked at
least once. Roberto does not deny this prejudice, and Gianni graciously
lets the subject go, creating equilibrium between them by restoring the
little difference that separates gay from straight, the difference that
the gay mans prejudice would erode. Giannis behavior is funny, but
his sexuality is not. Ultimately, what is most funny about Gianni is his
failure to solve any of the eighty-four cases he has worked as a detective.
He does solve Robertos case, but Nina kills him before he can report
his triumph.
Through Gianni, Four Flies continues a rhetorical response to the
psychoanalytic (mis)classification of perverts that runs through the queer
characters of Argentos first two gialli. Like the earlier films, Four Flies
compounds this critique with another shot at scientific reasoning, this
time aimed at what is arguably psychoanalysiss most revered area of
authority: dream interpretation. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud
famously asserts that the heart of every dream is the fulfillment of a wish.
Roberto has a dream that recurs several times in the film; it visualizes a
story he overhears about an execution by decapitation of a criminal in
Saudi Arabia. At this point in the film, Roberto still thinks he is guilty of
murdering Carlo, so the dream seems to be at once an expression of his
anxiety about getting caught and a fulfillment of his wish to receive just
punishment as an end to the guilt he feels over his crime. The psychoanalytically inflected dream adds depth to Robertos character, but like Sams
flashbacks in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and like Robertos own
wish fulfillment dramatized in the opening sequences intercut power
struggle of drumming and stalking, the wish at the dreams core has no
substantial connection to the mysterys solution: the titular four flies, like
the titular bird, render the dream irrelevant as they lead to the revelation that Roberto has no real guilt to punish. Furthermore, as several
other critics have noted, the dreams greatest significance stems from
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its foreshadowing of the films final violent death, Ninas decapitation in

a car accident. Ironically, then, the dream does not reflect punishment
for Robertos guilt but for soon-to-be-revealed Ninas. The great truth
of the dream is prediction, not psychoanalytic interpretation.
The dreams premonitory quality goes against Freuds rejectionarticulated at great length in The Interpretation of Dreamsof superstitious dream theories that preceded his own, and it sets up the films most
elaborate visual moment. Ninas decapitation occurs in slow motion;
Argento used a special camera to capture the effect at one thousand
frames per second. The spectacle begins when Nina slams into the back
of a truck, and as the car continues forward, the trucks high bed shears
off the cars top. The windshield explodes, and in Ninas point of view
the truck looms closer. Her head gets severed and rolls out onto the
street. The car explodes, and the frame freezes, abruptly ending the film.
Spectacle, not psychoanalysis, gets the final word in Four Flies on Grey
Velvet, and the closing emphasis on spectacle underscores the titles significance. In one sense, the title refers to the theory that leads to Ninas
discovery, the theory that has the human eye capturing images on the
retina like a camera captures images on film. Because the eye/camera
captures Ninas swinging fly necklace through multiple exposures of the
same retinal film, the image that police get from one of Ninas victims
looks like four flies on grey velvet. The titular velvet could also refer to
the use of velvet in photography more generally, noted in the synonym
for camera that provides the title for the film journal The Velvet Light
Trap. Argentos title, then, not only refers to the eye-provided clue that
solves the mystery but also to the cameras eye, aligning his work with
the self-referential tradition of horror noted by Carol Clover and others.
The significance of the dream, which foreshadows the films most
elaborate visual moment, and the significance of the title, which casts
Four Flies as a reflection on film as an ocular medium, combine. Together they make the act of viewing, rather than the act of psychoanalytic
interpretation, the most significantand perhaps the onlysource of
truth in the film. Four Flies thus solidifies the dismissal of psychoanalysis begun in Bird and anticipates the turn away from psychoanalysis
as the key to filmic meaning that David Bordwell, Noel Carroll, and
other film theorists took more than two decades later. It also begins to
articulate what Deep Red, generally acknowledged as one of Argentos

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two greatest masterpieces, demonstrates in full: aesthetic experience,

not psychoanalysis, genetics, forensics, or any other science, is the authoritative source of meaning in film and in life. Spectatorship, which
Argentos later films save from accusations of sadistic voyeurism, replaces
psychoanalysis as the ne plus ultra of cinematic interpretation. In a sense,
Birds Sam Dalmas does the right thing when he revels in repeatedly
replaying the memory of his voyeuristic experience at the Ranieris art
gallery, but since he does it to uncover a repressed memory, he does it
for the wrong reason. Similarly, the decapitation in Robertos dream is
not to be psychoanalytically interpreted but enjoyed as a companion to
Four Flies ultimate spectacle, the decapitation of Robertos wife.
Deep Red
Deep Red develops this emphasis on aesthetics and spectacle through
all of the films elements, including the identities of its actors. Although
Argento supposedly holds actors in low regardseveral of his critics and
collaborators suggest that ego issues arose between Argento and Tony
Musante, who plays Sam in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which
gave Argentos view of actors a negative tint ever afterArgentos choice
of the actor to play Deep Reds amateur detective, Marcus Daly, is highly
significant. In fact, David Hemmings playing Marcus Daly is one of the
most significant uses of casting in Argentos oeuvre, perhaps second
only to his use of his daughter Asia in Trauma (1993) and The Stendhal
Syndrome. In 1975, the year of Deep Reds release, Hemmings was best
known for playing Thomas in Michelangelo Antonionis Blow-Up (1966),
one of the most successful films by one of Italys most revered auteurs.
Blow-Up set the stage generally for Argentos subversion of narrative
conventions, discussed at length in the next section, and specifically
for his meditation on spectacle and spectatorship in Deep Red. BlowUps Thomas is an affluent photographer who spends his time exploiting
women on film and in the bedroom, living a lifestyle that exposes the
decadence of Londons art scene as well as the corruption of cameraenabled voyeurism. Taking pictures in a park on a sunny day, Thomas
accidentally captures details of what he thinks might be a murder. He
becomes an amateur detective like the artist-detectives in Argentos
gialli, blowing up his pictures larger and larger to determine whether
strange blobs on the film reveal in one instance a gun-wielding assassin
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and in another a dead body. Thomass efforts lead nowhere, leaving the
mystery unsolved and the status of perception, both the human eyes
and the cameras, in a mire of subjective uncertainty.
The uncertainty surrounding what Thomas really sees in Blow-Up
directly parallels the uncertainty surrounding what Marcus really sees
in Deep Red. Like Sam in Bird, Marcus walks down a Roman street
at night and witnesses an act of bloody violence. The victim is Helga
Ulmann, a psychic already shown detecting the presence of a murderer
in an audience come to observe her abilities. As Marcus passes her
apartment, she presses her face against the glass of a high window,
screaming for help. From behind, someone strikes her with a meat
cleaver, and she crashes through the glass, which slices her throat in
gory close-up. Marcus runs to her rescue and arrives too late to save
her, but like Sam, he later thinks he has seen something that could be
crucial to the investigation. His fixation on the memory prompts his
amateur sleuthing, and like Sams, Marcuss memory finally does no
good, as he recalls what he has seenthe killers face reflected in a
mirror, which he mistook for one of Helgas bizarre paintings of faces
that evoke Edvard Munchs The Screamjust in time for the killer to
reveal herself and attack.
Deep Reds use of the memory motif from Bird stands alongside yet
another Freudian problem with gender, sexuality, and identification that
surrounds the hunt for the killer. These and other repetitions of elements from earlier Argento filmspainting again takes a central role in
the mystery, as well as another flashback to a childhood traumahelp
to situate Deep Red within the giallo tradition and to ossify Argentos
contributions to giallo conventions. They also mark Deep Red as the
culmination of the filmmakers responses to a set of problems with the
authority of psychoanalysis and of science more generally. By repeating
plot points and character types as well as various visual strategies, such as
the editing of the scene at the gay club in The Cat o Nine Tails and the
intercut scenes of drumming and stalking in Four Flies on Grey Velvet,
Argentos films present, deploy, and improve rhetorical methods for
exposing the weaknesses of psychoanalytic and other scientific claims.
His aesthetic patterns ultimately suggest aesthetics themselves as the
authority to replace the authorities critiqued; they become a rhetoric
that is ready to be adapted and redeployed in other films.

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Argento does not deny his films rhetorical repetitiveness. In fact, he

emphasizes his use of repetition, explaining in an interview on the Blue
Underground DVD of Deep Red that contrary to the beliefs of many, the
film does not introduce new dimensions to the giallo tradition. Deep
Red may appear to be a more violent and bloodier film, he says, but
this is not true because the film was a nightmare, so all the facts were
exaggerated; all these facts were present in my other films. One could
quibble about whether calling violent elements exaggerated amounts
to admitting that the film is, in fact, more violent and bloodier, but more
important here is noting Argentos self-consciousness about repetition,
repetition with the significant difference of exaggeration. Deep Red is
not new; it is simply more.
The exaggerated, nightmarish quality of Deep Reds violent set pieces
stems from their extended lengths and their magnification of everyday
incidents into life-ending mutilations. Helgas death scene begins when
she hears faint, strange notes of children singing la-la-la, and it escalates through rapid splices of quick tracking and asymmetrical still shots
of her flamboyantly decorated apartment (in which the Munch-like images join a gargantuan menorah and Star of David that emphasize her
Jewish identity). The scene hits a high when the killer bursts through
the front door, which leads to multiple close-ups of the killers cleaver
rending Helgas flesh. The brutality is interrupted by a cut to Marcus
and his friend Carlo conversing in the street, picks up again when Marcus sees Helga through the window, and finally ends when Marcus lifts
Helgas body from the shards of the window where she is impaled. The
sequence takes about seven minutes from the first notes of the creepy
la-la-la childrens music that announces the killers arrival to the final
shot of blood dripping from the mouth of Helgas corpse.
The most gruesome aspect of Helgas murder is not the flesh-rending cleaver, which somehow transformed into a hatchet and spawned
the title for the films American release, The Deep Red Hatchet Murders, but the skin-slicing glass of the broken window. While few people
are familiar with the sensation of being hacked by a meat cleaver, many
have been cut by sharp glass, so what finally dispatches Helga is an
exaggerated form of a relatable experience. Similarly, when Professor
Giordani, Helgas colleague and Marcuss sleuthing partner, meets
his bloody end during four grueling minutes of violence, the most
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squirm-inducing moment is likely not the blade that stabs him in the
neck but the repeated slamming of his mouth into the sharp corners
of his fireplace mantle and his hard wooden desk. Argentos cowriter,
Bernardino Zapponi, explains in an interview on Blue Undergrounds
Deep Red DVD:
We started to write the story, looking for all the essential elements that
would be scary. For example, if someone gets shot by a gun, there are
very few people that can relate to that sensation or experience. But if
we stick someones head in the middle of boiling water, its a sensation
that everyones hadalmost everyones burnt themselves with hot water.
For example, when someone bumps into a sharp corner, its a sensation
that everyones experienced.
The films status as nightmare dilates familiar dangers of broken glass

and bumpable objects into specters of gruesome death.
Gruesome violence is not the only source of Deep Reds nightmarish
exaggeration. As in Four Flies, Argento begins Deep Reds onslaught
during the credits, which appear slowly on a black screen accompanied
by major themes from the sound track by Goblin, the band Argento
assembled and used for this film and a few others. After Argento and
Bernardino Zapponis writing credit disappears, Goblins music fades
out, and the creepy la-la-la childrens music fades in along with a floorlevel shot of a bright room decorated with a Christmas tree. A scream
resounds as a shadow on a wall stabs another shadow repeatedly with
a butcher knife. The bloody knife falls in front of the camera, and the
kneesock-clad legs of a child (sex indeterminate) step into the frame,
stopping just beside the knife. The scene fades out, and the credits and
Goblin score fade back in as if the interruption has not occurred. Since
this scene is a childhood trauma that plays an integral role in Deep Reds
convoluted mystery narrative, it is not truly random; the interruption of
the credits suggests the force with which the past trauma is reasserting
itself in present events. The interruption makes an argument: if the
trauma the scene depicts is powerful enough to disrupt the credits, it is
certainly powerful enough to motivate murder. Nevertheless, the scenes
initial appearance lacks all context, so on a first, uninformed viewing,
it plays as a random violation of the convention of opening credits, a
convention that has seldom, if ever, been so violated.

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Read within the context of the rest of the film, the interrupting scene
makes sense as the return of a repressed childhood trauma, a notion
Freud explains in his essay The Uncanny. Another bit of creepiness
that Freud addresses in that essay is the uncanny feeling associated with
dolls and automatons, which he claims stems from a childs fear that the
inanimate will come to life, a childs wish that the inanimate will come to
life, or both. Such creepiness appears when Amanda Righetti, a writer
who knows too much about the killers murderous history, finds a childs
doll hanged in her apartment just before the killer murders her via submersion in boiling bathwater, and when Professor Giordani is accosted
by a cackling automaton (which inspired the puppet used by the killer
in the Saw series of American horror films) before his encounters with
sharp corners and a knife. Similar creepiness appears just before Helga
is attacked as well. Before the sequence begins, the camera slowly scans
along a row of childlike objects that includes an ornate figurine, some
colorful rope, some marbles, a miniature devil, and a miniature baby,
the latter of which is selected from the array by giallo-gloved fingers.
The camera then reveals the final items, knives, and cuts to an extreme
close-up of eyeliner being applied beneath what context suggests is the
killers wide, staring eye.
The row of objects also includes crude hand-drawings of murder.
Unlike the other items, which serve no narrative function beyond Freudian creepiness and therefore appear random, these drawings relate to
revelations crucial both to the plot and to the psychological make-up of
the killer, who, like Monica Ranieri, has aspects of her history revealed by
art. Marcus becomes too interested in finding out who murdered Helga,
so the killer goes after him, playing the creepy la-la-la childrens music
before whispering menaces of death. For the musician, the childrens
music provides an irresistible clue, so he tracks down the song and learns
from a book by Amanda Righetti that it is associated with a house some
people think is haunted. He finds the house, in which he discovers a
wall with a chip in its paint that reveals a childs drawing underneath.
After using some nearby broken glass to chip away more paint, he sees
what looks like a depiction of the scene of childhood trauma: in front
of a Christmas tree, a child holds up a bloody knife, and a man nearby
gushes blood from a gaping wound. When Marcus leaves, more paint
falls from the wall, revealing more of the drawinga third person in
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the sceneand showing that Marcus literally does not have the whole
picture (figure 7).
Marcus returns to the house later and finds a secret room hiding
a mans decomposed corpse, but he never sees the third person in the
drawing, so he never gets the clue indicating that the long-ago murder
involved more than the child and the victim. He has enough clues, however, to react when he sees a similar drawing in the possession of the
creepy daughter (she likes putting lizards on pins and watching them
squirm) of the houses caretaker. The creepy girl admits that she took
the drawing from the archives of her nearby school, which Marcus and
his love interest and partner-in-sleuthing, the journalist Gianna Brezzi
(played by Daria Nicolodi), soon visit. There Marcus finds another drawing, and it bears his friend Carlos name. Carlo drew the pictures, so the
trauma depicted must be his. Marcus concludes that Carlo is the killer.
The drawings that represent Carlos traumatic childhood are not the
only clue that point toward Carlo as the murderer. The drawings are
compelling because they show that he has a trauma worth repressing that
could very well return as a murderous impulse, and thus they compound
another according-to-Freud problem that Marcus discovers earlier in the
film: Carlo is homosexual, and as Robin Wood and Harry Benshoff demon-
Figure 7. In Deep Red, Marcus

discovers a hidden drawing that depicts
the childhood trauma shown during
the films opening credits.
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strate, cinematic history suggests that homosexuals are monsters (and vice
versa). The conclusive revelation of Carlos sexuality occurs after Marcus
visits the house Carlo shares with his mother, who tells him that Carlo has
gone out with someone called Ricci. Ricci turns out to be a man in drag
(played, however, by a woman, Geraldine Hooper), and drunken Carlo is
more than a little distressed to be found out: Good old Carlo, Carlo says,
hes not only a drunk but a faggot as well. Surprise, surprise! Although
he displays a discomfort level comparable to that of the valiant journalist
having a tte--tte with Dr. Braun in The Cat o Nine Tails, Marcus looks
neither surprised nor upset. The strong feelings lie completely on the side
of Carlo, who in his drunken depression suggests that he wants to die.
As Bird and Cat demonstrate, being gay is enough to incite suspicion of
murder, and the line between suicidal and homicidal is as thin as the line
between homosexual and homicidal. Add to the combination of suicidal
with homosexual tendencies a childhood trauma as significant as murder,
and the recipe for a killer queer is enough to seem as complete as Marcus
takes it to be when he finds Carlos drawing.
Deep Red does not directly address Carlos sexuality until he calls
himself a faggot, but it begins his characterization as a homosexual
prior to his self-hating rant. The signs accumulate when Carlos mother,
Marta, answers the door for Marcus, and the exchange that follows is
not unlike one boy asking anothers parents whether a friend can come
out to play. Marcus asks for Carlo, and Marta calls upstairs before she
realizes, What was I thinkingmy boys gone out! She then prattles
on about her glory days as a movie star. Referring to Carlo as a boy
infantilizes him only slightly less than the pronoun my. Not only does
Carlo, a grown man, live with his mother, but she still thinks of and treats
him as a boy, hers, and of course she knows that he has gone out and
even has the address for where he has gone. The relationship recalls
Norman Batess proclamation, A boys best friend is his mother; the
two are close, perhaps problematically close, and in casually revealing
this closeness, Marta seems to reveal plenty of what a Freudian psychoanalyst would recognize as causal factors for homosexuality. Freud
explains the etiology in his book Leonardo da Vinci:
In all our male homosexuals there was a very intensive erotic attachment to a feminine person, as a rule to the mother, which was manifest
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in the very first period of childhood and later entirely forgotten by the
individual. This attachment was produced or favored by too much love
from the mother herself, but was also furthered by the retirement or
absence of the father during the childhood period. ... Deeper psychological discussions justify the assertion that the person who becomes
homosexual in this manner remains fixed in his unconscious on the
memory picture of his mother. By repressing the love for his mother he
conserves the same in his unconscious and henceforth remains faithful to
her. When as a lover he seems to pursue boys, he really thus runs away
from women who could cause him to become faithless to his mother.
For Freud, a mother loving her son too much, or vice versa, can make a
boy gay, and that seems to be precisely what has happened with Marta
and Carlo. Just like Monica Ranieri, Carlo fits a classic Freudian profile,
and thus he fits perfectly with preconceptions for a killer in the Norman
Bates vein.
Except that Carlo is not the killer. Shortly after Marcus discovers
the drawing with Carlos name on it, Carlo arrives with a gun and says
he will kill Marcus, who should not have meddled. Police crash into
the room, guns blazing, before any meaningful exposition can occur, and
Carlo flees. He runs into the street, gets his leg caught on the back of a
truck, is dragged screaming and bouncing off curbs for several blocks,
and then, when the truck stops, his head is crushed by a speeding car.
The case seems to be closed until Marcus realizes that he was having a
conversation with Carlo at the very moment when the original attack on
Helga occurred: Carlo cannot be the killer. Marcus goes back to Helgas
apartment and has his memory of seeing the face of the killerof Marta,
Carlos motherreplay just in time for Marta to confront him in a rage
over the death of her son: He was only trying to protect me! Carlo never
murdered anybody. It all began such a long time ago. Instead of beginning
an elaborate explanation like the ones provided by the killers in Bird, Cat,
and Four Flies, Martas long time ago line cues a flashback to the scene
that interrupted the credits, this time from Martas rather than Carlos
perspective. Carlos father explains that Marta will be fine, he will take
her back to the hospital, but she refuses to go and murders the father in
front of his son, who looks on in shock as the knife falls at his feet.
Suddenly, Martas prattle about her glory days becomes more significant. After referring to Carlo as my boy, she explains, When I first

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married Carlos father, he made me give up acting, at the height of my

career. Now its all gone. This loss apparently destabilized her enough
to require hospitalization, and although the film never directly states a
causal relationship, it implies that the loss of her acting career combined
with Martas unwanted hospitalization to motivate murder. The mother/
son relationship, like Monica and Ninas cross-gender identifications in
Cat and Four Flies, may or may not have something to do with what
her son has turned out to be. Freudian speculation about what causes
perversion is more irrelevant than ever because Carlos sexuality and
Carlo himself have no direct connection with the murders. As Marta
states, Carlo never murdered anybody: his mother did, and her insanity
lacks other characters elaborate Freudian justifications.
The flashback to Martas perspective on the films primal scene of
murder is as close to explanation as Deep Red comes. Whereas Argentos
earlier films provide verbal answers undermined by images, Deep Red
provides only images, and the total abandonment of the verbal in favor
of the visual completes Argentos transition to a rhetoric of aesthetic authority. After the flashback, Marta attacks Marcus, and their brief battle
culminates in Martas necklace getting stuck in the metal cage around
an elevator shaft. The elevator car catches the necklace and pulls until
Marta, like Nina before her, is decapitated, and as in Four Flies, Deep
Red ends with a freeze-frame on a spectacle: a pool of Martas blood in
which Marcus sees his own reflection (figure 8). Credits roll over the
image, beginning with a note to the audience, You have been watching
DEEP RED, directed by Dario Argento, a closing self-reference that
is a hallmark of some of Argentos greatest films. The note reflects the
audiences activity in the same way that the pool of blood, a metaphor
for the entire film as a bloody spectacle, reflects Marcus. Psycho ends
with a psychoanalytic explanation of what viewers have just seen, Bird
ends with an explanation that mocks such explanation, and Deep Red
foregoes end-of-film explanation entirely, emphasizing instead what for
Argento is far more important than sense-making: the act of looking at
a spectacle of violence.
This final replacement of psychoanalytic and other rationally grounded
sources of explanation with an assertion of aesthetic engagement with
spectacle as films most important source of interestits most meaningful
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Dario Argento
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Figure 8. Deep Reds final image shows Marcus

Daly (David Hemmings) staring at his own
reflection in a puddle of blood.
element, if meaningful can be divorced from the clarity or truth commonly associated with meaningbecomes Deep Reds fulfillment of the
mystery storys promise of revelation. Whereas Psycho replaces detectives
with psychoanalysts as revelators, Argentos first four gialli take steps toward replacing psychoanalysts and other scientists with art and artists as
revelators. Bird and Cat provide scientific revelations about their killers
in their endings in order to dismiss them, Four Flies provides a scientific
revelation of its killers identity in order to overshadow the revelations
importance with a final fiery spectacle, and Deep Red provides no scientific revelation about its killer at all, closing instead with the spectacle of
blood as the final message and the only viable means of understanding
the film as a whole. Viewers have often complained that Deep Red and
some of Argentos later films are hard to follow, that they do not make
sense. These viewers are correct if they insist on looking for a detective,
psychoanalyst, or other source of rational authority to appear at the end
and explain how all the films pieces fit into a meaningful interpretation.
Such viewers would get their best answers from Argentos assertion that
Deep Red is a dream, not in the Freudian way that would have dreams
excessive nonsense reduced to kernels of wish-fulfilling, interpretable
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sense, but in a way that would view a dream as a series of exaggerated

images that may or may not be connected to one another according to
consistent chains of cause and effect.
Continuing his exploration of films as dreams that do not need rational, interpretable motivation, Argento left the giallo after Deep Red
to create supernatural tales of witchcraft in Suspiria and Inferno, his
most visually sumptuous films. The next section of this essay takes up
Argentos use of the supernatural to create irrational narratives that
make his case for the primacy of aesthetic experience in the hierarchy
of filmic meanings. These films go further toward this end than the gialli
because the giallo is still a type of mystery, and thus it requires its detectives and revelations, however different those detectives and revelations
might be from their traditional counterparts. Without these conventional
elements, a film simply is not a giallo, so Argentos convention-defying
trajectory naturally took him away from the genre that made him famous.
Tenebre
He did not stay away, however. Many of Argentos post-Inferno works
qualify as gialli, but none better than Tenebre,3 hailed as his return to
form after the wild excursions of Suspiria and Inferno. Like Bird, Cat,
Four Flies, and Deep Red, Tenebre features an amateur detectiveanother artist, this time a novelist. Self-reflexive elements run throughout
Argentos oeuvre, making artists such as Sam Dalmas in Bird and Marcus
Daly in Deep Red (with whom Argento has said he particularly identifies)
potential stand-ins for the director. Michael Brandon, the actor who
plays Roberto in Four Flies, even resembles Argento. Nevertheless,
Tenebre is Argentos first film to feature a clear stand-in not only for
artists in general but specifically for an artist known for creating violent
art. This connection makes Peter Neal a cipher for Argento in ways that
add layers of significance to dialogue, images, and events.
At Tenebres start, the successful novelist Peter Neal has written a
giallo-style novel called Tenebre, just as the successful filmmaker Dario
Argento has created a giallo-style film called Tenebre. As an Argentolike creator of violent fiction, Peter gets to respond to his genres critics
in a manner that anticipates, in a much gentler manner, the response
Argento delivers via Opera. Meeting with reporters shortly after his
arrival in Rome, Peter is ambushed by Tilde, a feminist reporter:
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tilde: Tenebre is a sexist novel! Why do you despise women so much?

peter: Sexist? No, I dont think its sexist.
tilde: Women as victims ... the male heroes with their hairy macho
bullshit. How can you say it isnt?
peter: Whats the matter with you? Youve known me for ten years,
ever since you studied in New York. You know very well that I . . .
tilde: Look, Im talking about your work.
peter: Well, I dont know, uh ... would you like me to tell you I
supported the Equal Rights Amendment?
tilde: Okay, so then explain the books. Do you write to a fixed pattern, or do your publishers tell you that this kind of sexism sells copies?
At this point Peters agent, Bullmer, interrupts, heading off what could
be a public embarrassment by offering Tilde a separate interview. After
Bullmer and Peter stand to leave, Tilde smiles, tugs at Peters jacket, and
says, Hey, my mother was hoping youd call. Peter responds with similar pleasantry, even complimenting Tilde on the interviews toughness.
These two phases of Peter and Tildes interaction, the first adversarial
and the second congenial, suggest a layered response to those who call
Argentos work sexist, misogynist, homophobic, and otherwise hateful:
first, Argento disagrees with them, and second, he respects and even
appreciates the sharp interest they take in his work.
Tenebres rhetorical response to those who read Argentos work as
hateful toward disempowered sexual groups is not always so gentle. Like
Argentos first four gialli, the two Tenebresthe film and the novel within
the filmfocus a great deal of attention on perverts and perversion, and
the films critique of assumptions about perversion embeds a critique of
simple-minded film critics. During the films first murder sequence, the
killer hisses Pervert! before using a straight razor to slash a woman first
shown shoplifting a copy of the novel Tenebre. Because she offers sex to
the store manager who catches her shoplifting to avoid being reported
to the police, her perversion is figural if not literal prostitution. Literal
prostitution gets caught up with Argentos favorite so-called perversion,
homosexuality, when the film reveals trouble in the relationship between
Tilde and her female lover Marion, who has sex with male clients in the
home the two women share. The couples deaths soon follow the revelation
of their troubled romance, and just before he slashes Tilde with a razor,
the killer again hisses, Pervert, filthy, slimy pervert!

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This killers concern with perversion echoes the concerns of killers

from Argentos earlier films, and when Tenebres pervert-killer is revealed
as Christiano Berti, another reporter who interviews Peter about his
book Tenebre, it becomes part of the films critique of Argentos simpleminded interpreters. Although Christiano presents himself as an ardent
admirer of Peters work, their conversation is just as adversarial as Peters
conversation with Tilde:
christiano: Tenebre is about human perversion and its effects on
society, and Id like to know how you see the effects of deviant behavior
on our lives.
peter: Well first of all, it isnt just about that.
christiano: Two of the victims are deviants. The killer is try
peter: Now wait a minute, who says theyre deviants? One of them
is gay, but so what? Hes portrayed as perfectly happy. In fact, his relationship with . . .
christiano: The killers motivation is to eliminate what he calls
corruption.
peter: Now the killer is insane. What I mean by that is that the only
aberrant behavior . . .
christiano: But what is aberrant behavior? [laughs] I was brought
up a very strict Catholic, were you?
peter: Yeah, I guess so.
christiano: But I believe in abortion, I believe in divorce. That
makes me aberrant from a strictly Catholic standpoint.
peter: I see. I thought this was an afternoon show. You really want
us to get this heavy?
christiano: I guess not. Its just that Im very interested myself.
This exchange makes Peter a mouthpiece for the critique of sexual norms
that begins in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. In Peters view, gay
people can be perfectly happy, so homosexuality is not deviant, which
sets up a definition of deviance and perversion that differs sharply from
the definitions offered by psychoanalysts and also, as Christiano points
out, by the Catholic church.4 Disagreement over the definitions of perversion, aberration, and deviance foregrounds the cultural contingency
of the broad category of human perversion and positions Peter, and
through him Argento, as interested in dismantling cultural assumptions.
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When Christiano points out that the killer in Peters book targets corruption, a word treated as a synonym for perversion, Peters sensible
response is that the killer is insane. At that moment Peter might not know
that Christiano is the killer, but his characterization of his own books
killer applies equally well to the man interviewing him: Christiano has
assumed the killers motive from Peters novel, and in doing so he has
also assumed the killers insanity. According to Peter/Argento, targeting homosexuals and others outside the cultural norm and regarding
them as perverts are part of the same insanity as killing women with a
straight razor. Christianos assumption that Peter agrees with murdering
so-called perverts is idiotic, just another part of his insanity, and thus
Argentos film argues that equating the makers of violent art with the
violent criminals that their art depicts is simply crazy.
Tenebre critiques simple equations of artists with the killers in their
art, but it does not critique or dismiss all associations between artists
and killers. Reading Peter as a diegetic stand-in for Argento becomes
problematic at the films end, when Peter is revealed as the murderer
behind some of the films most gruesome slayings. About two-thirds
of the way through the film, Peter and his sidekick Giannis pursuit
of the razor-killer leads them to Christianos house. Peter and Gianni
separate, and Gianni witnesses Christiano being murdered with an axe.
Since Christiano has destroyed the evidence of his guilt, including the
straight razor he has used to kill, the police see him as just another
victim. The murders that followof Gianni, Peters agent Bullmer,
and Peters fiance Janehave a modus operandi that differs from
the razor killings: Gianni is strangled in a car, Bullmer is stabbed on
a bright city street, and Jane is axed in her apartment. The motives
behind these murders, at least on the surface, are as different from
Christianos motives as the weapons used. Gianni dies because, like
Sam Dalmas and Marcus Daly, he has witnessed something important
that he cannot quite recall; this detail turns out to be Christiano telling
Peter, who is about to murder him, that he is the razor-killer, so Peters
motive is self-protection. Bullmer and Jane are having an affair, so
Peters motive for killing them is jealousy. Peters motives are revealed
when Detective Germani, the lead investigator on the razor-killer case,
finally catches up to him:
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peter: [Laughing maniacally] When I realized Christiano Berti was

the killer, and it didnt take me long to realize that ... the rest, Mr. Germani, was like writing a book. A book!
germani: The perfect revenge. The razor-killer was dead, but you
wanted him to live on long enough to be blamed for the murder of your
fiance and her lover. The two people you hated most.
Unlike Christianos story, which is a tale of horror and madness, Peters

story is classic noir: he kills his fiance and her lover for revenge, and
he kills Gianni before the young man can remember enough to ruin
the elaborate cover-up that Peter has plotted. The author might be like
a killer in a book, but in light of these motives, he is not like the killer
in the book Tenebre. If Peter is Argentos stand-in throughout the film,
through him Argento seems to say teasingly that he might indeed kill
people, just not because of the insane motives of the sexist, homophobic
killers in his art.
This teasing refusal to exculpate artists completely becomes even
more convoluted in light of flashbacks scattered throughout the film
to a bizarre scene of a circle of teenaged boys on a beach engaging in
sex play with a seductive woman (the scene recalls a similar moment
in Fellinis 81/2). One of the boys slaps her, and she and the other boys
punish him: the other boys hold him down while she violates his mouth
with the high heel of a red shoe. Like those in Bird, Four Flies, and Deep
Red, this flashback repeats with a little more information each time. The
final, crucial piece of flashback information appears after Jane receives a
pair of red shoes as an anonymous gift and, while wearing them, meets
a spectacularly gory end. A shot of her body jolted by a blow from the
axe to her off-camera midsection fades to an extreme close-up of an
eye, which fades to a first-person sequence in which the woman from
the beach scene is stabbed to death, violated by a knife in her midsection as an answer for the boys violation by her shoe in his mouth. After
he kills her, the boy takes her shoes, and the shot fades back to the eye
close-up, which fades back to Janes corpse, which apparently wears the
very same shoes.
The phallic shoe/knife violations have heavy overtones of Freudian
sexual trauma leading to fetishism, an aberration Freud describes as the
normal sexual object [being] replaced by another which bears some rela-
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tion to it, but is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim (Three
19). First a shoe, then a knife: in the flashbacks, both penetrate areas
of the body associated with sexual activity, but neither is normal. When
Detective Germani reveals that as a youth Peter was accused of killing a
woman, intercut images of the woman from the beach confirm that the
flashbacks have been scenes from Peters past, experiences that suggest
the psychological impetus behind Peters present-day revenge plot. As
a boy, he was traumatized by a fetishistic violation, so he took revenge
on the woman who violated him with a fetishized form of murder. As a
man, Peter is traumatized by the violation of his agent and friend Bullmer
having an affair with his fiance Jane. His first response is to violate
Bullmer in a first-person sequence involving a knife to the midsection
that directly mirrors the knife to the midsection received by the woman
on the beach. His second response is to violate Jane, whose wearing of the
red shoes equates her with the traumatizing woman from his past, with
an axe to her midsection (and just about everywhere else). Perversely
violated, Peter becomes a perverse violator. If Jane and Bullmers infidelity is a type of perversion, his revenge makes him a perverse punisher
of perverts. Perhaps Christiano was right about Peters attitude toward
perversion all along?
Maybe. The idea that Peter is ultimately a punisher of people outside
of sexual norms gains support from Argentos casting of Eva Robins, who
was born a male but developed female sexual characteristics in puberty,
as the woman on the beach. When Detective Germani confronts Peter
with his crimes, he calls him completely mad despite the apparently
rational plotting of the perfect revenge, so if Germani is right, Peter
has even more in common with Christiano. Tenebre suggests this possibility but does not confirm it. As a result, the film provides both the
exculpating claim that only idiots like Christiano think artists necessarily
share the views of the killers in their art and the condemning possibility
that this artist, Peter, who is at least sometimes a stand-in for Argento,
does indeed share such views. If Peter might be Argento, and Peter
might be a punisher of perverts, then Argento might be a punisher of
perverts, too. The exculpation and the condemnation appear in suspension, contradicting without cancelling one another. Peters psychoanalytically overdetermined backstory is so perfectly and heavy-handedly
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Freudian that it verges on self-parody, but its status as the films truth
is as indeterminate as the films ultimate position on the character of
violent artists. Argento cannot be pinned down; no position in this film
can be trusted.
Tenebres ending graphically demonstrates the untrustworthiness
of the artist and of art. After Peter kills Jane and a female detective,
Detective Germani corners him and engages him in discussion of the
backstory and revenge plot. Peter starts to cooperate with Germanis
order to surrender, but he breaks away, brandishes a straight razor, and
cuts his own throat. Germani and Anne, Peters assistant (played by Daria
Nicolodi), leave Peters presumably dead body behind so they can call
for police backup. Germani returns to the scene and finds Peter gone.
On the floor where Peters body has been lies the straight razor, which
turns out to be fake, a prop that squirts blood from the blade. Shortly
after the discovery that Peter has used a bit of cinema magic to deceive
Germani and the audience, Argentos camera performs a similar trick
(figures 911). In one moment, Germanis body, shown in medium closeup, fills the frame. When he bends down, Peter appears in the exact
space he has occupied. Peter has been standing behind Germani, but the
cameras angle has kept him hidden from the audience, so his appearance
seems sudden, and a silence-interrupting chord reinforces the jolt that
this suddenness delivers. When Germani stands back up, he hides Peter
again until another camera angle shows Peter raise his axe and slam it
into Germanis back. Different camera placement would have made the
surprise of Peters attack impossible from the audiences perspective,
but the camera colludes with Peter, tricking the audience into sharing
Germanis false sense of security. Ultimately, Argentos often-imitated
visual trickery allies him with Peter the murderer, just as Argentos violent
art allies him with Peter the novelist.
The deceptiveness that forms another bond between Argento and
his onscreen stand-in suggests that finding meaning in art, especially
in images, is always dangerous because of the way images frame truth,
both literally and figuratively. This reflection on the dangerousness of
art continues as the struggle between Peter and Germani knocks over
a large sculpture that looks like a pillar of silver spikes. The sculpture
falls against the apartments front door, setting up the films final link
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Figure 911. In
Tenebre, a shot
demonstrates that
Argentos camera
cannot be trusted
to show a complete
picture: the angle
helps a murderer
(Anthony Franciosa)
hide behind a
detective (Giuliano
Gemma).
of the problematic association between Peter and Argento to Argentos

larger concerns about aesthetics. At this point in the film, both detectives have fallen; indeed, all but two of the films notable characters are
dead. Only Peter and Anne remain, and Anne is on her way back into the
apartment where Peter waits, still holding the axe. As she tries to open
the front door, which the sculpture blocks, Peter raises the axe, ready
to kill her when she enters. Finally, she pushes the door hard enough
to move the sculpture, which falls in the opposite direction, toward
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Peter. It smashes into him, and one of its spikes breaks off and impales
him against a wall, killing him slowly as Anne looks on, screaming. Her
screaming continues so long that she seems to have gone mad. All that
remains in Tenebre is screaming, which carries over a fade to black and
into the scrolling credits.
Deep Red ends with its survivor staring into a pool of blood, figuring
the significance of violent spectacle. In similar metaphoric form, Tenebre
ends with its killer being killed by art while its survivor screams insanely,
figuring the dangers of violent spectacle. As in Argentos earlier films,
the psychoanalytically overdetermined backstory of Tenebres killer is irrelevant to the storys resolution, which instead emphasizes art, this time
suggesting not only that aesthetic experience is meaningful for a violent
spectacles audience but also that it has the potential to push onlookers
toward the madness of endless screaming. While on one level Tenebre
defends violent art from the accusations of sexism and homophobia hurled
by simple-minded critics like Tilde and Christiano, on a more fundamental level it depicts art as anything but safe, anything but a politically correct
vehicle for good intentions or for consistent, interpretable critiques. The
value of the aesthetic is the pleasure of looking at spectacle, but it is also
respect for spectacles power to present and critique meanings without
any commitment to reliable or even accessible interpretation. Art is tricky,
so it demands attention, and if viewers take anything for grantedsuch
as the sole appearance of Germani in the frame signifying that he is the
only thing of importance in the space that the frame represents, or Anne
approaching the front door signifying that she is the only obstacle against
the killers escapethey risk a fatal error. Death by art actually bookends
this film: the opening murder of the shoplifter stealing a copy of the novel
Tenebre begins with the killer shoving pages of the book down her throat
before he starts slicing her with the razor. If the aesthetic experience of
spectatorship is the ne plus ultra, the truth that Argentos films offer to
replace the truths of psychoanalysis, science, and reason, it is a truth
that is untrustworthy, unpredictable, and, as Tenebre was titled for its
diminished U.S. release, Unsane.
Unsane is not a bad title, but Tenebre, translated as darkness or shadows, fits better with the films uncertainties and ambiguities as well as
its emphasis on imagery, on the art that the title of Chris Gallants 2000
book on Argento correctly names Art of Darkness. Argentos visual flair
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permeates Tenebre, perhaps most notably in a long tracking crane shot

that precedes the murders of Tilde and Marion. The camera captures the
lovers quarrel and then tracks backward from Tilde, through a window,
to the exterior of their massive asymmetrical home, a Brutalist design by
the prominent Italian architect Sandro Petti (Cozzi 79) that looks like
a collection of concrete slabs piled asymmetrically into a postmodern
structure. From the window near Tilde, the camera climbs upward and
to the left, along the concrete, past several shuttered windows, until it
finds an unshuttered window with a clear view on Marion. Lingering
on the furniture and other details of Marions room, the camera seems
to be on its way through the window and back into the house, but then
it retreats to the exterior and climbs further up, to the roof. It goes
over the roof, back alongside the building, then downward, past more
windows, back to the ground floor.
Suddenly a pair of clippers appears, and the camera assumes the
killers point of view as he cuts his way through the shutters to attack
Tilde. The fluid movement prior to this perspective, movement up and
around the walls of a tall building, could not have been humanthey
were the cameras alonebut the camera enters the killers perspective
as easily as it glides through a window. After the clippers make way for
the killer to enter, the long take (about three minutes, not long by long
take standards, but since nothing happens during those minutes, they
feel longer than 180 seconds) ends with a cut to Tilde standing in front
of the window where the take has started. The killer ends up coming
at her from the opposite direction, so while the long take has involved
marvelous, acrobatic, and expensive continuity, the cut from the part of
the long take motivated by the killers perspective to the shot of Tilde
by the window defies continuity. The cut returns to the point in space,
the window, where the long take started, suggesting that the long take
has formed a complete circle, but since the killer comes at Tilde from a
different direction, the long take must have actually ended at a different
point, a different window, which means the cut must actually have been
spatially discontinuous. Taken together, the long take and the cut that
ends it form a sequence of camera movements and perspectives that
are both motivated and unmotivated, spatially connected and spatially
disjoined. It is pure style, calling attention to the camera as an independent entity that requires no rationale beyond an appetite for images.

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This self-consciously virtuosic sequence is one of many elements in

Tenebre that continue Argentos career-spanning interest in film that calls
attention to itself as film, an interest marked by the representations of
voyeurism that run from Bird to Opera and by the artist-protagonists
who fumble through almost all of his early films. Peters fiction writing not only allows him to function as a layered cipher for Argento; it
also allows him to discuss the plot of Tenebre, the movie he is in, as a
work of fiction. He does not quite fit the postmodern mold of fictional
characters who know they are fictional characters, but Peter does refer
to the murders he commits as like writing a book, and prior to this
artsy confession, he discusses his own and Germanis investigations in
terms of plotting a mystery. A conversation between Peter and Gianni
provides the films most noticeable wink at the audience: during their
surveillance of Christianos house, Gianni comments, This is boring,
and Peter answers, All detection is boring. If you cut out the boring
bits and keep the rest, youve got a bestseller. In addition to conveying
a pithy formula for the entire mystery/thriller genre, Peters answer
describes what Argento has just done: the scene begins with Peter and
Gianni climbing the fence and positioning themselves in Christianos
yard, cuts to Christiano destroying evidence, and cuts back to Giannis
complaint about boredom, which immediately precedes the two men
getting what they are waiting for. Peter is talking about detection in print
fiction, but his discussion of cutting makes his formula a fine gloss on
how editing creates the successful giallo film.
While conversations that compare diegetic reality to diegetic and realworld fictions match the self-conscious dimension of the long take that
builds up to Tilde and Marions murders, two other scenes significantly
share the long takes surrender of rational motivation in favor of an appetite for images. The first involves a vagrant who menaces the shoplifter
and chases her home, where she breathes a sigh of relief just before
the razor-killer strikes. The second involves a dog who menaces Maria,
Giannis girlfriend and an assistant at Peters hotel in Rome, through a
long chase that ends up at Christianos house, where Christiano catches
and murders her. Both of these scenes involve random threats from the
outside world from which women flee to the insides of homes, where even
greater threats await. The link between these scenes and the long take
that precedes Tilde and Marions murders is randomnessnarrative and
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cinematographic elements disconnected from the context of the story that

nevertheless climax in deaths that contribute to the storys core. Although
McDonagh and others have remarked that Tenebre makes a lot more
sense than many of Argentos films (164), these moments of nonsense
are crucial to the films atmosphere of terror, an atmosphere suggesting
that the films threats come not from specific murderers but from an innately and ubiquitously horrifying world (Koven 74). This suggestion is
perhaps Tenebres clearest inheritance from Argentos previous two films,
Suspiria and Inferno, which confound explanation in terms of conventional storytelling. Whereas Argentos first five gialli attack psychoanalysis,
science, and other sources of reason as means of interpreting narrative,
the Three Mothers trilogySuspiria, Inferno, and Mother of Tearsas
well as Phenomena attack narrative itself, tearing apart the bones and
sinew that conventionally allow storytelling to stand.
Against Narrative:
The Three Mothers Trilogy and Phenomena
Argentos early gialli are set in Rome, which appears not as the ancient
city of the Colosseum, St. Peters Square (the Vatican), and dozens of
other landmarks recognized around the world, but as a modern city of tall
buildings, concrete, and asphalt. It is recognizably Roman to people who
know the city well but sufficiently nondescript for Argentos international
audience to feel like it could be anyplace. As a result, American and
British characters such as Sam Dalmas, Marcus Daly, and Peter Neal fit
their surroundings as well as anyone, which is to say sometimes well and
sometimes not at all, for the faceless crowds and endless concrete are as
welcoming and alienating as any other modern metropolis (Koven 47).
Indeed, one of the most recognizable places in the Rome of Deep Red
is not Roman at all. Several scenes, including the scenes on the street
that allow Marcus to witness and to solve Helgas murder, occur in and
around the Blue Bar, which Argento fashioned as a near-replica of the
bar in the American painter Edward Hoppers masterwork Nighthawks.
The paintings loneliness and isolation reflect the situations of Italians
and foreigners alike in Deep Reds Rome, and the integration of this
American work on a street that also features classical statuary highlights
Argentos setting as a mlange of places and traditions as well as people.

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This depiction transforms Rome from a city of precious antiquity to a

city of aggressive modernity, so Rome becomes functionally placeless.
After citing an interview in which Argento describes Tenebres stark
setting as a Rome of the near future, McDonagh observes that the film
takes this erasure of place even further:
It undeniably takes place in a Rome that has no past: there are no shots
of the Colosseum, the Trevi fountain, classical statuary, Renaissance
paintings or churches, or any of the architecture of centuries past that
define Rome. Tenebrae takes place in a city of dazzling white concrete,
high-rise apartment buildings, malls, airports, television studios, and
modern private homes; no baroque or rococo influence is permitted
to sully the mise-en-scne, no superfluous ornament clutters its clean
planes. Its all cool, stark, and slightly remote. (16263)
Eschewing the architecture of centuries past does not equate to disinterest in architecture. Tenebres long take around the postmodern, Brutalist
home of Tilde and Marion savors every inch of the bizarre structure,
evoking comparisons of the buildings incongruities with the distorted
minds of the films madmen.
Argentos camera may avoid locations easily recognizable as Roman, but from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage forward, it savors
the shapes and patterns that architecture lends to the films cinematic
tapestries. In addition to the glass cage of Birds most famous set piece,
Argentos directorial debut picks up many interiors and exteriors that
enrich suspense and characterization. In the moments leading up to one
of the razor-killers most gruesome slayings, the camera shows the same
stairway from both bottom and top, which creates a dizzying effect comparable to stairway shots in Hitchcocks Vertigo (1958) but also a striking
geometric pattern that evokes the abstract expressionism of the painter
Wassily Kandinsky as well as compositions by the classic film directors
Robert Wiene and Fritz Lang, the latter of whom Argento has often
cited as an important influence. The Cat o Nine Tails offers a similar
shot of a stairway, using a spiral instead of triangles as the geometric
motif (figures 1213).
The dizzying sublimity of such images provides a complement to
the grotesque sublimity of the murders in the gialli. When in Deep Red
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Figure 1213. Shots

of staircases in The
Bird with the Crystal
Plumage (top) and
The Cat o Nine Tails
(bottom) demonstrate
Argentos early
interest in using
architecture as a
source of imagery that
is geometric, abstract,
and expressionistic.
Helgas expressions of agony join the paintings on her walls that evoke
Munchs The Scream, and when in Tenebre Janes severed arm sprays
blood on the wall in a spatter that evokes Jackson Pollocks action painting, these images, too, are art, and they rely on setting to create their
colorful effects. Stripping Rome of conventional Roman-ness allows Argento to use his city as a blank canvas for compositions that are allusive,
elusive, and distinctly his.
Suspiria
Visual strategies that involve the camera picking apart architecture in
ways that resonate with killers picking apart bodies reach their pinnacle
in Suspiria, which is universally regarded as one of Argentos greatest
accomplishments and which, largely because of its stunning imagery,
appears again and again on critics lists of the most frightening films of
all time. While on the one hand Suspiria leaves the reality of specific
places behind, creating a colorful, oneiric, fairy-tale world that contrasts
sharply with the cold metropolitan spaces of the gialli, on the other hand
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it makes its specific location central to its plot and to its layers of visual
and auditory significance. The film begins with credits made of elongated
white letters against a black background; like the credits of Argentos
previous film, Deep Red, the sparseness of this opening emphasizes the
creepy score composed by the Argento-assisted band Goblin. Instead of
interrupting the sparse credits with a scene of primal trauma la Deep
Red, Suspiria has a voiceover that begins just after the title appears:
Suzy Banyon decided to perfect her ballet studies in the most famous
school of dance in Europe; she chose the celebrated dance academy of
Freiburg. One day, at nine in the morning, she left Kennedy Airport in
New York and arrived in Germany at 10:40 p.m. local time.
This voiceover, the only overt narration in the film, not only identifies
the upcoming setting as Freiburg, Germany, but it also specifies the city
and the airport Suzy has left as well as the times of departure and arrival.
When the final credit disappears, a sound like the slam of a hammer brings with it the first shot: a sign in English and German that lists
flights arriving from London, Rome, Rio, and New York. This list picks
up where the voiceover left off, specifying places where the action is not
while showing where the heroine is, the German airport. Then, when
the camera tracks toward the door through which Suzy, played by the
American actress Jessica Harper, will soon emerge, a subtle clue indicates the films primary setting: a poster showing tall dark trees labeled
Black Forest. Another copy of this poster appears by the doors through
which Suzy exits the airport and enters a dark and stormy night. She
gets into a taxi and asks to go to Escher Strasse, a street named for yet
another abstract artist who has influenced Argentos visual style. The
cabdriver either has or pretends to have difficulty understanding Suzys
American accent, so the two repeat Escher Strasse several times, making the name difficult to miss. Although it does not appear right away, a
wall in the dance academy features a painting very similar to the abstract
work of M. C. Escher, contributing to the places otherworldliness and
reinforcing the allusion built into the academys address. Place names
overwhelm this films first few minutes, highlighting the importance of
place that is absent in Argentos early gialli. Argentos only film prior to
Suspiria that puts so much emphasis on place is Le Cinque Giornate
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(1973; a.k.a. The Five Days of Milan), a dark political comedy set during the 1848 revolt of the Milanese against Austrian control. Argentos
only feature film outside the giallo and supernatural-horror genres, Le
Cinque Giornate marked a retreat from the internationalism of the gialli,
allowing Argento to speak directly to the Italian people about their own
political history.
As an Italian film with an American lead actress and a German setting, Suspiria combines the internationalism of the early gialli with the
national specificity of Le Cinque Giornate in a way that, according to
Linda Schulte-Sasse, allows the film to reflect on the history of fascism
that Germany and Italy share. This reflection on European political
history, more or less absent in the early gialli, appears most pervasively
in depictions of power.5 The evil in Suspiria is the classic evil of the
supernatural fairy tale: the female-dominated group of people who run
the dance academy is really a coven of witches, and as such they represent what Barbara Creed calls the monstrous-feminine, the threat of
abjected female power to the patriarchal symbolic order (77). Helena
Marcos, the superannuated Greek immigrant who is secretly the schools
Directress and the covens leader, is bent on victimizing the young,
presumably because doing so somehow increases her power. The spells
that she and the other witches cast work most often through implication
rather than direct representation; two scenes in particular provide vivid
demonstrations.
In the setup for the first of these scenes, Suzy refuses an offer of a
room in the academy from Vice Directress Madame Blancplayed by
the veteran actress Joan Bennett, known for her roles in Fritz Langs
Scarlet Street (1945) and the TV show Dark Shadows (196671). Suzy
has already settled off campus with another student, and she prefers
to stay there. Miss Tanner, Madame Blancs right hand, remarks about
Suzys refusal, I had no idea that you were so strong-willed. I see that
when you make up your mind, nothing will change it for you. This line
soon becomes ironic because the witches change Suzys mind for her.
In the next scene, Suzy walks through a hallway in the academy, and
Goblins creepy score announces the presence of evil as an ominous
shot/reverse editing pattern connects her to a Gypsy-like servant. The
servant stands with an evil-looking little boy, Madames Blancs nephew
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Albert, and holds a piece of glass like a talisman. When the glass reflects
a glaring light, the scores nondiegetic, rumbling, and barely comprehensible shout of Witch! suggests a spell being cast. Suzy grasps her
head and neck as if she feels stifled, and in the following scene, she
tries to dance but finds herself weak, unable to keep up with her fellow
dancers steps. Instead, she lolls about the rehearsal room like a puppet
suspended from invisible strings. She collapses, and the witches take
her into their careinto the very room Suzy has refused. The witches
invisible power thus carries out their will.
In the second of these scenes, a combination of sound and editing
again makes invisible agency, in a sense, visible. The scene is set up when
the blind pianist who accompanies the dancers rehearsals, Daniel, crosses
his demonic employers. His guide dog bites Albert, presumably because
the dog has detected something amiss through the special sense that dogs
often possess in tales of the supernatural (Cooper, Gothic, 158). Daniel
defends his dog from accusations of viciousness, arguing that the boy
must have done something to disturb the dogs gentle nature. In a fury,
Miss Tanner fires him. Later, Daniel and his dog walk through a square
composed of neoclassical structures. Schulte-Sasse explains that these
buildings, which seem out of place in the quaint, medieval crampedness
of Freiburg, evoke the neo-classical architecture Nazism privileged,
and she argues the point through a convincing comparison of Argentos
set with famous images from the Third Reich. The significance of her
argument lies in a comparison of the witches reign of terror, which consists of omnipresent surveillance implied by the cameras suggestions of
invisible agency as well as elimination of anyone who deviates from the
witches opinions and worldview, with the Nazis systematic reign of
surveillance and paranoia, a disciplining of the body and social behaviour
(those punished in Suspiria are the ones with a strong will), a process of
selecting who belongs to the we and elimination of who does not. Suzys
strong will makes her a target, and so does Daniels. His walk through
the fascism-evoking square leads to his death.
Sensing something amiss, Daniel and his dog come to a halt in the
square, and sound cues the invisible agencys presence: the creepy score
plays, the dog starts barking, Daniel shouts Whos there? and the score
provides the nondiegetic, garbled answer, Witch! An editing pattern
that juxtaposes extreme low-angle and high-angle shots of Daniel and
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the dog emphasizes the pairs terror while implying a presence on the
rooftops of the neoclassical buildings (figures 1415).
In one of the films most intricate and expensive sequences, a statue
of a giant, vicious-looking bird appears perched atop one of the squares
buildings. The camera shows the building where the statue perches from
a greater distance, and shadows moving along its walls and columns look
Figure 1415. In Suspiria, the juxtaposition of

extreme high- and low-angle shots suggests the
presence of an invisible agency as Daniel (Flavio
Bucci) and his guide dog walk through a square
flanked with neoclassical architecture.
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vaguely like witches flying by on broomsticks. A reverse shot from the

statues position suggests the statues perspective, and with sounds of flapping wings, the camera swoops down from the statues perch, flying along a
line of attack, but it zooms past Daniel, and nothing happens immediately.
The score switches from soft jingling to frantic drumming, and shots of
Daniel, the dog, and the building from various angles express increasing
danger, confusion, and fear. When the music fades, the climax erupts: the
dog, presumably under the witches influence, jumps up and rips out his
masters throat, giving Miss Tanner and her associates the last word in the
argument about whether the dog is gentle or vicious.
Interpreting the mystical weakness that changes Suzys mind and
the mystical influence that controls Daniels dog as the results of witchcrafts invisible agency relies utterly on inference. The repetition above
of words such as presumably and suggests marks key points in this
argument where inference is necessary to support the logic behind the
interpretation. Without such inferences, these scenes are just jumbles
of weird music and quick cuts; they provide no direct, unquestionable
evidence that establishes witchcraft as the causal agent behind the sequences outcomes. Clinging to such inferences, viewers might develop
the same sort of paranoia as Suzy and the others who suspect witchcraft.
Any shot could be a representation of invisible agency; the only way to
know is if a shot or shots culminate in an outcome worthy of witchery.
Thus the inference of witchcraft occurs upon retrospection, a review of
moments prior to an event occasioned by the event. If Suzy went from
the weird moment with the servant in the hallway to a perfectly adequate
performance, or if Daniel left the neoclassical square to spend a quiet
evening at home, there would be no reason to suspect that the sound
and editing were anything more than irrational atmosphere.
This kind of retrospection helps many other scenes in the film to
make sense as well. The buildup to the first murder sequence provides
a great example. Suzys taxi ride to Escher Strasse brings her face to face
with Pat, a young woman fleeing the academy as Suzy tries to enter. Pat
says something that Suzy cannot hear clearly over the torrent of rain
and thunder, and she sprints away. Suzy fails to gain admittance to the
academy, and as her taxi departs, a shot through a window follows Pats
flight through the woods. The camera then abandons Suzy to observe
Pats arrival at a friends apartment building, which shares the bizarre, art
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nouveau dcor of the dance academys interior. Pat tries to explain why
she is so upset, but she gives up, saying, Its useless to try and explain
it to you. ... You wouldnt understand. ... It all seems so absurd, so
fantastic. ... All I can do is get away from here as soon as possible. The
friend leaves her alone to dry off, and Pat eyes her surroundings warily.
A gust of wind blows open a window, startling her. The friend rushes
in to close the window, saying, It was just the wind. Alone again, Pat
paces the room. An exterior long shot of the too-high-to-be-an-entrance
window moves in toward her, and the creepy music rises. A cut to the
interior shows Pat slowly approaching the window from the other direction. She looks outside, turns away, looks over her shoulder, turns away
again, looks over her shoulder again, and steps back toward the window.
The film provides no diegetic explanation for Pats behavior, no reason to
share her suspicion of the window. Bringing her face close to the glass,
Pat gazes outside. She grabs a lamp to shine some light through the
window, but the glare only makes seeing harder. After two long minutes
of this back-and-forth, unexplained window gazing, something finally
happens to justify it: a pair of eyes suddenly glows, returns Pats gaze,
and fades out. A moment later, an inhumanly hairy arm bursts through
the glass, and the films most (in)famous murder begins in earnest.
In retrospect, all the fuss over the window can be explained by the
presence, invisible until the glowing eyes appear, that materializes as
the hairy arm. Just as the nondiegetic music and editing cue the audience to something sinister outside the window, a special sense, likely
the being watched feeling that does not require evidence from the
five normal senses, lets Pat know that an invisible danger lurks outside.
Until the attack of the hairy arm, however, this sequence, like the sequences in the hallway and the neoclassical square, involves nothing but
unmotivated, unexplained cuts and sounds. It uses style, not a logical
reason to be afraid, to build suspense. Although the killers appearance
retroactively justifies the buildup, it lacks any other explanation. Who
or what is the killer with the hairy arm? He or it uses a knife for the
murder, so despite the hair, it seems human, but a human would not
be able to come through the too-high-to-be-an-entrance window, and
a humans eyes would not suddenly glow and fade out. The film never
reveals who or what the killer is, and he or it is never discussed beyond
the friends eventual screams about a murderer attacking Pat. The

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only explanation, like the explanation for the sequences in the hallway
and neoclassical square, is that witchcraft is at work. The explanation
for all of these sequences and their outcomes is that the supernatural,
the unexplained, provides causality.
The explanation of the strange events in Suspiria is that they are
unexplained. As Pat says, they are so absurd, so fantastic that they
exceed explanation. A universe in which the supernatural is possible
implicitly admits unexplainable phenomena. Where the laws of nature
do not apply, a too-high-to-be-an-entrance window can be an entrance
anyway. Nevertheless, the explanation its unexplainable is not entirely
satisfying. Desperate to understand the strange events at the dance academy, Suzy becomes a giallo-like amateur detective, and she eventually
seeks out the help of her psychiatrist friend Dr. Frank Mandel (Udo
Kier, who also has a role in Mother of Tears). Suzy meets Dr. Mandel in
the middle of a bright urban area that contrasts sharply with every other
setting in the film: instead of the neoclassical stateliness of the square
where Daniel dies, and instead of the sharp-angled, primary-colored
strangeness of the dance academy and the apartment building where
Pat is murdered, this scene features rounded skyscrapers and concrete
in soft whites and silvers. The contrast in settings emphasizes the difference of the scenes calm, rational conversation about what might really
be happening at the dance academy. As the camera moves from an establishing shot of a skyscraper to the place where Suzy and Dr. Mandel
sit for their conversation, it passes a sign for the Sixth Meeting on New
Studies in Psychiatry and Psychology, which explains the presence of
Dr. Mandel and his colleague Professor Milius. The sign also summons
a bogey familiar from Argentos earlier films: psychoanalysis.
Suzys most immediate motivation for seeking Dr. Mandels help is
concern for her dance-academy roommate, Sara, who has gone missing
(and has already died in one of the films grisliest sequencesfleeing
from a razor-wielding figure, she tries to escape a room in the academy
through a small window and tumbles on the other side not to the ground
but to a room full of razor wire, in which she becomes entangled until
the figure arrives to slash her throat). Dr. Mandel says that he knows
Sara well because she was a patient of his, and without regard to patient
confidentiality, he reveals that she once had a nervous breakdown and
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that she had wild ideas about the dance academy. In recounting these
ideas, Dr. Mandel provides crucial exposition about Helena Marcos.
After Helena Marcos founded the dance academy in 1895, [t]he local
people believed her to be a witch. The psychiatrists story becomes
wilder as he speculates that Madame Marcos had something about
her that incited persecution from religious people, and it becomes
wilder and more fanciful still when he notes her nickname, The Black
Queen. He casually refers to the academy as a school of dance and
occult sciences, as if the combination were natural, and explains that
after Madame Marcoss (presumably faked) death by fire, the occult part
of the combination fell away. Dr. Mandel claims that the current spread
of belief in magic and the occult is part of mental illness; bad luck isnt
brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds, and in doing so he
not only provides McDonagh with the excellent title Broken Mirrors/
Broken Minds; he also frames everything in the film as madness.
At this point, the films accumulated weirdness is enough to cue
skepticism about the psychiatrists diagnosis, which does not explain the
glowing eyes, suddenly deranged dog, and other phenomena that have
appeared independent from any one perspective that could be discredited as insane. In addition, the first, longer part of his expositionabout
the mysteries of the Black Queenovershadows his moment of diagnostic simplicity, which contradicts the evidence he has presented for
Madame Marcoss witchery without presenting any evidence against it.
Furthermore, immediately after his exposition, Dr. Mandel introduces
Professor Milius, whom he grants authority greater than his own. Author
of the (fictional) book Paranoia or Magic? Professor Milius says that he
has known real witches. Despite referring to witchcraft as an appendage
of contemporary psychiatry, he completely upends the broken minds
hypothesis with his description of magics practitioners:
They are malefic, negative, and destructive; their knowledge of the
art of the occult gives them tremendous powers. They can change the
course of events and peoples lives, but only to do harm. ... Their goal
is to accumulate great personal wealth, but that can only be achieved by
injury to others. They can cause suffering, sickness, and even the death
of those who, for whatever reason, offend them. ... [Helena Marcos
was] a powerful witch with a tremendous talent for doing evil, a real
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mistress of magic. ... A woman becomes queen if her magic is a hundred

times more powerful than the rest of the coven, which is like a circle.
Its strength rests with its leader, its head. A coven deprived of its leader
is like a headless cobra, harmless. Skepticism is the natural reaction of
people nowadays, but magic is ever present ... magic is everywhere,
and all over the world, its a recognized fact, always.
Professor Miliuss transportation of witchcraft from the realm of broken

minds to the realm of recognized fact trumps any skepticism that Dr.
Mandels flimsy argument has not already discarded. Once and for all,
Suzys amateur sleuthing leaves the quasi-realistic territory of the giallo.
In Tenebre, Detective Germani explains that he has figured out Peter
Neals guilt with a quotation, used by Neal earlier in the film, from Arthur
Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes: When you eliminate the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. This line
succinctly sums up the improbabilities of the giallo while distinguishing
them clearly from the impossibilities of supernatural horror. Impossibility is the essence of Suspirias world. By letting someone at a psychiatric
conference speak truth rather than some dismissable, irrelevant theory,
Suspiria is kinder to science than Argentos earlier films. In fact, Dr.
Miliuss comment about cutting off the head of the coven sets up the
films ending, in which Suzy kills Helena Marcos and thereby destroys
the coven and the dance-academy building. Whereas the science of
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o Nine Tails, and Deep
Red has nothing to do with the downfalls of their killers, Dr. Miliuss
science is the key to the triumph of Suspirias heroine. The scientists
belief in witchcraft provides the films impossibilities their most sensible
support as well as their practical resolution, but instead of making the
impossibilities seem rational, this successful science ultimately allies
itself with irrationality.
This argument has so far explained Suspirias irrational moments
the too-high-to-be-an-entrance entrance, the dancers weakness that
begins with a look from a stranger holding a talisman, the gentle guide
dog that suddenly kills its masteras motivated by an invisible, magical
agency that the film represents through sound and editing. Instead of the
drugged mous(s)e used by the witches in Rosemarys Baby (1968), or the
poisoned apple used by the witch in Disneys Snow White (1937), which
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Argento has often said inspired Suspirias colorful fairy-tale aesthetic, invisible agency represents the inexplicable workings of Argentos witches.
For many of Suspirias viewers, the result of using stylized sound and
editing to show something invisible instead of props to show something
visible is total confusion. Gary Arnolds 1977 review in the Washington
Post, Suspiria: Upstaged Terror Gone Wild, provides one perspective
on what this confusion does to the film:
Argentos latest thriller, a ridiculously self-indulgent spree of satanic bogeymannerisms entitled Suspiria, virtually self-destructs in the opening
sequence. Eager to menace the audience from every sensory direction,
Argento doesnt so much create and sustain an illusion of terror as invite
you to marvel at his garish ingenuity, at the spectacle of a filmmaker who
cant resist overstylizing and upstaging his material.
According to Arnold, the film self-destructs because it is self-indulgent; the excess of style causes a nonsensical sensory overload. Continuing to lambast Argentos work, Arnold notes of Suzys consent to stay
at the dance academy, Theres no reason beyond sheer plot necessity
for the heroine to expose herself to this particular milieu. From this
unflattering perspective, contrivance, not reason, propels Argentos plot.
Arnolds negative perspective is not the only way of understanding
the film, but it successfully captures Suspirias emphasis on style. In a
review of Suspiria on DVD and Blu-ray in the January 9, 2010, issue of
The Guardian, Phelim ONeill calls the film classic horror and puts
Arnolds point in a prettier light: Film is a visual medium. ... Suspiria
takes things to such extremes visually, it often pushes away such trifles
as dialogue and logic to blow the mind and assault the eyes and ears.
Although these two reviews differ on whether Argentos hyperstylization
of the horror film is a good thing, they agree that he forsakes the sensible
for the sensory, subjugating rational narrative to press the cinemas two
sensory modalities, sight and sound, to their limits.6
One strategy for reaching these limits is Goblins score, which juxtaposes soft chimes, pounding drums, and barely comprehensible vocals to
such an eerie effect that David Gordon Green, who is slated to direct a
Suspiria remake, is planning to reuse it (Moore). The sharp contrasts of
the score combine with the sharp angles that Argentos camera highlights
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in his settings. The angular, colorful decors of the dance academy, which
Arnold rightly compares to the madhouse in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
(1920), and of the art nouveau apartment building where Pat meets her
doom provide geometric, expressionistic surroundings that match the
bewildering violence of the witches impossible world (figures 1617).
To achieve extremes of color, Argento and the cinematographer Luciano Tovoli used Eastman Color Kodak film and an outdated Technicolor
printing process, which James Gracey explains:
This film would also be the last ever to be dio-transferred: the negative
was given to Technicolor who split it into three separate black-and-white
negativesone for red, one for blue, and one for green. These were
then printed one on top of the other to create the vibrant look of the
finished film. Argento insisted that Technicolor also use the highest
possible contrast to increase the presence of primary colours. (7071)
Jarring sounds, jagged shapes, and jolting colors come together in compositions that suggest madness and horror. Their exquisite workmanship
makes the film both sublime and beautiful, repellant and hypnotic. It
telegraphs the unreality of the diegetic world.
Suspirias exquisitely wrought, unreal compositions reach their
pinnacle in murder scenes. Pats death, accompanied by frantic drumming and dissonant synthesizers, is the most elaborate. In a move that
echoes Helgas murder in Deep Red, the hairy arm bursts through the
too-high-to-be-an-entrance window, grabs Pats head, and pushes her
face through shattering glass. A medium shot shows Pat with her back
to a wall as the arm enters the right side of the frame and stabs her.
She clutches the wound, screams in agony, slides down the wall, and is
stabbed again and again. Cuts to her friend running through the building, screaming for help, interrupt the violence and stretch it out. Pats
prolonged suffering continues as the knife rends her flesh and as the
killer prepares a rope for her neck. Lying on top of the stained-glass
ceiling of the buildings vast lobby, she screams and gasps at further
stabbings. An extreme close-up shows her beating heart through a
gaping hole in her chest, and the knife enters the frame once more to
penetrate the exposed organ. Her head presses backward, breaking
glass, and finally her body falls through the high ceiling. A shot from
the lobby floor, where Pats friend watches in terror, shows the stained
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Figure 1617. In Suspiria, Pat (Eva Axn, top left)

is eclipsed by her art nouveau surroundings,
which create a hyperstylized aesthetic context
for the hyperstylized violence that is to come.
glass and its metal support beams explode. Hanged, Pats body dangles
in midair. The camera tilts downward to follow streams of blood flowing
from her wounds, down her legs, toward the distant floor, where the
shot tracks across blood puddles on black, red, and white tiles until it
settles on Pats friend, who has been killed by falling shards of glass
and fragments of support beams.

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The violent chaos of this sequence ends on a still composition that

the camera savors as the music calms (figure 18). This shot captures the
combination of the friends death with the strange geometric patterns
of the floor. Her blood is a red closer to that of the floors tiles than
that of real human blood; her splayed arms and bent legs form angles
comparable to angles in the floors pattern, as do the angular shards and
beams sticking out of her body. The corpse becomes an extension of
the aesthetically wrought setting, the central figure in a violent work of
art. That the blood is unrealistic or that the corpses position is at least
improbable, perhaps impossible, does not matter in a context where
style and aesthetic impact take precedence over everything.
Aesthetic experience is arguably the ultimate source of meaning
in all of Argentos films, but Suspiria and the other films of the Three
Mothers trilogy, Inferno and Mother of Tears, take their emphasis on
aesthetics further by self-consciously connecting their irrational worlds
to nineteenth-century romanticism and the aestheticism that grew out
of it. As McDonagh and others have noted, the connection begins in
Suspirias title, which means sighs and is a reference to Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, one of the three Ladies of Sorrow
discussed by Thomas De Quincey in his work Suspiria de Profundis.
Figure 18. In Suspiria, a corpse is an extension

of the aesthetically wrought setting, the central
figure in a violent work of art.
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Although no one in Suspiria refers to Helena Marcos as the Mother of

Sighs or makes any direct reference to De Quincey, the titular reference
suffices to make Suspiria the first of a trilogy in which the other two
films involve the other two Mothers.
While De Quinceys descriptions of the Three Mothers personalities and depredations in Suspiria de Profundis inform the Mothers
depictions in Argentos films, another work by De Quincey has even
stronger resonance because it informs Argentos aesthetic sensibilities.
On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts, published in 1827,
explains how murder becomes art:
Everything in this world has two handles. Murder, for instance, may be
laid hold of by its moral handle ... or it may also be treated aesthetically, as the Germans call it, that is, in relation to good taste. ... [B]oth
a thief and an ulcer may have infinite degrees of merit. They are both
imperfections, it is true; but to be imperfect being their essence, the
very greatness of their imperfection becomes their perfection. ... [A]s
it is impossible to hammer anything out of [murder] for moral purposes,
let us treat it aesthetically ... a transaction, which, morally considered,
was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles
of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance.
De Quinceys argument about murder as art provides an inverted scale

for judging horrific spectacles. From an aesthetic standpoint, a horrific
spectacle is not supposed to be beautiful in the same way that a calm
pastoral vista can be beautiful. Horrors nature is to be imperfect, to
be horrific, so the more horrific the horror, the more perfect it might
be. Judging Suspiria by De Quinceys inverted scale, the deaths of Pat
and her friend are meritorious indeed, and their contexts, particularly
the colors and geometric patterns of the stained-glass ceiling and the
irregularly tiled floor, invite spectators to consider them as just the sort
of art to which the inverted scale applies.7
The difference between Arnolds and ONeills reviews of Suspiria
may reflect the fact that in the thirty-three years (and a torrent of films
visually enhanced by digital technology) between them, audiences for
horror films have come around to De Quinceys way of thinking. Arnold assumes that a filmmaker in the horror genre has an obligation to
create and sustain an illusion of terror and to resist overstylizing and

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upstaging his material, but ONeills first principle is that film is a visual
medium, and in horror, visual extremes are far more important than
such trifles as dialogue and logic. If what distinguishes film narrative
from a random sequence of images is the presence of logic, a chain of
moments displayed in a manner that conveys significant relationships
rooted, however indirectly, in cause and effect, Argentos hyperstylized
violence makes narrative far less relevant to horror than the presence
of visual excess. Sequences like the deaths of Pat and her friend work
against narrative because they demonstrate that horrors effectiveness,
what De Quincey would call its perfection, relies on narrative very little,
if at all. Thus Argento invests his energies in capturing the patterns of
his elaborate set designs and in subjecting his film to outdated printing
processes rather than in crafting narratives that come together into a
tapestry of perfect, comforting sense.
Decades of fans responses to Argentos work tend to share the elevating perspective in ONeills review, avoiding the paracinematic and camp
approaches that Janet Staiger associates with fans embrace of what they
regard as low culture. Instead, fans often approach Argentos films according to conventions for consuming avant-garde productions, for which
a fan typically identifies the films subject matter and then searches for
aesthetic patterns complementing or creating the supposed subject
(Staiger 137). Peter Hutchings notes that fans exhibit unashamed auterism as they rail against Argentos mainstream-critical detractors and
attempt to raise the cultural status of Argentos work, wondering why
critics fail to recognise talent when they see it (134). The fans see
talent where Arnolds review sees overstylization, and they implicitly seek
to raise Argento, and with him the horror genre, higher within cultural/
aesthetic hierarchies. Where viewers perceive horrors perfection as its
imperfection, perfect sense is anything but perfect, and narrative needs
to be beaten down to a place in the aesthetic hierarchy far below image.
Fans and reviewers who would elevate Argentos imagery join his works
in arguing that film is a visual medium, and visual excess is what film
does best. Argentos works call attention to and valorize their narrative
shortcomings by beautifying horror, and in displaying such excess they
suggest not only what horror film is but also what film as a medium
has the potential to be. Like the fans, the films appreciation of horror
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depreciates narrative, raising the possibility that a film that subjugates

image to narrative ignores the essence of its medium.
Aesthetic appreciation for the horrible is not the explicit subject of
De Quinceys Suspiria de Profundis, but it has a noteworthy presence,
especially in De Quinceys descriptions of the three Ladies of Sorrow
as incarnations of all individual sufferings of mans heart (149). These
descriptions interrupt De Quinceys fragmentary, hallucinatory narrative
with poetic elaboration comparable to the visual elaboration of Argentos
violent set pieces. Argento does not translate De Quinceys descriptions
of the Three Mothers fully into film, but he does use some of them. For
example, De Quinceys comment that the Mother of Sighs sighs inaudibly at intervals. ... Murmur she may, but it is in her sleep becomes
a moment in Suspiria when Suzy and Sara, sleeping in the rehearsal
studio after a rain of maggots has infested the dancers bedrooms, identify the silhouetted sleeper next to them as Helena Marcos because of
her sigh-like snoring (15051). Similarly, the terrible, stormy presence
of De Quinceys Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, appears
in Argentos portrayal of her in Inferno, and the gliding, regal ways of
De Quinceys Mater Lachrymarum, the Mother of Tears, appears in
Mother of Tears. The adaptation of De Quinceys Three Mothers makes
Suspiria de Profundis as well as De Quinceys larger aesthetic philosophy
a source and a frame for Argentos trilogy.
More important to understanding Argentos project in the Three
Mothers trilogy than the descriptions of the Three Mothers, however,
is what the Mother of Tears says about De Quincey at the end of his
vision:
Lo! here is he, whom in childhood I dedicated to my altars. This is
he that once I made my darling. Him I led astray, him I beguiled, and
from heaven I stole away his young heart to mine. Through me did he
become idolatrous; and through me it was, by languishing desires, that
he worshipped the worm and prayed to the wormy grave. Holy was the
grave to him; lovely was its darkness; saintly its corruption. Him, this
young idolater, I have seasoned for thee, dear gentle Sister of Sighs! Do
thou take him now to thy heart, and season him for our dreadful sister.
And thouturning to the Mater Tenebrarum, she saidwicked sister,
that temptest and hatest, do thou take him from her. ... So shall he be
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accomplished in the furnaceso shall he see the things that ought not
to be seensights that are abominable, and secrets that are unutterable. ... And so all our commission be accomplished which from God
we hadto plague his heart until we had unfolded the capacities of
his spirit. (15253)
The Mother of Tears credits herself with giving De Quincey his fascination with the wormy grave, with gruesome death and decay, and she
abjures the Mother of Darkness to show him sights ... abominable,
horrible visions. The Mothers, then, are responsible for De Quinceys
aesthetic appreciation of horror, the loveliness he finds in darkness. Their
commission, their purpose, is to serve up as much horror as is necessary
to make De Quinceys poetic nature unfold. They make him an artist
of the ugly, a master of horror, a product of the mold that also shaped
Argento. The Three Mothers that Argento inherits from De Quincey
produce the macabre spirit that motivates the best of the horror genre.
A similar spirit informs the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Argento has often cited as a lifelong influence. In an interview included
in Luigi Cozzis documentary Dario Argento: Master of Horror (1991),
Argento reflects, My films are very Poe-ish, but with a difference in
time and ambience. The difference in time and ambience is critical in
the adaptation of Poes short story The Black Cat that forms Argentos
half of the film Two Evil Eyes (1990), on which he collaborated with
George A. Romero (a colleague since the two of them worked together
on Romeros 1978 film Dawn of the Dead). Argentos The Black Cat
takes extensive liberties with the Poe original, modernizing it and making
its central character, Roderick Usher (Harvey Keitel), a photographer
whose work centers on murder victims. The protagonists name, a reference to Poes The Fall of the House of Usher, and his photographs,
which include images of murder directly from Poes The Pit and the
Pendulum and other stories, make Argentos The Black Cat a broad
homage to the macabre master of American romanticism. Making Usher
a photographer, of course, also makes him yet another cipher for Argento: Usher shares Argento, Poe, and De Quinceys fascination with
making art out of the wormy grave. The artists media may differDe
Quincey and Poe use the printed page, while Usher and Argento use
photographic imagesbut their purpose is the same.
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Poes writings reflect De Quinceys predilections for turning murder

into art, and they provide a foundation for Argentos aestheticism. In
his essay The Poetic Principle (1850), Poe writes, [U]nder the sun
there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified
more supremely noblethan this very poemthis poem per sethis
poem which is a poem and nothing morethis poem written solely
for the poems sake (417). This idea of the poem for the poems sake
prefigures the imperative art for arts sake from British aestheticism,
whose best-known spokesmen are Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. In
the conclusion to The Renaissance, published in 1873, Pater provides a
kind of manifesto:
Some spend [the short interval of life] in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among the children of this world, in art and
song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many
pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this
quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of
enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to
many of us. Only be sure it is passionthat it does yield you this fruit of a
quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion,
the desire of beauty, the love of art for arts sake, has most; for art comes
to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your
moments as they pass, and simply for those moments sake.
Pater justifies his valuation of art for its own sake as the surest and best
way to make the most of life. Refracted through the dark lens of De
Quinceys vision of murder as art, Argentos films seize this justification,
showing grotesque death for the sake of showing grotesque death. The
images do not need narrative logic because they are valuable in themselves; their value lies in the fulfillment of the Three Mothers purpose
of unfolding the artists spirit as well as in the excitement of passions that
make the most of lifes short interval. While on the surface the worship
of the grave that Argento inherits from De Quincey may seem nihilistic,
an affirmation of nothingness, it is in fact a means of enrichment, an
affirmation of life.8
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Inferno
Abandonment of narrative logic in favor of powerful, macabre imagery
that excites the passions and unfolds the capacity of an artists spirit may
be what makes Inferno, the second installment of the Three Mothers
trilogy, not only Argentos most difficult film to follow but also a film
he discusses in terms of superlative personal impact. In an interview
excerpted as an introduction to the 2000 Anchor Bay VHS release of
Inferno, Argento seems to confide in his audience:
Remember that this was one of the most difficult films for me. It was
a movie that took a lot of my energy and imagination. I hope you will
enjoy it. It is one of my most sincere and purest films.
Argentos languagetranslated from Italian as for me, my energy,

my most sincereemphasizes his own role in the film with a recognizably auteurist bent. Indeed, during his early days as a film critic or
at any point in his pan-European career, Argento might have become
familiar with the Cahiers du Cinema or Andrew Sarriss articulation of
auteur theory as an approach to film that considers the distinguishable
personality of the director as a criterion of value and interior meaning as the quality of a film that earns a director the mantle of auteur
(45253). The repeated elements of Argentos filmsartist-detectives,
his own hands as the gloved killers, faces smashing through glass, and
morecould very well be deliberate attempts to create the sort of artistic
signature that auteur critics seek.
Whether or not they are evidence of auteurism, the presence of such
elements as well as the films oneiric qualities, which are even more
pronounced than Suspirias, invite comparison with Federico Fellinis
dreamlike, autobiographical masterpieces, particularly 81/2, which is
about the experiences and dreams of a film director trying to make a
film. Since Argento once again uses an artist, a musician, as a protagonist, and since he once again casts his longtime girlfriend and cowriter
Daria Nicolodi in a major role, an autobiographical, Felliniesque reading might be possible. A reading of the film in terms of dream logic
is certainly possible, and Jodey Castricano has done just that in For
the Love of Smoke and Mirrors: Dario Argentos Inferno, which calls
attention to the films surreal uses of color, the languid movements of
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the character Rose during an underwater scene, and an overwhelming sense of strangeness in awkward dialogue, all of which add up to
the feeling of being in a dream. Nevertheless, arguing that Inferno is
an autobiographical dreamwork in the Fellini tradition only suggests,
rightly, that Argentos work deserves to be considered as both art film and
genre film and that it can be read in very personal terms. Acknowledging
Argentos place in the Fellini tradition does not help his dreamworks
convolutions to make any more sense.
Excerpts from an interview with Argento included on the Blue Underground DVD of Inferno provide additional perspective on the films
difficulty:
I had no idea it would be so difficult. It was very hard, even from the
writing. It was very complex, because I did not want to enter the world of
witches, as in Suspiria, but the world of alchemy, the magic science, the
meanings of designs of buildings. ... The alchemists were scientists who
studied all kinds of physic[al] phenomen[a], as well as the human psyche.
McDonagh uses an alchemical metaphor to describe the difficult narratives of Argentos films in general when she claims that their internal
logic is metaphoric rather than metonymic, so images proceed from
one to another not in the service of linear narrative, but by way of poetic
connections, a kind of alchemical reasoning (18). Alchemical reasoning,
in contrast to linear reasoning, is the transformation, even the transcendence, of image into personal experience rather than the sort of sense
that derives from a signifying chain. It does not have to make sense as
long as it creates poetic feeling.
For the success of this rationale for the irrational, Argentos mention
of magic science is key: if Suspiria reconciles with science to a point
where a scientist within the film is willing to admit the irrational into
sciences realm, Inferno reconciles still further through alchemy, a science that is the irrational and the impossible. Instead of being at odds,
magic and science become one. The consequences for writing through
this sort of irrational scientific reasoning are, as Argento claims, very
complex. One consequence is that Argentos interest in psychoanalysis,
skeptical and even adversarial in earlier films, manifests in an affirmative
move toward psychoanalysiss more mystical side. As McDonagh and
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others have pointed out, Infernos elemental images of fire and water
relate to Jungian archetypes:
Archetypes are images that arent derived from the specific psychological processes of the individual dreamer, but rather drawn from the vast
reserve of images that inform all cultural phenomena, from religious
symbolism to the world of legends and fairy tales. The image of waterparticularly bodies of water: oceans, pools, lakesis consistently
associated with the first of Jungs major archetypes, that of the Great
Mother who embodies the conflicting aspects of the feminine principle,
simultaneously nurturing and devouring. The Great Mother can also
be personified in dreams by houses, a particularly evocative association in light of the entire notion of the houses of the Three Mothers.
(McDonagh 146)
McDonaghs argument shows how archetypal imagery brings one type of

(arguably) magic science, Jungian psychoanalysis, together with another
that is not immediately apparent, alchemy. Argento approaches alchemy
not by representing it immediately in the storywhich has nothing to
do with the philosophers stone, the elixir vitae, or other typical signs
of alchemybut by entering it on the level of narrative form. His form
combines the magic science of the psyche with the art of filmmaking,
and the result is a film that is irrational because it is itself irrationality,
madness incorporated as art.
The figure of the house, which relates to the Jungian Mother, becomes Infernos rhetorical means of uniting alchemy with psychology
and irrationality with film. Indeed, Argentos mention of the meanings
of designs of buildings in the Inferno DVD interview points toward
the master metaphor through which the film asks to be read. Inferno
begins with close shots of something that looks like a dagger (a cutter
for the pages of an uncut book), a set of keys, and a book, The Three
Mothers by E. Varelli. This book makes the Three Mothers trilogys
connection to De Quincey, which appears only in Suspirias title, overt.
As the camera shows the books cover, soft piano music, a sharp contrast
with the frantic drums and synthesizers of Suspiria, establishes a sleepy,
dreamlike atmosphere. A title on the screen reads New York ~ April,
picking up Suspirias emphasis on place, which a voiceover reading from
The Three Mothers soon gives a new explanation:
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I, Varelli, an architect living in London, met the Three Mothers and

designed and built for them three dwelling places, one in Rome, one in
New York, and a third in Freiburg, Germany. I failed to discover until
too late that from those three locations, the Three Mothers ruled the
world with sorrow, tears, and darkness. Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother
of Sighs and oldest of the three, lives in Freiburg. Mater Lachrymarum,
the Mother of Tears, and the most beautiful of the sisters, holds rule in
Rome. Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, who is the youngest
and cruelest of the three, controls New York. And I built their horrible
houses, the repositories of all their filthy secrets. Those so-called mothers are actually wicked stepmothers, incapable of creating life, in . . .
With a burst of horns on the score, the title Inferno takes over the screen
and interrupts the voiceover. After the title, the voiceover goes on, combining paraphrases of De Quincey with original text. It continues:
The land upon which the three houses are constructed will eventually
become deathly and plague-ridden, so much so that the area all around
will reek horribly, and that is the first key to the mothers secret, truly
the primary key. The second key to the poisonous secret of the three
sisters is hidden in the cellar under their houses. There you can find
both the sister and the name of the sister living in that house. This is
the location of the second key. The third key can be found under the
soles of your shoes. There is the third key.
The voiceover is masculine, presumably representing the author Varelli,

and the person we see reading the book is a woman, Rose, the films first
candidate for a protagonist. She finishes reading and begins a letter to
her brother Mark, who lives in Rome, setting in motion the multiple storylines that will converge in the New York house of Mater Tenebrarum.
This convergence makes the house, the meaning and design of Varellis
building, central to the meaning and design of the film.
The houses meaning begins with the cities and countries where they
lie. The introductory voiceovers emphasis on the Three Mothers cities
as places from which they rule extends Suspirias use of Germany to
summon notions of the imperial Third Reich with references to other
empires, the ancient Roman but also the (relatively) new American
empire. Putting De Quinceys youngest of the three Ladies of Sorrow
in New York resonates pointedly with the United States status as the

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youngest of the three empires, and Varellis home in London evokes the
British Empire as well, which resisted imperial Germany, positioned
itself as the heir to ancient Rome, and gave birth to the United States.
Thus Inferno makes the witches motivation by world domination, given
only the weakest of implications in Suspiria, explicit.
The voiceover goes further into place-specificity with discussions of
the houses that Varelli has designed. The house in Suspiria provides an
abundance of weird backdrops for the films weird goings-on; Varellis
book makes that weirdness a plot point, and it does the same for the
weirdness Inferno shows within the New York home of Mater Tenebrarum. Varellis lamentation over building the houses suggests that
through their weird designs, they somehow enable the witches evil.
By giving his readers three keys to determining the locations of the
houses, he directs Rose and any other potential opposition toward confrontation with the evil, providing an impetus for the storyline. Varellis
discussion of his houses weird designs also explains the storylines end,
which echoes Suspirias ending. Suspiria concludes with a confrontation
between Suzy and Mater Suspiriorum. When Suzy stabs the ghastly
looking old witch, the dance-academy building crumbles around her like
the House of Usher in Poes tale. Inferno concludes with a confrontation
between Mark and Mater Tenebrarum. By coincidence, the house has
been set on fire by an unwitting inhabitant, so all Mark needs to do is
flee, leaving Mater Tenebrarum and the house to be destroyed together.
Varellis discussion of the witches connections to his architectural designs supports these endings, which show a connection so strong that
neither house nor witch can exist without the other.
To call the voiceover an explanation for Infernos ending is, admittedly, a stretch. By prompting Rose to identify Mater Tenebrarums house
and providing a wisp of reasoning to explain the spectacle of destruction
that Mark flees at the end, Varellis writing becomes the vaguest of maps
not only to the locations of the houses but to the events in the film. Without it, the incoherence that McDonagh and others note would be total
(149), but with it, Inferno is still difficult, or perhaps preposterous, to
follow. In the first sequence, Rose reads from The Three Mothers, writes
to her brother Mark, and leaves her apartment to mail the letter. A series
of shotsone of a sketch of the house in Varellis book, one of a picture
of the house on Roses wall, and one of the faade of Roses apartment
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buildingidentifies Roses building as Mater Tenebrarums home. As

she returns from the mailbox, Rose starts to figure out what the series of
shots has already told viewers. She looks at the metal plate that covers
the exterior entrance to her buildings basement, and Varellis voice in
her memory replays, The second key is hidden in the cellar. She goes
to Kazanians Antiques, the shop on the first floor of her building where
she originally acquired The Three Mothers from the mysterious owner,
Kazanian. When she asks him about the book, he replies dismissively,
Lots of books have been written about houses of the damned. Not
dissuaded, Rose points out that the book mentions a strange odor (key
number one), and just such an odor permeates the area where she and
Kazanian are standing. He dismisses her ideas again. Rose leaves the
shop, the voice in her mind repeats the fact about the second key, and
passing by a group of cats, she lifts the plate and begins her descent into
the buildings basement.
This descent quickly takes Rose into a surreal and confusing world.
She passes through a room stuffed with junk, random papers, and cobwebs, all normal enough for a buildings basement. She comes upon a
staircase, inexplicably filled with blue light, leading further beneath the
city. Down she goes, reaching a level marked by broken pipes and dangling
wires that suggest architectural chaos, which might be at least marginally
believable were the creepy blue light from the stairs not complemented
with creepier purple light from the room beyond. Water trickles down
along a vertical pipe until it spills onto the concrete floor, providing both
Jungian imagery and a trail that Rose follows to a hole in the concrete.
Yet another level awaits beneath Roses feet, but it is completely flooded.
Leaning over to peer into the water, Rose drops her keychain, which falls
in and gets caught on a floating piece of furniture just barely out of reach.
Even though the flooded level seems to glow blue from within, Rose finds
an old lamp to help light her pursuit of her keys (in both sensesthe
literal keys she has dropped, and the keys Varelli provides in The Three
Mothers). Exhibiting extraordinary (perhaps unbelievable) bravery, Rose
lowers herself into the water and explores.
The effects for the underwater sequence were beautifully conceived
and executed by (uncredited) Mario Bava; Inferno was the last film Bava
worked on before his death in 1980. The sequences otherworldly, underwater aesthetic amplifies the surreality established by the lighting and

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other bizarre details of the buildings surprisingly vast, deep basement.

Able to hold her breath for a very long time (a prerequisite for the character that was an important factor in casting Irene Miracle in the role),
Rose moves slowly into the underwater realm. Taking her perspective,
the camera shows a room with ballroom dcor amidst which lies a portrait
labeled Mater Tenebrarum, the second of Varellis keys. When she tries
to retrieve her keychain, Rose accidentally knocks it further down, all the
way to the distant floor. A quick trip up for air precedes another descent,
and point-of-view shots from her slowly moving position closely capture
the rococo designs on the mantle of the underwater fireplace, similarly
ornate chandeliers, throbbing orange drapery, the floral pattern on the
rug beneath her keys, and finally the ridges of decay on a corpse that
suddenly floats toward her as if attacking. Panicked, she swims up, kicking at the rotting corpse as it continues to drift toward her. She escapes.
Not many houses have underwater sub-sub-basements with telltale
corpses detailed in eerie blue light, but Mater Tenebrarums house is
exceptional. Mark, the second candidate for protagonist after his sister
is murdered, gets another experience of the houses exceptionality as
he unknowingly heads for his confrontation with the evil Mother. He
begins in the same room where the film begins, the place where Rose
reads The Three Mothers, and starts following Varellis threads. Staring at
the picture of the house that the earlier series of images places between
Varellis sketch and an exterior shot of the houses facade, Mark recalls
Varellis third key, which is under the soles of your shoes. He notices
an abundance of ants (an evocation of Luis Buuel and Salvador Dalis
surrealist film Un chien andalou [1929]) on the wall and floor, some of
which are emerging from between boards of the hardwood floor. Using a length of wire, he discovers a narrow passage beneath the boards.
Pulling up boards leads to a hole big enough to enter, and like his sister
before him, he travels downward.
Marks search of the cobweb-lined, scrap-covered, blue-glowing area
beneath the floorboards leads him to a small sliding door, which opens
on a stairway that goes further down. Down one level is another sliding door to another space like the one Mark has crawled through, and
down another level is a door, which leads to more rooms and hallways,
a short flight of steps up, and finally another door that opens on a corridor that looks part cave, part building (figure 19). The only way Marks
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Figure 19. In Inferno, Mark (Leigh McCloskey)

discovers Mater Tenebrarums lair within a house
that has a completely irrational structure.
path through the house and the spaces he encounters makes sense, the
only way the structure itself makes sense, is to see it as deliberately
convoluted and obfuscated. Whether such a structure would be able
to stand is a reasonable question, but even with disbelief suspended on
that question, the house is irrational, full of weirdness for the sake of
weirdness, architectural art for the sake of architectural art.
While the utilitarian potential for such a house is minimal, the metaphoric potential is huge. Metaphorically, the films title is far more relevant to its content than Suspirias, and the house realizes that relevance.
Rose and Marks journeys through the house take them continually
downward, deeper and deeper into its dark places, toward the terrible
Mother of Darkness. In Dante Alighieris Inferno, the poet and his
guides journey takes them continually downward, deeper and deeper
into hell, toward the terrible Prince of Darkness. The connection of the
house to Dantes hell gets stronger as the house starts burning at the
end; during Marks downward journey through areas not yet aflame,
cuts to burning places emphasize that he is going deeper into a fiery
pit. If the house stands for Dantes hell, all the films gory moments
within the house might be readable as part of a larger allegory in which
characters violent deaths relate to the tortures of the damned. Such a

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reading works in places. Two of the goriest deaths have a kind of poetic
justice in them. Kazanian, the antiques dealer, tries to drown a bag of
cats and in the effort gets eaten alive by rats and hacked to death by
a deranged cook. John, a butler, conspires with Carol, a housekeeper
(Alida Valli, who plays Miss Tanner in Suspiria), to rob their rich but
ailing mistress Elise (Daria Nicolodi); John gets his eyes ripped out, and
Carol, startled by seeing his body, drops a candle, sets herself as well
as the house on fire, and falls through a window to her death. Poetic
justice is absent, however, in the deaths of Marks friend Sarah, who
makes the mistake of reading Roses letter to Mark; Sarahs neighbor
Carlo, who makes the mistake of trying to help Sarah; Rose, who makes
the mistake of trying to solve the mystery of the Three Mothers; and
Elise, who makes the mistake of trying to help Mark do the same. The
allegorical Inferno connection is fragmentary at best; it does not provide
a coherent way of understanding the film.
The architect Varelli provides another metaphoric understanding
of the house. After Mark crawls through the space beneath the floorboards, he finds a red-lit passage that offers vantages on a room with
gold wallpaper inhabited by a nurse with a man in a wheelchair, house
residents whom Mark has previously encountered. The nurse leaves,
the man wheels himself out of the room, and Mark pursues the man,
who turns out to be Varelli himself. You found the way down, I see,
the architect says. Relying on a voicebox in his throat connected by
a wire to a sound board, the old man tells Mark about building the
Mothers houses, which became their eyes and ears. He elaborates,
This building has become my body, its bricks my cells, its passageways
my veins, and its horror my very heart, suggesting that the building
is a metaphor for its creator. This suggestion is temptingparticularly
since it opens the door to questions about whether the film Inferno,
itself a convoluted structure, might be a metaphor for its creator, Dario
Argento, and these questions circle back toward the films Fellini-like,
autobiographical dimensionsbut it does not hold up simply because
the only evidence to support it is Varellis claim. The house is far too
chaotic to sustain comparison to an organic system, and Varelli, who
inadvertently strangles himself on the wire connecting his voicebox to
the soundboard after a botched attempt to poison Mark with a syringe,
is not nearly important enough in the Three Mothers mythology to have
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something as important as Mater Tenebrarums house be a metaphor

for his body.
The suggestion that the house is like a human body is not altogether
without merit. In his attempt to glorify himself through an equation of
the house with his body, Varelli leaves out the part of the body that has
the most metaphoric potential when applied to the house: the head. In
Suspiria, Professor Milius tells Suzy, A coven deprived of its leader is
like a headless cobra, harmless, and when Suzy kills Mater Suspiriorum,
she figuratively cuts off the covens head, and both the coven and the
dance-academy building are destroyed. Each of the Three Mothers is
the head of her own house; cut off the head, and the body, the rest of
the house, dies. Taken in this direction, Varellis body metaphor applied
to Mater Tenebrarum instead of to Varelli connects to the metaphor of
the body politic that traditionally casts royalty as the political bodys head
and various subjects in other parts. This body approach is not entirely
satisfying either, though, because Mater Tenebrarum, unlike her older
sister, has no coven. She may be the head of her house, but she heads
no state. Other than Varelli, who is more her prisoner than her polis,
Mater Tenebrarum lacks solid connections to her houses tenants, who
are occasionally wicked but not clearly witches. She seems to work alone.
The relationship between the body and the house in Inferno only
works in terms of destruction: the house does nothing bodylike when
its head is still on, but it dies like a body when the head is cut off. That
the body metaphor only really applies when the body is mutilated seems
apt, however, in a film that features mutilations as its most outstanding
qualities. Nina Darntons New York Times review of Inferno from 1986
remarks that the film deserves the highest rating in the slice-and-dice
category of movies, but she also notes that [t]he movies distinguishing
feature is not the number or variety of horrible murders, but the length
of time it takes for the victims to die. Like the gialli and Suspiria,
Inferno strings together violent, drawn-out set pieces, and for at least
some of the target audience, everything else in the film is subordinate to
delivering the gory goods (Koven 33). The goods in Inferno are notable
for their extremity (Kazanian and Johns deaths, already mentioned,
are particularly nasty) as well as for their improbability. Elises death,
for example, is so unlikely that it straddles the line between funny and
frightening: after she runs through the building, pursued by an unseen

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force (and with a lot of wind in her hair), she finds a quiet spot where
some of the films ubiquitous cats start flying into the frame from all
sides, scratching her and bringing her helpless to the ground, where a
gloved killer finishes her with a knife.
Elises death is arguably the strangest, but the death sequence that
comes closest to being a microcosm of the films approach to spectacles
of death is the first, which culminates with the murder of Marks friend
Sarah. Mark and Sarah study music in the same class in Rome. When
Mark leaves Roses letter behind in class, Sarah picks it up and takes
it with her during her journey home through a dark and stormy night.
She reads it while riding in a taxi driven by the same man (or at least
the same actor) who drives Suzys taxi in Suspiria. The letters contents
inspire her to tell the driver to take her to a library, and when she gets
out of the taxi, she pricks her finger on a needle sticking out of the door.
The pricked finger has fairy-tale resonance (see Sleeping Beauty), and an
extreme close-up emphasizes it with foreboding. After nabbing a copy of
The Three Mothers, she gets lost trying to find her way out of the library.
She soon finds herself in a strange room, lit with the same primary colors
that signal bad places in Suspiria, filled with open flames and a cauldron
of bubbling goo. A figure tending the cauldron sees that Sarah carries
Varellis book, and he attacks her, his monstrous hands almost thrusting her face into the goo. She flees for home, where she runs into her
neighbor Carlo (Gabriele Lavia, who plays a different Carlo in Deep Red
and Mr. Betti in Argentos 2001 film Sleepless). Carlo agrees to stay with
her until she feels less afraid, and when she asks whether he has heard
of the Three Sisters (a.k.a. the Three Mothers), he fatefully replies that
he only believes in what he can see and touch. Sarah puts on music by
Verdi, which provides the sound track to the coming violence. When she
goes to phone Mark about the letter (she gets his answering machine),
the scene cuts to black-gloved hands unfolding four attached paper dolls.
As a hand begins to use scissors to decapitate one of the dolls, the scene
cuts to a lizard eating a moth, a random insert that corresponds with
an image that appears later in the film when Mark, crawling under the
floorboards on his way to meet Mater Tenebrarum, sees a cat eating a rat
(figures 2022). These moments randomness underscores the randomness set in motion by the black-gloved hands mutilating the paper dolls.
After the first doll decapitation, the scene cuts to a woman being hanged
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Figure 2022. In
Inferno, images of
random violence
such as a lizard
eating a moth,
a woman being
hanged, and a
cat eating a rat
underscore the
randomness of
the murders.
(figure 21). After the second doll decapitation, the scene cuts back to the
exterior of Sarahs building, wherein Sarah is about to meet her doom.
As in Suspiria, the editing in this scene suggests the workings of
magic, with the editorial cuts from the scissor-cut dolls, to the mysteriously hanged woman, back to the dolls, and then to Sarahs death sequence, signifying a voodoo-like equation between the dolls mutilations
and the characters. This connection is not necessarily obvious, however,
and the surprisingly decontextualized hanged woman contributes to the

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aura of randomness surrounding the scenes that follow (commenting

on the hanged woman in an interview by Francesco Locane on the fan
Web site Dark Dreams, Argento says, The city is in chaos; it is an image of death). As Sarah begins to realize the extent of her danger, the
lights go out, and Carlo goes to fix the fuse box. He stumbles back into
Sarahs view, a knife buried in his neck, and falls on top of her, choking
and spitting blood, grasping at her, pinning her, until finally a blackgloved hand removes the knife and plunges it into Sarahs back. Carlos
gruesome demise increases the films abiding sense of randomness by
having the ratio of his death scene to his total screen time be painfully
skewed toward death. The chain of dolls, rather than clearly signifying
a chain of mystical deaths, works as a metaphor for the chain of random
violence, and the chain of random violence works as a metaphor for the
movie as a whole. The chain of dolls reflects on the film as a sequence of
bizarre happenings held together more by style and editing, aspects of
the medium, than by coherent story. Just as the paper is the medium and
linkage of the dolls, celluloid is the medium and linkage of the deaths.
The medium, then, replaces narrative as the films central focus. The
paper-doll series of deaths dramatizes this replacement, giving the Marshall McLuhan saw the medium is the message a new, darker shade of
meaning. After Mark comes to Sarahs apartment and finds her stabbed
to death, the action switches from Rome to New York, where a monstrous hand uses a window like a guillotine to dispatch Rose and create
another link in the chain of randomness. Up to this point, Rose has been
a protagonist from the same mold as Suspirias Suzy Banyon, a strongwilled woman stirring up trouble by asking too many questions, so her
death is a blow to audience expectations as well as to genre conventions,
la the blow delivered to audiences by the genre-changing murder of
Marion Crane (shower-dying Janet Leigh) after Psycho spends its first
third developing her as the lead. In killing off Rose, Inferno goes to an
even greater extreme, again throwing off a common screentime ratio, that
of time given to a victim versus time given to a survivor. Unaware of his
sisters death, Mark arrives at Mater Tenebrarums house in New York and
picks up the giallo-like amateur sleuthing for the films second half, with
the result that the audience either has to transfer identification from one
lead to another, or (as is often the case with Inferno) the audience feels
lost, abandoned by a narrative that eschews the convention of unfolding
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a story by consistently following an individual or group, a convention so

widespread that it seems a defining element of film narrative itself.
Because it has a chain of two protagonists instead of horrors typical
sole survivor,9 Inferno provides only one consistent focus from beginning to end: Mater Tenebrarums house. While many tales of haunted
houses treat their settings as characters, Inferno is one of the few that
use stylized representation of a setting instead of characters as a source
of (arguably insufficient) coherence. Whether this replacement of character with hyperstylized mise-en-scne and editing succeeds in creating
a good film is debatable, but successful or not, it follows Suspiria in
downgrading narrative and affirming spectacle as the defining element
of film experience. Furthermore, even the house, whose architectural
impossibility doubles the impossibility of the storyline, dies in the end,
and since Mark does not so much triumph over the evil of Mater Tenebrarum as run away from it, the final conflagration produces no real
hero, tragic, antiheroic, or otherwise. Infernos opposition to narrative
is stronger than Suspirias because out of all Argentos films, it comes
closest to being pure spectacle. Freedom from narrative may or may
not be the purity that Argento invokes when he calls Inferno one of his
purest films, but it is the purity that marks the films greatest feat.
Mother of Tears
Almost everything about Inferno is unconventional, but it does make one
move that is very conventional for the second film in a horror series: it
paves the way for part three. During the early scenes that show Mark
and Sarah in the music conservatory in Rome, Mark twice encounters
a beautiful woman whose presence coincides with strange happenings.
First, she appears in the conservatory, and Argentos editorial representations of magic indicate that she is preventing Mark from reading
Roses letter. Second, she appears in a car driving past Sarahs building
just after Sarahs brutal death, which suggests that her power has caused
the brutality. These coincidences combine with Varellis voiceover from
the beginning of the film, which notes that Mater Lachrymarum is the
most beautiful of the three sisters and located in Rome, to suggest
that this woman is the third Mother herself. Inferno did not achieve
Suspirias mainstream success, but both films garnered enough of a
cult following for these glimpses of the third Mother to create fervor

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for the third film. Stories circulated widely that a script was ready soon
after Infernos release, and to explain a growing delay, speculations grew
about Argentos trouble with Fox, Infernos distributor, as well as about
his troubled relationship with Daria Nicolodi. Argentos explanation, in
an interview on BloodyDisgusting.com, is that after five years working
on the series, he was a little tired of telling the story (Argento, Interview with Mother). The whole truth is likely a combination of reasons.
In any case, thirty years passed between the release of Suspiria (1977)
and Mother of Tears: The Third Mother (2007), and during that time,
Argentos work had transformed in ways that the final section of this essay
explores. As a result, Mother of Tears hardly looks like it belongs with
the previous two films. Among Argentos devotees, reactions have been
polarized, but the poles have not been the extremes of total garbage and
pure genius that marked Suspirias reception: while many hate it, few are
willing to rate Mother of Tears more highly than acceptable or pretty
good. Even McDonagh describes it as sadly unconvincing (xxv).
In their time, Suspiria and Inferno were revolutionary. Although their
colorful palettes can be traced back to films such as Mario Bavas Blood
and Black Lace (1964) and even to the tinted frames of The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari (1920), their combinations of wild visuals with storylines that
challenge storytelling itself were unlike anything the world had ever seen.
During the years since Inferno, horror cinema has produced many visually stunning films, and the best-known of such works often acknowledge
Argentofor example, the makers of the American Saw series (200410)
tag his works visually through their signature puppets resemblance to the
puppet in Deep Redas a cornerstone of contemporary horror. A film that
merely duplicated the by-2007 familiar aesthetics of Suspiria and Inferno
would not be worthy of the series; Mother of Tears had to be different,
rooted in its own moment as much as in its predecessors, to pose the sort
of challenges that define the Three Mothers trilogy. The differences of
Mother of Tears achieve just that sort of challenge, and like most films
that are shockingly different, it has often been misunderstood.
While summarizing the stories of Suspiria and Inferno is difficult
to do without lapsing into misrepresentation, summarizing Mother of
Tears is easy. It begins with the Catholic Cardinal Monsignor Brusca
and a construction team uncovering the grave of Oscar de la Valle, who
in 1814 transported an urn full of Mater Lachrymarums magical items
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to Viterbo, bringing death and destruction to all he encountered. The

church buried La Valle in a coffin chained to the urn, so unearthing
the coffin and breaking the chains reawakens the evil, setting Mater
Lachrymarums apocalyptic plans in motion. A priest sends the urn to
his friend Michael Pierce at the Museum of Ancient Art in Rome, but
an art-restoration student, Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento), and a museum
staff member, Giselle Mares, come across it first. They break the urns
wax seal and examine its contents. As soon as Sarah leaves Giselle alone,
Mater Lachrymarum and her demonic helpers murder Giselle, and
Sarah soon finds herself trying to solve the mystery of Giselles death
while running for her life amidst a city spiraling into chaos. Michael
and Sarah are lovers, so when Mater Lachrymarums followers kidnap
Michaels son, the stakes become personal. They become even more
personal when Sarah discovers that she is the daughter of a white witch
who was murdered by the Three Mothers and that she, too, is a white
witch. With the assistance of her mothers spirit and an assemblage
of religious and arcane do-gooders, Sarah proceeds from discovery to
discovery. Since Mater Lachrymarums minions hound her steps and
murder all who help her, she leaves a trail of bodies in her wake, and
the police, especially Detective Enzo Marchi, follow the trail. Sarah
and Enzo both end up in the house Varelli built in Rome, and they
find a secret passage that leads to the underground lair where Mater
Lachrymarum and followers from around the world are having an orgy
of sadistic sacrifice. Narrowly avoiding becoming sacrifices themselves,
Sarah and Enzo destroy a garment from the urn that is the key to Mater
Lachrymarums power, which makes the house and the underground
lair begin to crumble. A falling obelisk impales Mater Lachrymarum,
and Sarah and Enzo barely escape the destruction, emerging from the
underground lair victorious as a new day dawns on rescued Rome.
The emphasis on Rome provides one of Mother of Tearss most significant departures, not only from the other films in the Three Mothers
trilogy but from Argentos entire corpus. Whereas the early gialli show
Rome as a city difficult to distinguish from any other modern metropolis, Mother of Tears features a Rome that tourists will recognize, full
of domes, arches, and ruins. Whereas the first two films in the trilogy
provide distinct urban locations for actions that primarily occur on the
insides of bizarre and colorful structures, Mother of Tears returns again

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and again to the streets, filming mostly on location rather than on sets
constructed to advertise their own artificiality. The political valence of
Suspirias German setting is a subtle way to suggest the Three Mothers fascistic plans for world domination; Infernos American setting is
slightly less subtle in tying New York to Mater Tenebrarums globalized power, but it is still not a subject directly discussed. By contrast,
Mother of Tears makes Romes political significance essential to the
story. Providing crucial exposition, Sarahs helper Father Johannes (Udo
Kier) explains that the witches aim to make Rome fall again, to usher
in the Second Age of Witches. Confirming Father Johanness claims,
a televised newscast later comments on the chaos, Theyre calling it
the Second Fall of Rome. Finally, the Three Mothers hazy plan from
the first two films becomes clear: they will bring in new Dark Ages by
the same means that brought on the first Dark Ages, Romes fall, so the
story of Mother of Tears could occur nowhere else.
The importance of Rome in the Three Mothers plans justifies the
shift from Suspiria and Infernos colorfully constructed interiors to the
abundant exterior locations shot for Mother of Tears. After the murder of
Giselle, Mater Lachrymarum and her followers reclaim the urn and the
magic objects inside, and they celebrate their triumph through a ceremony
in which Mater Lachrymarum lowers the garment of power onto her
naked, thoroughly photographed body. She chants words to accompany
the mystic symbols on her new clothes, and as she raises her arms, the
scene cuts to a woman on a bridge, surrounded by classical Roman architecture, pushing a stroller. She stops, picks up her baby, smiles, throws
it over the side of the bridge (where it smacks into fatal stone and thuds
into the water), and then breaks into tears. Next, a quick succession of
cutsto a stabbing on an exterior stairway, to hoodlums smashing a car,
to two men strangling one another on a city street, back to the weeping
mothershows that people all over the city are descending into violence
brought on by Mater Lachrymarums spell. Flashes of public violence
recur throughout the film, showing more and more people involved, and
on one occasion a violent mob almost kills Sarah in the street. The violence
brought on by Mater Lachrymarums magic is both an aim and a means
of multiplying the power to do more violence.
The growth of the witchs power through the violence on the streets
of Rome provides the background for the journey that leads from Sarahs
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first encounter with the urn full of magic relics to Sarah finding and
killing Mater Lachrymarum by destroying the most important of the
relics. This journey is the films plot, but the story uncovered within the
plot duration is much more detailed and chronologically expansive. In
fact, Sarahs quest, in which first Michael and later Enzo provide factgathering assistance, involves little more than uncovering backstory.
The movie develops narrative interest with a few chases, random street
violence, and the graphic murders of people who provide Sarah and
Michael with information, but other than getting information, the protagonists never really do anything between the relic-finding beginning
and relic-destroying end. Information gathering is, of course, the primary
activity of protagonists in most mystery narratives, including gialli, but
in such mysteries the information is about a variety of suspects, and the
informations purpose is to mislead with red herrings as much or more
than it is to enlighten with real explanations. In Mother of Tears, the
information is not only all relevant to the bona fide Mother of Tears,
but it is also all collected for its own sake, because knowing about the
Mother of Tears is intrinsically valuable. Instead of art for arts sake,
Mother of Tears focuses on story for storys sake.
After Sarah and Giselle go through the magic items in the urn, the
first major source of storytelling is a priest whom Michael meets at the
hospital where Monsignor Brusca is recovering from a stroke suffered
shortly after unearthing Oscar de la Valles grave. As the priest begins the
legend of La Valles discovery of the urn in 1814, the scene cuts to blackand-white sketches of what the priest describes: first, wolves crowded
around the town where La Valle and the urn resided, digging up and
destroying fresh corpses in the graveyard; then, La Valle boarded a coach
for the Vatican, and everywhere he went, children died, crops burned,
whole villages were devastated; finally, La Valle ended up in Viterbo,
sick, blind, and dying. In quick succession after the revelation of this part
of the backstory, more random violence plagues Rome, Michaels son is
kidnapped, and punk-looking witches from all over the world begin arriving in Romes airport. The second revelation of backstory, five minutes
of film-time after the first, occurs in a library, where Sarah scours books
with pages titled Les Sciences Occultes that provide artistic renderings
of three-headed beasts and other mystical marvels. Thinking aloud as
she reads, Sarah says, Three Furies, three Fates, three Graces, Diana,

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three-headed, the Triadwhy are there always three? Her reading thus
gives the Three Mothers the strong mythical context that they also have
in De Quinceys original essay. A call from Michael interrupts Sarahs
research and spurs her on toward another major source of storytelling,
Father Johannes, on the path to whom she is chased by some of the
witches earlier shown arriving in Rome.
While waiting for her meeting with Father Johannes, Sarah meets an
intermediate source of information, Marta, who recognizes her as Elisa
Mandys daughter. Marta provides information about Elisas role in the
backstory, which is crucial because it links Sarah to Suspiria. Up until this
point, Sarah has believed that her parents died in a car crash in Freiburg,
but Marta corrects the misinformation: Your mother dared to fight a very
powerful black witch, Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs. Father
Johannes enters the room and joins the conversation. In addition to explaining Mater Lachrymarums goals, he gives the backstory even more
depth, telling the story of the Three Mothers thousand-year reign and
their settlement in Freiburg, New York, and Rome. Mater Tenebrarum
and Mater Suspiriorum died many years ago, Father Johannes says,
and catching on, Sarah says, The Mother of Sighsshe murdered my
parents. Yes, Father Johannes continues, but not before your mother
had injured her horribly. After fighting your mother, she was reduced
to a shell of her former self. A young dancer named Suzy Banyon finally
managed to kill her. Not only does this part of the story create a link to
the first film of the Three Mothers trilogy; it also provides more story
than Suspiria offers by itself. If anyone ever wondered why Suzy Banyon,
utterly lacking in magical ability, could kill such an uber-witch during a
relatively short and easy exchange, here is the answer: Suzys triumph
might not seem to make sense in the first film, but it actually does make
sense because prior to the film, Mater Suspirorum was weakened by a
white witch with real power.
Sarahs acquisition of sense-making information is interrupted by
more chases and the deaths of Father Johannes, Marta, and Martas
lover Elga, but it continues when Sarah goes to meet Mr. Guglielmo
De Witt, who identifies himself as an alchemist and builds a connection to Inferno comparable to the connection that Father Johannes
and Marta build to Suspiria. As he subjects Sarah to a mystical eye
examination, from which he learns about her journey so far, he explains
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alchemys combination of white and black magic as well as of witchcraft

and science. Centuries ago, a great Roman alchemist, Varelli, lived
for a time in this villa, De Witt says as he leads Sarah into his home
library. He was also a gifted architect, and near the end of his life, he
built the residences for the Three Mothers. At this point, De Witt
produces a copy of Varellis book The Three Mothers, and close-ups of
its pages show the same text and page design shown at the beginning
of Inferno. A voiceover and music that sound very similar to the sound
that opens the previous film even accompany Sarahs reading. With this
last piece of information, Sarah now knows everything that the viewers of all three films know about the Three Mothers, and the journey
has given all of this knowledge a context that allows the previous two
films to make a great deal more sense than they make on their own.
Varellis book also gives Sarah the last clue she needs to head toward
her final confrontation with the Mother of Tears, the location of the
witchs house in Rome and the Latin phrase, What you see does not
exist, and what you cannot see is truth, which guides her to the underground lairs hidden entrance.
By having Sarahs journey be a journey of storytelling, Mother of
Tears not only does the opposite of the previous two films in the seriesproviding an abundance of story that allows the films events to
make rational sensebut it also recasts the previous films, allowing
them to make sense as well. Instead of the excess of nonsense that turns
the previous films into attacks on rational storytelling itself, the last film
in the series makes so much sense that everything around it starts to
make sense, too. The sound track colludes in this effort by combining
themes from the previous films scores with a much more conventional
horror-film score that uses choral motifs to highlight the grandly religious, apocalyptic terror. Instead of being overtly antinarrative, Mother
of Tears embraces narrative with the grandest narrative possible, one
that makes sense of one thousand years of evil and then posits as its
possible ending the end of the world. The scope is, in a word, biblical.
Its not just a narrative; its a supernarrative.
This supernarrativity is what perhaps most distinguishes the third
film in the Three Mothers trilogy from the first two, and it lies behind
much of the films critical reception. A review by Dennis Harvey in
Variety demonstrates:

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It has taken Dario Argento nearly three decades to complete his Three
Mothers horror trilogy commenced by 1977s Suspiriahis first, best
and most widely popular post-giallo effortand 1980s visually striking
if muddled Inferno. Whether viewers will think Mother of Tears:
The Third Mother was worth the wait depends on if they are willing to
settle for laughs over chills: This hectic pileup of supernatural nonsense
is a treasure trove of seemingly unintentional hilarity. Although lacking
helmers usual aesthetic panache, this Mother is a cheesy, breathless
future camp classic.
Nonsense in this review differs from the muddled nonsense of Inferno. It is of a class with laughs, hilarity, and camp; it refers to
the films undeniable aura of silliness, which radiates from its alarming
excesses. In addition to the excess of story, Mother of Tears offers an
excess of violence, which comes closer to the spirit of the earlier films but
greatly surpasses them. Giselle gets her jaw ripped apart by a medieval
torture device; she is also eviscerated with a knife and strangled with her
own intestines. The Japanese witch who leads a group of witches from
the airport gets her head smashed like a melon by a trains bathroom
door. Father Johannes gets his throat slashed and his face mutilated by
a meat cleaver. Michaels very young son gets torn apart and cannibalized. Elga gets her eyes gouged out by another medieval torture device,
and Marta gets skewered by a spear that enters her vagina and exits her
mouth. The list could continue. For visual flair, none of these deaths
matches Suspirias close-up of a knife entering a still-beating heart, but
together they might rival Peter Jacksons Dead Alive (1992) for the title
of Goriest Film Ever. The extremes are extreme enough to be ludicrous,
nauseating enough to be laughable.
Another laughable extreme appears in the films treatment of gender issues. In Deep Red, the relationship between the amateur detective Marcus and his partner-in-sleuthing Gianna provides a humorous
counterpart to the subtexts related to sex and sexuality that appear in
Carlos storyline. Playboy Marcus is smaller than Gianna, and since she
is a confident professional, he often feels a need to assert his masculinity, even accepting her teasing offer to arm wrestle (he loses). Although
the confusion about gender roles between Mark and Gianna plays for
comedy, the playful subversion of those roles is ultimately serious, and
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as Tenebres exchange between Peter Neal and the reporter Tilde demonstrates, Argento listens to the critics who call his work sexist. Charges
of sexism leveled against Suspiria and Inferno likely stem from their
unwavering depictions of the feminine as either evil or an object of sexualized violence, depictions consistent with Barbara Creeds discussion
of female abjection and the monstrous-feminine, which derives much
of its monstrous power from the reproductive (i.e., mothering) capacity
of the female body. The antagonists are, after all, witches led by a triad
of cruel matriarchs, and their mostly female victims tend to be in their
nightclothes when torn to pieces. Instead of backing down after thirty
years of having the Three Mothers films called sexist, Argento ramps up
the depiction of female abjection in Mother of Tears. The women in this
film are not only violent; they are bad mothers. Under the influence of
the Mother of Tears, one woman throws her baby off a bridge, witches
eat Michaels son, and Father Johanness assistant Valeria murders her
own child with a cleaver before turning on Father Johannes. The ultimate
bad mother, the Mother of Tears (a wicked stepmother, as Varelli says
in his book The Three Mothers, quoted in Inferno), becomes a cipher for
bad motherhood, for women failing to live up to their God-given roles
as nurturing givers of life.
While Mother of Tears takes the depictions of feminine evil to an
even higher level, it also adds an element missing from the earlier films:
good mothers who contrast with the bad. The ultimate good mother
is Elisa, whose commitment to nurturing her progeny continues from
beyond the grave. Sarahs devotion to her good mother appears several
times, particularly when she weeps over pictures of her dead parent and
when, after Marta briefly summons Elisas spirit, grown-up Sarah shouts,
Dont leave me, Mommy! to the fading shade. Mommy does not actually leave Sarah at that point; she stays to help until she must sacrifice
herself to save Sarah by dragging Michael (turned into an undead servant
of Mater Lachrymarum) into the fiery netherworld. Although she is not
as dedicated as Elisa, Marta is also a good-mother figure. Her voice and
eyes effuse sympathy when she tells Sarah the truth about her parents,
and when the younger woman is in need, Marta and her partner Elga
take Sarah into their home. That Marta and Elga are both lesbians and
good-mother figures extends Argentos history of sympathetic portrayals
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of homosexuals. The lesbians difference from the reproductive mothers

who throw their babies off bridges and hack them up with meat cleavers
defines good motherhood not as giving birth but as truly nurturing and
caring for the young.
The effect of the ludicrous extremes of good and bad motherhood, extremes that do not necessarily ally reproduction with goodness, ultimately
connect to extreme representations of patriarchy and heteronormativity.
Heternormativity appears in the deaths of the good lesbian mothers:
Martas death from a spear driven through her vagina is a grotesque phallic punishment of her sexual deviance; it allies phallic aggression with heteronormative oppression, which is itself allied with Mater Lachrymarums
forces of bad motherhood. The extremity of the punishment reflects the
extremity of the normative forces, which condemn themselves through
the excess of the violence they do. The death of the Mother of Tears
herself echoes the punishment that her minions visit upon Marta: when
Sarah destroys the magic garment, Mater Lachrymarum stands naked
and helpless before her followers for an instant and then is skewered
by a giant obelisk that comes crashing into her lair. The phallic obelisk
highlights the irony of a woman participating in phallic aggression that
canand doessubdue her as well. The aggression and violence reveal
the evils of heternormative and patriarchal forces, which collapse on their
purveyors just as the Three Mothers houses collapse when their power
is overcome. Mater Lachrymarums death by obelisk is poetic justice to
the Nth degree.
While the critical possibilities of such justice have a subversive allure,
their ludicrous degree is problematic for any reading of the film that tries
to establish a consistent political rhetoric. The extremes surrounding
good and bad motherhood go so far that they do not seem sincere. When
an adult shouts Dont leave me, Mommy! to her mothers ghost, the
films mommy issuesamplified by the fact that the exchange between
mother and daughter is played by real-life mother and daughter Daria
Nicolodi and Asia Argentobecome so saccharine that they are almost
as nauseating as the spear skewering Marta from orifice to orifice. The
excess of the films gore and supernarrativity combines with the excessive
polarization of feminine roles to make Mother of Tears appear exaggerated on every levelsensory, narrative, and interpretive. In the context
of such exaggeration, definitively labeling the films exploitative imagery
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as feminist or antifeminist, queer or antiqueer becomes impossible.

The result of the exaggeration is, as Dennis Harvey claims in Variety,
pure camp. Nathan Lee, in a review in the New York Times titled Supernatural Stew, Served with Camp, refers to the films premise as
magnificent nonsense. Susan Sontags classic 1964 essay Notes on
Camp describes camp as a certain mode of aestheticism, which is
the spirit of extravagance that as a taste responds to the strongly exaggerated (43). It relies on seriousness that fails, or what Harvey calls
unintentional hilarity. Given Argentos turn toward dark humor in his
Masters of Horror TV films Jenifer (2005) and Pelts (2006), immediate
predecessors to Mother of Tears, intentionality behind the humor is
debatable. Whether or not it is intentional, the failed seriousness of the
films aesthetic treatments of storytelling, violence, and gender issues
makes its narrative absurd, not nonsensical in terms of irrationality but
in terms of silliness. Exploring an avenue of aestheticism different from
those explored in the earlier films, Mother of Tears uses the grandest
narrative possible, a campy narrative so sweeping that it adds sense
where it was formerly absent, and the result is silliness. While Suspiria
and Inferno attack narrative through nonsensical irrationality, Mother
of Tears attacks narrative by having rationality create nonsense. Mother
of Tears is an inversion of the previous films with the same result: narratives claim to primacy in film experience is laid low.
The particular mode of silly narrative that Mother of Tears employs
resonates with some of the most popular novels-turned-films of its decade. David Edelstein of New York magazine claims that Sarahs odyssey
has a little Harry Potter, a little Da Vinci Code, and several Web commentators compare the film to Dan Browns Angels and Demons, which
also features characters running around Rome to stop a deadly plot.10
What these texts have in common with Mother of Tears is the depiction
of the forces of good fighting against conspiracies of bad so immense that
the outcome of the fight could change the world forever. Their scope,
which is critical to their appeal and success, is appropriately millennial,
grand not despite postmodernitys skepticism about grand narratives
of truth but because of that skepticism. Conspiracy narratives focus on
paranoid reasons uncanny production of sense behind seemingly disconnected phenomena. In religious conspiracies, skeptical questioning
of the overarching truths of religions belief in the supernatural, as in

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the adaptations of Dan Browns novels, often produces the possibility of

newer, greater truths. Mother of Tears takes on the grandness of these
texts millennial scope and extends them to the point where their seriousness visibly fails, and in doing so it approaches satire of millennial
sensibilities.
Similarly, the extreme gore, particularly in the scenes involving medieval torture devices, evokes another of the decades most popular series,
the Saw films that helped make torture porn part of the American film
vocabulary. Those uberviolent films acknowledge Argento through their
random puppets and carefully choreographed set pieces, and Argento,
in turn, acknowledges them through a kind of one-upmanship, a demonstration that a master from an earlier generation can still outdo his
cinematic progeny. The relationships between Mother of Tears and its
higher-grossing contemporaries show Argentos film to be both of its
time and apart from it, participating in its discourses while maintaining
an ironic distance that highlights contemporaries weaknesses while
celebrating their triumphs.
Although the campiness and grandness of its narrative sets Mother
of Tears apart, the film still bears many elements of Argentos signature
style. A standout example is the scene in which Sarah explores the house
Varelli built for Mater Lachrymarum, which, as Lee notes in the New
York Times, consists mainly of a three-and-a-half minute Steadicam
tracking shot of thrilling complexity: the camera follows [Sarah] up and
down stairs, through delicate variations of light and shadow; it also
moves gracefully from low to high angles to capture her disorientation
as she navigates the labyrinthine halls and stairways. Although it gravitates toward a camp aestheticism, Mother of Tears does not completely
abandon the traditional aestheticismthe appreciation for the beauty
possible through cinematographythat characterizes the other films in
the trilogy. Its use of elaborate set pieces and an amateur detective ties it
to the first and second films and to the earlier gialli. Indeed, except for
when professional detectives replace the amateurs, as in The Stendhal
Syndrome, these elements run through all of Argentos feature films,
giallo and supernatural alike (one could even argue that these elements
are present in his lone comedy, The Five Days of Milan).
This continuity troubles the division of giallo and supernatural films
into separate genres or subgenres. In Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds,
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McDonagh includes an interview in which she says to Argento, Your own

films fall into two groupsthe naturalistic thrillers and the supernatural
horror films. Argento replies, I think thats an artificial distinction; I
dont see a great difference between them. The realistic pictures are not
very realistic, even though theyre about psychopaths rather than witches
(23536). This reply suggests that in addition to troubling gender, sexuality, science, rationality, and narrative, Argento implicitly troubles genre.
As Argentos comment about his unrealistic realism indicates, strong
genre boundaries do not divide his films into distinct categories. While
the move from Deep Red to Suspiria is a turn toward the supernatural,
the amateur sleuthing of Suzy, Rose, Mark, and Sarah in the Three Mothers trilogy imports aspects of the giallo into the context of supernatural
horror. Furthermore, Deep Red and Suspiria share The Bird with the
Crystal Plumages interest in reconstructed memory: just as Birds Sam
and Deep Reds Marcus see things of critical importance that they work
to remember up until the films climaxes, Suzy hears the soon-to-bevictim Pat say something, a hint about how to access the witches hidden
lair, that she struggles to understand until a critical moment when she
is able to use the memory to find Mater Suspiriorum. Such recurring
elements make genre boundaries permeable, but Phenomena, the film
that Argento made between Tenebre and Opera, goes even further, becoming an experimental hybrid of giallo and supernatural horror that
constitutes an attack on rational narrative worthy of the Three Mothers.
Phenomena
In contrast to its initial American title, Creepers, which emphasizes the
films interest in bugs, the lasting title Phenomena emphasizes the importance of seeing the film as a collection of strange happenings rather
than as a deliberately plotted narrative. It is also a collection of Argentos
styles and subjects, a microcosm of his works. Some critics regard it as
the nadir of Argentos career (Gracey 94), and others regard it as one
of his most successful films (Cozzi 86). In an interview on the Anchor
Bay DVD, Argento calls Phenomena his most personal film as well
as his best. Regardless of its success as a film on its own, as part of
Argentos entire oeuvre it stands as the effort that comes closest to using
an incoherent story to articulate a coherent philosophy of what film as
an art form should accomplish.

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One major thread of the story has Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connellyin the DVD interview, Argento explains that he used the name
Jennifer to help Connelly identify with the part), the adolescent daughter of a celebrity, becoming an amateur detective in the case of a serial
killer who is victimizing the students in her all-girls boarding school.
This aspect of the story is pure giallo, and it plays out through familiar stalk-and-kill set pieces that overshadow but do not obscure
a typical whodunit mystery with (barely) human culprits. However,
Jennifer is not a normal amateur detective. The storys second major
thread follows her as she tries to cope with her supernatural influence
over insects, which swarm to protect her in times of distress and can
telepathically communicate crucial information, such as the locations
of dead bodies, to help her solve mysteries. Jennifer therefore has
a place among other young people with psychic powers from thenrecent supernatural horror films like Carrie (1976), The Fury (1978),
The Shining (1980), and Firestarter (1984). With her supernatural
defenses, Jennifer is more like Sarah from Mother of Tears than Suzy
from Suspiria or one of the sleuths from the first five gialli, but unlike
Sarah, Jennifer needs her powers to battle people who kill through
ordinary means. The stories of the Three Mothers engage everyone
with the supernatural, but the story of Phenomena confines the supernatural to a single character in an otherwise naturalistic mystery.
The supernatural and natural phenomena interact as Jennifer interacts
with her world, but one never entirely subsumes the other, so horror
neither subsumes nor is subsumed by giallo.
The failure of the supernatural and the natural to subsume one
another results from a struggle that plays out in Phenomenas aesthetic
as well as its story. Professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasance), a
wheelchair-bound entomologist who helps Jennifer understand her
power, turns a conversation about insects and the wind into an eerie
reflection on the realm that he and his young female friend occupy:
A very particular wind, typical of this part of the country. It comes from
the Alps. The blasts of warm air cause snow avalanches, make the flowers
grow, the hatching of the larvae. Some people get headaches; when it
blows, there are those who say it causes madness. Its a strange part of
the country, the Swiss Transylvania.
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As Professor McGregor speaks, the camera slowly zooms in, giving his
carefully delivered words greater import. On the sound track, the wind
blows steadily, underscoring the ubiquity and power of what the professor
describes. What he says is, strictly speaking, scientific: warm air causes
avalanches and provokes the maturation of flowers and insects, which
can trigger intense allergic as well as psychological reactions. Calling the
region the Swiss Transylvania, however, gives it a pall of supernatural
significance. Thanks to Bram Stoker, Transylvania for many connotes
vampires, but as Stoker indicates in the opening pages of Dracula, the
Romanian forests had rich traditions of superstition long before they
captured the Irish novelists imagination. A wind with the power to alter
lives, especially in a region already shrouded in superstition akin to the
Transylvanian, could seem unnatural, and as the backdrop for Jennifers
supernatural relationship with insects, it seems like magic.
Cinematography and sound conspire to arouse such superstitious
feeling, beginning with the films opening frames, which capture sublime
mountains and swaying trees as a bus approaches on a narrow road. The
whistling wind conveys the vastness of the surroundings, and the bus
retrieves a line of passengers before it putters away, leaving Vera (Fiore
Argento) behind. Goblins soft, haunting score rises, accenting the wind,
and while the credits roll, a high crane shot explores the trees, leaving
Vera beneath them, and then rejoins her as she heads toward a house
tagged by sound and seclusion as a bad place. As she approaches the
entrance, quick cuts show chains attached to a wall, jerking as if someone, or something, held by them were fighting to be free. The chains
conjure the inhuman, the idea of a monster about to escape captivity in
a mystical world of majestic mountains and dark woods.
The creature escapes and stalks Vera through point-of-view shots
that hide his appearance. He eventually kills her, stabbing her with scissors, shoving her through glass (an effect shot by the cinematographer
Romano Albani at 340 frames per second), and sending her severed head
tumbling down a waterfall. The actions are inhuman, but the perpetrator
is eventually revealed as human, at least mostly. An uptight schoolmistress at the academy Jennifer attends, Frau Bruckner (Daria Nicolodi),
turns out to be protecting the killer, her deformed son. Although the
connection to the schoolmistress is not made until after Jennifer falls
into Frau Bruckners clutches, a police detective, Inspector Geiger, visits

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an insane asylum to learn about the killers genesis. The member of the
hospital staff who tells the tale gives the asylum supernatural associations that fit with the Swiss Transylvanian surroundings: The further
down one goes in this place, the more monstrous the inmates become.
Its probably the same in hell. When Inspector Geiger eventually visits
Frau Bruckners home, they discuss the killers conception; she shows
the detective a large scar on her chest as she recalls being grabbed by
one of the asylums inmates and raped through the bars of his cell. Frau
Bruckner tells Jennifer that the child born from the rape doesnt want
to see his reflection ... he stays in his room with his crazy thoughts.
The boys violent origin in a place compared to hell combines with his
madness and aversion to mirrors to give him a mythical aura, a monstrosity that exceeds humanity and therefore belongs in the dark fairy
tale that Argentos cowriter Franco Ferrini claims the film to be.
While the childs origins and actions suggest the fantastic, his grotesque appearance is grounded in science. The effects specialist Sergio
Stivaletti, interviewed on the Anchor Bay DVD, explains that his studies in medicine inspired the design for the killers maskit is based
on Patau syndrome, also known as trisomy 13. According to the U.S.
National Library of Medicine, trisomy 13 is a chromosomal condition
associated with severe intellectual disability and physical abnormalities
in many parts of the body ... heart defects, brain or spinal cord abnormalities, very small or poorly developed eyes (microphthalmia), extra
fingers and/or toes, an opening in the lip (a cleft lip) with or without an
opening in the roof of the mouth (a cleft palate), and weak muscle tone
(hypotonia) (Trisomy 13). Although few children survive this condition as long as Frau Bruckners son, this medical description accounts
for the boys appearance as well as his mental instability (figure 23).
Viewed in these terms, the boy is less a fairy-tale monster than a
marvel of extreme science, one of many extreme scientific phenomena
that Argento puts on display in his aptly named film.
In his DVD interview, Argento claims that even Jennifers power
over insects has a basis in science, pointing to a German news story
about police detectives experimenting with insects to help them solve
crimes as well as to his consultant, a French entomologist named Leclerk,
who explained everything about how the world of insects applies to the
world of criminals. Leclerks diegetic stand-in, Dr. McGregor, explains
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Figure 23. The killer in Phenomena,

whose features stem from the medical
condition trisomy 13, is both a fairy-tale
monster and a marvel of extreme science.
to Jennifer, Extra-sensory perceptionthe paranormal powers that

are unusual in human beingsare perfectly natural in insects. Some
species communicate with each other over vast distances by telepathy.
... Its perfectly normal for insects to be slightly telepathic. Exuding
adolescent angst, Jennifer replies, Yeah, its normal for insects, but am
I normal? Instead of providing an answer, Argento cuts to a scene of
Jennifer being picked on at school that culminates with her summoning
a swarm of flies that crowd around the school building, silencing her
cruel peers with terror.11 This sequence grounds Jennifers blossoming
power in scientific precedent and human development. Parallel to Frau
Bruckners son, Jennifer is a developing adolescent who is ostracized for
exhibiting a genetic rarity. Like Deep Red, which introduces the psychic
Helga through a scientific discussion of extrasensory phenomena that
include insect telepathy, Phenomena positions its phenomena on the
fringe, the borderline between scientific rationality and supernatural
madness. On this borderline, the phenomena can be simultaneously
fantastic and scientific, irrational and rational.
Phenomenas flirtations with the irrational go much farther than
Deep Reds, earning association with the Three Mothers trilogy through

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narrative elements that defy good sense. Several threads in the films
hybrid giallo/supernatural storyline demonstrate its tenuous relationship with the laws of sensible storytelling. First, the film is a mystery
that features detectives and clues, but the ratiocination that Sherlock
Holmes made central to the mystery genre gets pushed to the superfluous margins. Inspector Geiger exemplifies rational clue following, and
it gets him all the way to Frau Bruckners house. His efforts, however,
go unrewarded: Frau Bruckner easily subdues him, and his greatest
contribution ends up being that he buys Jennifer a little time to escape.
Like the clue following and memory reconstructing of the giallo detectives, Geigers ratiocination is in vain. Jennifer, however, finds her way
to the killers abode not by conventional, rational clue following but by
using a special fly, the Great Sarcophagus, that when placed in a box
acts as a compass for locating decomposing corpses. Her process also
leads to trouble, but she ends up as the films victorious survivor. These
two threadsInspector Geigers ratiocination and Jennifers mystical
clue followingdiminish classical mystery narrative to irrelevance.
Inspector Geigers efforts also combine with efforts made by Morris
Shapiro, a representative of Jennifers celebrity father who tries to help
her, in another challenge to traditional storytelling. Geiger arrives at
Frau Bruckners house just as Jennifer is figuring out that the schoolmistress is a villain; when Jennifer hears his approach, she lights up at
the prospect of rescue. His potential as a rescuer does not disappear
when Bruckner subdues him. Trying to flee, Jennifer enters a room
where Bruckner has chained Geiger to a wall, and she falls into a pool
of maggots and rotting human flesh. When Bruckner comes to finish
Jennifer off, Geiger heroically mutilates his own hand to free himself
from his chains, but though he tackles the madwoman to help Jennifer
escape, Bruckners reappearance after his attack indicates his failure
to be a true savior. Similarly, Morris looks like a potential savior for
Jennifer. As she endures abuses at Bruckners hands, cross-cut scenes
show Morris discovering Jennifers location and driving to her rescue.
After Geiger tackles Bruckner, Jennifer flees the house and runs down
to the lake, where she has a final battle with Bruckners deformed son.
Surviving the battle with help from her insect friends, Jennifer walks
away from the lake and greets Morriss approaching car with a relieved
smile. Morris emerges, and they run toward each other with open arms,
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but before they unite, he is suddenly decapitated by a piece of sharp

sheet metal, which Bruckner wields offscreen in her surprise return.
Geiger and Morriss failures as rescuers for the young damsel in distress
poke fun at such possibilities for narrative resolution as well as the traditional gender roles they involve. In the hybrid world of Phenomena,
such predictable conclusions and roles have no place.
The actual end of Jennifers trials ties off a final thread that deals a
final blow to traditional narrative expectations. Early in the film, police
visit Dr. McGregor to get a forensic analysis of Veras decomposing head.
During their visit, Dr. McGregor introduces them to Inga, a monkey
who is trained to help the wheelchair-bound scientist perform daily
tasks. With police looking on, Dr. McGregor scolds Inga for handling
a scalpel, which the monkey claims to have found outside. Later, Frau
Bruckner breaks into Dr. McGregors home to murder him. Throughout
the sequence, Inga screams, trying to find a way in to help her master,
but all she can do is witness the crime. Later, Inga finds a straight razor
in a garbage can, and in another sequence shown from Bruckners unidentified point of view, Inga assaults the schoolmistresss car. By the time
Bruckner decapitates Morris, Inga is long forgotten, so the film delivers
one last surprise when the monkey leaps into the frame, knocks down
Bruckner, and mutilates her face and neck with the straight razor. In
place of a masculine hero, Phenomena provides a monkey as Jennifers
savior. The girl watches the mutilation in horror, and the film ends.
Just as Dr. McGregor gives Jennifers influence over insects a context
of scientific sense, the monkeys storyline provides the means (her training as a companion) and the motive (avenging the murder of her master)
that cause her attack on Bruckner. That a monkey would do such things
might be hard to believe, but Ingas storyline puts her behavior at least
on the border of plausibility. The use of a real monkey in most of Ingas
scenes bolsters this plausibility: to perform in the film, the monkey who
plays Inga had to be about as smart as her character. She performed
well overall, with problems arising only when she wandered off into the
forest (retrieved within hours) and bit off the tip of Jennifer Connellys
finger (sewn back on successfully). The monkey phenomenon, like all
the others in the film, has enough diegetic and nondiegetic explanation
to suspend disbelief, but Ingas attack on Bruckner nevertheless plays
as a shocking absurdity. Every bit of weirdness shown in the films Swiss

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Transylvanian setting, taken by itself, fits rationally with its context, but
taken all together, these phenomena are overwhelming and therefore
hard to believe. As McDonagh states, the films excess of plot elements
is a little difficult to deal with (184). Making things even more difficult,
the Goblin score plays alongside heavy-metal tracks by Iron Maiden,
Motorhead, and other popular musicians from the 1980smusic with
lyrics that interrupt the flow of the narrative to alienating ends. Giallo,
supernatural thriller, rational narrative, irrational randomness, scientific explanation, fantastic fairy tale, mock-heroic ending, monkey-exmachina, bugs, decay, heavy metal, and a pool of maggots and gore:
other than as an aesthetic assault on the senses, what approach could
comprehend all of Phenomena at once?
The film provides an answer. In addition to having an uncanny influence over insects, Jennifer has a problem with somnambulism. Jennifer
walking mindlessly around the schoolon crumbling ledges, through
woods, to a car of young men ready to take advantage of her, and toward her first meeting with Dr. McGregorprovides some of the films
most suspenseful moments. When she begins her journey, she sees a
long white hallway lined with bluish doors (figure 24). It appears from
her point of view: the shot centers on nebulous white at the hallways
end, and cross-cut with images of Jennifer sleepwalking, the camera
tracks through the hall at increasing speed. More than a decade prior
to Phenomena, Italian television featured Dario Argentos Door into
Darkness, a show that presents each episode as another door opened
upon a narrative possibility. In Jennifers dream, each door is a possibility
for her journey, so it is also a possibility for the film. The odd, excessive
collection of elements that is Phenomena is a series of opened doors, of
imaginings held together by thread after thread of causally motivated
narrative. The causation and explanation provided in Phenomena appear
in such excess that they mock narratives reliance on such things. They
lack the grandiose narrative of Mother of Tears as well as the elusive
narratives of Suspiria and Inferno, but they still suggest that the primary
purpose of film is not thinking but looking. Processing each opened door
in relation to the others challenges or defies sense, but looking through
each door, experiencing the dream, is a reward in itself. Taking the point
of view of the dreamer, Phenomena equates Jennifer with Argento, the
dreamer behind the film, and with viewers, the dreamers in front of the
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Figure 24. In Phenomena, Jennifers

sleepwalking sequence begins with a
point-of-view shot of a dream-world hallway.
film. The film, then, is the dream, and dreams do not need a reason to
be. Neither do (or does) certain Phenomena. Reason and narrative are
ancillary to what film can accomplish. If Argentos films have a coherent
philosophy, it is an imperative: look, they say, and dream.
Against Conventions: From Trauma to Giallo
With the exception of the Three Mothers trilogy, Argento has not subjected his films to the parades of sequels typical of horrors masterworks.
The Internet Movie Database reports that plans for a sequel to Phenomena got close to production in 2001, but the project got scuttled because
of Argentos contractual obligations. Similarly, the movie that became
The Card Player (2004) was planned as a sequel to The Stendhal Syndrome, but since Asia Argento was unavailable to reprise her role, it was
rewritten as a stand-alone. Although Argentos works have few sequels,
the highly repetitive conventions of the giallo, some of which Argento
helped to ossify, relate each successive giallo in an auteurs oeuvre to its
predecessors. Similarly, repeated conventions are what make sequels to
American slasher films, descendents of the Italian giallo, recognizable.
For example, most of the films in the two Halloween series (eight films

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in the first series, 19782002; two going on three in the second, 200712)
are recognizable because of the return of a killer in a mask that looks
like William Shatner with a hangover. Most of the films in the Friday the
Thirteenth series (eleven films, one remake, 19802009) are recognizable because of the return of a killer in a hockey mask; all of the films in
the Nightmare on Elm Street series (eight films, one remake, 19842010;
subtract one from either Friday or Nightmare if double-counting 2003s
Freddy vs. Jason is objectionable) are recognizable because of the return of a killer with a burnt face and a razor-fingered glove. Similarly,
most gialli are recognizable because of the return of a killer in a trench
coat, hat, and black gloves, so perhaps all of Argentos gialli, from Bird
to Giallo (19702009), should be considered as a single series akin to
a series of slashers.
Mikel Kovens La Dolce Morte compellingly links the giallo to the
slasher, and whether or not Argentos giallior perhaps even all gialli
deserve to be considered as a large-scale serial raises theoretical questions
about genre, sequels, serials, and remakes that are beyond the scope of
this essay. However, for consideration of Argentos works as a whole, the
similarities of films within the giallo and related traditions have critical
importance, and the differences that stand out among those similarities
are the key to understanding Argentos development after 1990.
As writer and producer, Argento continued beyond Phenomena to
work on supernatural horror films directed by men who had previously
worked as his assistants; these films include Lamberto Bavas Demons
(1985) and Demons 2 (1986), Michele Soavis The Church (1989) and The
Sect (1991), and Sergio Stivalettis Wax Mask (1997, originally planned as
a collaboration with fellow horror maestro Lucio Fulci). These collaborations combined with Argentos own growing reputation to strengthen the
international status of Italian horror more generally, helping Argentos
protgs as well as directors such as Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, Sergio
Martino, and Aldo Lado to receive much broader recognition. Despite
Argentos reputation as a horror auteur, since 1990, almost all of his directorial featuresTrauma (1993), The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), Sleepless
(2001), The Card Player (2004), Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005), and
Giallo (2009)are naturalistic crime stories that fall into either the giallo
tradition or what Koven identifies as the closely related poliziotto tradition.
Of the features that do not fit this descriptionMother of Tears (2007),
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The Phantom of the Opera (1998), and Dracula 3D (2012, projected)the

first is the completion of his famous supernatural trilogy, and the latter
two are adaptations of classic gothic fiction. These filmsin addition to
Argentos supernaturally tinted entries for the Masters of Horror TV show
Jenifer (2005) and Pelts (2006)are worthy of consideration, but this essay concludes by considering how the giallo and giallo-like films reveal a
productive tension between Argentos later works and the works from his
so-called golden era, which arguably ended with Opera (Gracey 139).
Trauma
As its title suggests, Trauma focuses on connections among violent experience, repression, and memoryconnections explored in the memory
reconstructions of Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Deep Red. In
these earlier films, memory reconstructions turn out to be irrelevant to
solving the crimes. The heroes struggles with memory reconstruction
are complemented by the villains struggles with traumasMonicas
memory of her sexual assault in Bird and the memory of the murder of
Carlos father that Carlo and Marta share in Deep Redwhich provide
psychoanalytically informed explanations for the killers actions that
the films ultimately dismiss. Thus the films represent memory issues
in psychoanalytic terms, not to reveal great truths about memory, but
to belittle psychoanalytic truth claims. At first glance, Trauma seems
to come from the same mold as these earlier films. It has an emphasis
on memory that appears alongside uberviolent set pieces (including a
decapitation by elevator that recalls Martas death in Deep Red), hints of
the supernatural (including a full-blown sance, also recalling Deep Red),
unusual attention to animals (including a lizard, also from Deep Red),
gripping camera movements (including killer-cam point-of-view shots,
pervasive in earlier films), and other familiar elements that Argento
helped turn into giallo conventions. In the interview on the Anchor Bay
DVD of Trauma, Argento refers to the film as pure Argento, reinforcing the tendency to receive it as a conventional Argento film.
However, unlike the earlier films that emphasize memory, Trauma
does not treat all of its psychological content with the same dismissiveness. This content takes pride of place in the title, which suggests
that the film is not about a single trauma (indeed, it features many) but
about trauma as a phenomenon to be explored. Etymologically, trauma

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comes from the Greek word for wound, and like most Argento films,
Trauma features plenty of wounding, mostly dealt by the killer known
as the Headhunter, who uses a handheld device rigged with a mechanically contracting wire noose that slices easily through necks. Trauma
more commonly connotes psychological damage resulting from a violent
incident. Cathy Caruth summarizes Freuds take on the phenomenon:
The wound of the mindthe breach in the minds experience of time,
self, and the worldis not, like the wound of the body, a simple and
healable event, but rather an event that ... is experienced too soon,
too unexpectedly to be fully known and is therefore not available to
consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares
and repetitive actions of the survivor. (34)
As the story unfolds, Trauma reveals several such incidents in the lives of
sixteen-year-old Aura Petrescu (Asia Argento) and her mother Adriana
(Piper Laurie), who turns out to be the killer.
Aura enters the film on the verge of jumping off a bridge, across
which her fellow protagonist David is driving. He stops to prevent her
suicide, and they form a relationship, first that of an adult (David) trying
to help a child (Aura) who shares his history of drug addiction, then that
of forbidden love. Their second meeting occurs after Aura has endured
the trauma of seeing (she believes) both of her parents decapitated by the
Headhunter (she has actually seen her mother carrying away her fathers
severed head). Not long after this incident, David learns that Aura suffers
from anorexia, and he turns to a friend who works with him on a television
news show for information. How did she end up that way? David asks,
and his friend explains, Trouble with her parents. Its said these girls will
even have a classic dream. In the dream her fathers leaning over her,
about to kiss her. Five minutes of film time later, Davids friends voice
elaborates on the subject in Davids memory while David drives through
an unnamed American city (Minneapolis): Theres something like eight
million of them out there, meaning eight million women with anorexia.
Taking Davids perspective, the camera emphasizes glimpses of dangerously skinny women he sees while he drives. The memory-voiceover
continues, Deeply attached to an unstable mother, shell dream her
father is leaning over her about to kiss her.
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At this point, the scene cuts to a mans face looming over the camera,
identifiable in context as Auras father leaning over her as a very young
child, about to kiss her. Another cut shows Aura as she is in the present, eyes closed, dreaming the dream that Davids friend describes and
inhabiting her younger self as she waits happily for the kiss. The scene
cuts back to the looming face, but before the fathers kiss connects, he
starts screaming and clutching at his throat. Aura, still inhabiting her
younger self, stretches her mouth in a silent scream, and then older
Aura, in her bed, awakes from the nightmare. Unclear in its immediate context, Auras dream of her father being strangled and of her own
silent scream reflects what Caruth describes as the complex ways that
knowing and not knowing are entangled in the language of trauma and
in the stories associated with it (4). In this moment of dreaming, Aura
both does and does not know what her unconscious tells her in dreams,
what her conscious mind represses: her mother is abusive, her fathers
murderer. The trauma of growing up with such a mother is the cause
of her anorexia, a silent scream about the wound in her mind.
Behind Auras traumatic childhood and present-day experiences
lies yet another trauma, the one that prompts Adrianas murder spree.
At the films end, when Adriana has imprisoned and is preparing to
kill Aura and David, David asks, Why did you kill them? Adriana
responds, Because ... Nicholas, speaking the name of her baby boy,
whose death the film has implied but not yet explained. The scene cuts
to a flashback of Adriana in childbirth, doctor and nurses surrounding
her. A rainstorm outside causes a sudden power surge that startles the
doctor, who is working with a scalpel between Adrianas raised legs.
He accidentally decapitates the baby, which explains not only Adrianas
trauma but also her motive and modus operandi: many of her victims
have been the medical staff involved in the incident, and she has killed
them by decapitating them in the rain. In Adrianas flashback, the medical staff gives her shock therapy in an attempt to erase her memory
and save their careers. This detail reveals that the traumatic memory
has been willfully repressed by Adrianas psyche as well as by medical
intervention; as a result of this repression, the memory has been reasserting itself in a repetition compulsion so strong that Adriana will kill
only in the rain, the circumstance most strongly associated with her baby
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Nicholass death. She even goes as far as to create rainsetting off a

motels fire alarm and sprinkler systemto supply the conditions necessary to behead a member of the medical staff. Thus Adriana perfectly
represents the cycle of trauma and repetition that Freud describes, a
cycle so powerful that it ends up involving Aura in her own repetitive,
destructive behavior, the life-refusing patterns of anorexia.
While Trauma is true to a psychoanalytic representation of trauma,
as in the earlier films, Argento does not affirm psychoanalysis as a valid
science. This refusal of affirmation occurs in two threads. The first involves what Aura witnesses at her familys estate: she thinks she sees the
Headhunter carrying away her parents severed heads, but like Sam in
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Marcus in Deep Red, she feels
that something is wrong with the memory. When she finally reconstructs
what she really saw, her mothers living head beside her fathers severed
one, the reconstruction is too lateshe and David are already Adrianas
prisoners. The belatedness of the reconstruction is consistent with the
earlier films; it refuses to validate psychoanalytic approaches to memory.
The second refusal involves a psychiatrist, Dr. Judd, who works at the
clinic where Auras family has confined her. Dr. Judd pursues Aura after
the murder of her father, bent on recommitting her to his clinic, and
in one chase, he gets into a fatal car accident that reveals the severed
heads of all the victims in the trunk of his car. The police conclude that
he is the Headhunter, but when Adriana is revealed as the killer, Aura
figures out Dr. Judds true motive. Earlier in the film, Dr. Judd gives
Aura a highly unorthodox and abusive treatment to help her with her
memories, a psychedelic drug that causes visually elaborate hallucinations and reveals precisely what Dr. Judd does not want her to know:
that she once saw him having sex with her mother. Combined with the
discovery of Adrianas guilt, the revelation that Dr. Judd has had an
affair with Adriana supplies his motive for covering up her crimes and
carrying the evidence in his car. In the end, the psychiatrist is an abusive
accomplice to murder, so as the films representative of his profession,
he puts psychiatry and psychoanalysis in a very bad light.
In its negative representation of psychoanalysis, Trauma is consistent
with Argentos earlier films, but unlike Bird and Deep Red, which classify
their psychologically damaged people as murderers who come to very
bloody ends, Trauma is highly sympathetic to the psychological disorders
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that the flawed science of psychoanalysis would try to address. In the

DVD interview, Argento explains that one inspiration for the film was
a niece who struggled with anorexia. Argento and his coauthors on the
Trauma script became very interested in the subject, so they researched
it and discovered that anorexia is a significant and in their view underrepresented social problem. The film, then, fills a gap by showing the
truth about anorexia. In a sense, the core of the film is Argentos own
family trauma, and the film is his own therapy, working through the
traumatic experience with his daughter Asia in the role of the anorexic
niece. Trauma suggests this strong relationship between film and therapy
when Dr. Judds psychedelic memory treatment leads to an image of Aura
unraveling a VHS tape, a symbol for the unraveling of her memory that
leads to revelations. Film, not psychoanalysis, is once again Argentos
source of truth and meaning, but this time the truth has a personal and
social mission. The result is a surprisingly traditional narrative film. It is
easy to follow, has a staid color palette, and uses editorial cuts that rarely
disrupt the storys continuity.
Trauma, then, is true to Argento conventions in every way but one:
story is more salient and more important than visual experience. As
McDonagh notes, Enthusiasts treasure his films for their weirdness and
their overwhelming visual beauty, precisely those things Trauma lacks
(224). The hallucinations and the murders have some of Argentos typical visual flair, but they ultimately only advance the plot. The traditional
prioritization of story is for Argento very unconventional, so the creation
of what looks like a typical American thriller (it was shot in the United
States, mostly using American crew and equipment) is for Argento an
experimental move. By differing from his usual approach in this critical
way, he challenges the conventions his earlier films helped create by
making them compatible with traditional film narrative. Ironically, this
breaking of his own mold can only happen through a film that looks like
it could have come from somebody elses.
The Stendhal Syndrome (Revisited)
Argentos next film, The Stendhal Syndrome, accomplishes a great deal
more in the visual arena; it was the first major Italian production to
use CGI (Gracey 127). Because Anna Manni is a policewoman, the
film belongs more to the poliziotto than the giallo, but it involves many

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giallo conventions. More importantly, it picks up where Trauma left off

with serious treatment of character psychology; a psychoanalyst is an
important character, and as Argento explains in an interview on the Blue
Underground Blu-ray disc, the character represents the real-life psychoanalyst Graziella Magherini, whose book on the Stendhal Syndrome
inspired Argentos story. In addition to once again giving psychological
content pride of place by using a psychological condition as the films
title, Argento invests a great deal of screen time in showing Annas psychological response to her rape. Like Monica Ranieri, Anna identifies
with her attacker and becomes a murderer. In a sense, The Stendhal
Syndrome dramatizes the perspective of the killer that is dismissed as
irrelevant at the end of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. One result
is slower pacing, as the transformation from cop into killer is detailed.
Another is that the psychologically troubled protagonist, again played
by Asia Argento, becomes highly sympathetic. This sympathy develops
from her storyline, so once again, Argento works against his own conventions by making the films bizarre visuals secondary to plot.
Sleepless
Sleepless spends less time on psychology, making a different departure
from the patterns of Argentos earlier films. To some, Sleepless seemed
not to have departed at all; it begins the Neo-Animal Trilogy, which
includes his next two feature-length films, The Card Player and Do You
Like Hitchcock? and brings back even more of the classic giallo elements
defined by Argentos first three features. An interview for the BBC by
Almar Haflidason begins, Sleepless seems to mark a return in style to
some of your most acclaimed thrillers like Tenebre and Deep Red,
to which Argento responds, This is a detective film, a giallo, that has
the same atmosphere as those movies. I wanted to get back to my style
of twenty years ago after a long period of exploring horror and fantasy
themes. Most elements of the plot are indeed a throwback to the films
from the 1970s and 1980s, with much more in common with the first five
gialli than any of the 1990s films. Although one of the protagonists, Ulisse
Moretti, is a retired policeman, neither he nor his younger counterpart,
Giacomo, is currently part of the police, so they are amateur detectives
in a line of descent from Birds Sam Dalmas. The earlier films focus on
protagonists seeing something that they need to reconstruct in their
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memories; Giacomo remembers hearing something that he struggles

to identify and succeeds only after his confrontation with the killer, his
friend Lorenzo, is under way. In Deep Red, Gabriele Lavia plays Carlo,
who as the prime suspect for the murders draws attention away from
the real culprit, his mother; in Sleepless, Gabriele Lavia plays Mr. Betti,
who as the prime suspect for the murders draws attention away from
the real culprit, his son (as Mr. Betti holds a gun on Giacomo and his
girlfriend Gloria, for a moment he speaks and acts almost exactly like
Carlo holding a gun on Marcus and Gianna). Sleeplesss title lacks the
animal references of the titles in the first Animal Trilogy, but the killer
chooses victims based on their similarity to animals and kills them in
ways that mimic a farmer killing animals in a childrens book, The Death
Farm. During the stalk-and-kill set pieces, the pacing is fast, the editing
is frenetic, and the Goblin score uses jolting metal riffs. The killer even
uses a child-sized puppet that recalls the puppet from Deep Red. The
list could go on: the movie is littered with classic Argento giallo fare.
What makes Sleepless one of the best of Argentos later works is not
these much-heralded returns to form: it is the casting and performance
of Max von Sydow as Moretti. Born in 1929, von Sydow is a veteran actor from many films by Argentos favorite, Ingmar Bergman, and even
though Jennifer Connelly (in Phenomena) and Adrien Brody (in Giallo)
are both Oscar winners, von Sydow is arguably the most celebrated actor ever to appear in an Argento film. His performance gives Moretti
dimensions that would usually be superfluous in an Argento film. The
films dialogue mostly focuses on the mystery of the dwarf killer, who
in the present day seems to have picked up a murder spree from the
1980s that ended when a dwarf blamed for the crimes, Vincenzo, turned
up dead. When conversations turn to the past, they tend to focus on the
childhood experiences of Giacomo and Lorenzo. Moretti says very little
about his past or his feelingsonly a few lines about his failing memory
and his recollections of his investigation of the murders in the 1980s.
Nevertheless, von Sydows layered tones, careworn facial expressions,
and deep-feeling eyes give Moretti weight from a violence-stricken life
and paternal caring for young Giacomo, whom he has known since his
mother was a victim in the 1980s, that direct speech need not acknowledge. The closest acknowledgment occurs at the beginning of the film,
set in the 1980s, when Moretti promises the boy Giacomo that he will

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find his mothers killer, even if it takes me all my life. More than anything, von Sydows performance conveys age, the wear of a lifetime of
such dedication, oldness beyond the characters considerable years.
Morettis weariness is one of three main ties to the films title. The
other two are more overt. The first relates to the killers patterning of
murders after the morbid childrens rhyme (written by Asia Argento) in
The Death Farm, which states that only after killing all the farm animals
can the farmer finally go to sleep. Lorenzos murders in the 1980s, when
he was only a boy, stopped before he could complete the sequence of killings in the rhyme, which suggests that during the seventeen years until
his killings resume in the present day, he has been (at least figuratively)
sleepless. The second significance of the title Sleepless relates to Mrs.
de Fabritiis, the mother of Vincenzo, who was wrongly accused of the
crimes because witnesses saw that the killer had a small body. Seventeen
years later, after Moretti suggests that he now believes Vincenzo could
be innocent, Mrs. de Fabritiis says, I havent slept for seventeen years,
conveying her unwavering concern over the accusations, her longing for
closure, and, as she later admits, her guilt over killing Vincenzo to save
him from the ignominies of prison. Sleepless marks the toll of times
passage again and again, giving the difference between the early 1980s
and the early 2000s special significance.
After nearly two decades, Lorenzo resumes his murders, Moretti
resumes his investigation, and Argento resumes the style he developed in
Deep Red and Tenebre for the murder-and-investigation giallo. This parallel between the recursiveness of Argentos career and the timeline of his
film may or may not be intentional, but the backward-looking orientation
sets Sleepless apart from the aggressively present-focused and, in Tenebre,
even future-focused orientations of the earlier films to which Sleepless
invites comparison. Sleeplesss departure from Argento conventions is
acknowledgment of time and history, and with that acknowledgment
comes a need for clarity, akin to Morettis need to address unfinished
business and Mrs. de Fabritiiss need for closure. This clarity manifests
in yet another entirely rational storyline that, like Trauma, gets fully
and clearly explained: Moretti and Giacomo put all the clues together
so that every one of the murders makes sense as either a performance
of The Death Farm or an attempt to elude capture. Even the killers use
of a child-sized puppet, which is bizarre and mysterious in Deep Red,
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makes sense in Sleepless because it helps the killer evade discovery by

perpetuating the belief that the killer is a dwarf. The film refuses to leave
even a single loose end: as the credits roll, a minor plot point, the disappearance of Vincenzos bones from the cemetery, is resolved when police
discover them among Lorenzos belongings. In Sleepless, the wisdom of
age explains away the randomness of Deep Red and Tenebre; no lack of
resolution will keep viewers awake.
The Card Player
Even while looking backward, Argento demonstrates a firm grasp on the
present by showing an interest in how technology can shape narrative. In
Sleeplesss first set piece, Angela, a sex worker, discovers evidence that a
client is a killer, so she flees his apartment and nervously takes the train
home. A cell phone call lets her know that the killer is on her trail; several
more calls intensify his game of cat-and-mouse as he stalks and finally
kills her on the train. This use of a cell phone recalls a single scene in The
Stendhal Syndrome, in which the original killer, Alfredo, calls his policewoman victim, Anna, to taunt her and then surprise her by revealing that
he is calling from within the same room. Such cell-phone stalking relates
Argentos films to the popular Scream series (19962011), which took its
inspiration from the phone stalker in When a Stranger Calls (1979). It
also provides a bridge to Argentos next film, The Card Player, which lets
technology shape its narrative by focusing on ways a stalker can wreak
havoc with a computer. Like The Stendhal Syndrome, The Card Player is
a poliziotto; it takes place almost entirely in the world of law enforcement
(a world that is lit, in a major experiment for Argento, almost entirely
with natural and location lights). The killer kidnaps young women and
uses them as the stakes in games of Internet poker that he plays with the
police. Streaming video shows the young women suffering on one side of
the screen, while the card games unfold on the other. When the police
lose a hand of cards, a woman loses a body part. Refusing to play or losing
too many times means a woman dies; enough wins mean she goes free.
Seizing on a current fad for video poker and anticipating the computer
terror of the big-production effort Untraceable (2008), Argentos use of
technology in his story makes The Card Player unmistakably contemporary even as it replays the black-gloved-killer and other conventions that
he has been using for decades.

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Online stalking opens up new possibilities for a sadistic killer, and

the titular Card Player uses many of them to his advantage. First and
foremost, computers hide his identity. The Card Player can interact with
the police at great length, and even though the police use high-tech
means to try to trace his identity and location, he is never in any real
danger of being discovered while he is online. Second, the killer can
broaden the impact of his cruelty. Pre-Internet, the only person hurt by
every second of a torturous murder was the victim, but with streaming
video, the Card Player can torment the police, too: they must watch as
the women suffer and feel agonizing suspense over every slowly dealt
digital card that will determine the killers next move. The Card Players
police victims include the commissioner, whose daughter Lucia (Fiore
Argento) is one of the streaming victims, as well as Anna, who is singled
out to be his primary adversary. Anna eventually learns that the Card
Player is Carlo, a fellow policeman who is in love with her and wants
revenge for being rebuffed. Third, he can create alibis for himself by
misrepresenting the timing of his games. The software the Card Player
uses for video poker creates the illusion that he is playing the game live,
but Anna and her Irish partner John finally discover that the games are
prerecorded, which allows the Card Player to be in the same room with
his adversaries while they think he is at a faraway computer.
These advantages help the Card Player to mislead the police as well
as the films audience about his identity, location, and timing, so incorporating the Internet into the story creates many opportunities for suspense and surprise. It also creates distinctive opportunities for visual
representation, such as an image that combines the policeman-killers
reflection with the online poker game and streaming video (figure 25).
In superimposing Carlos face as if it were a reflection on the computer
screen as he plays an online game, this image avoids a typical shot/reverse
editing pattern to establish the relationship between the player and the
game. It also collapses three different spaces and activities into a single
moment in space and time: the space occupied by the victim and killer
(in streaming video), the space occupied by the police (reflected on the
screen), and the intermediate space of the Internet-based game all appear
simultaneously. The simultaneity encourages viewers (both the police
and the films audience) to interpret the streaming video and the game
as live. It is actually prerecorded, but this fact is hidden until later in the
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Figure 25. In The Card Player, the titular killer

challenges police to poker games over the
Internet; this image exemplifies the opportunities
for layered visuals that this scenario creates.
film, as is Carlos identity as the killer. The illusory simultaneity of the

actions in the image puts Carlo in two places at once, which is a logical
impossibility of the sort often captured in the illusions painted by M. C.
Escher, for whom Argento shows his appreciation in Suspiria. The logical impossibility gives Carlo his alibi: since he cannot be in two places at
once, he cannot be the killer.
The illusion captured in this image makes technology treacherous.
The online game and video are fooling the police just as the film of the
online game, video, and players are likely fooling The Card Players
audience. This moment in the film is an image (the shot) of an image
(the computer screen) of an image (the streaming video). The combination of technologies captured in these inset images exemplifies what Jay
Bolter and Richard Grusin call remediation. Bolter and Grusin identify
a tendency of new media to remediate, or incorporate, the old. For example, Internet media remediate video through streaming video content.
Remediation works through a combination of immediacy, a sense of
transparency that allows the user to connect directly with content, and
hypermediacy, elements that foreground the process of mediation. In
the video-poker example, the immediacy works through the suggestion,

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an illusion, that the user is actually playing a game with the Card Player,
but hypermediacy appears through aspects of the interface, most visibly
the screen within a screen created by the streaming video, that call attention to the elements on the screen as computer-generated. Argento also
participates in the flipside of remediation, older media incorporating the
new, by including this Internet game (new medium) in his film (older
medium). The illusion that gives Carlo his alibithe suggestion that
everything occurs simultaneouslystems from the logic of immediacy.
The logic of hypermediacy, the fact that the games inclusion of streaming video is a mediation of a mediation, is what allows both Argento and
the Card Player to construct the illusion.
Argentos films have always been self-conscious, from the first meditations on spectatorship in Bird with the Crystal Plumage forward. The
inclusion of new media in The Card Player as illusion makers central
to the story asks viewers to think about the media and remediation involved in what they are watching. The Card Player, then, takes Argentos
now-conventional self-consciousness and gives it a new rhetorical form
through new technology. At the same time as the film shows layer upon
layer of technology, it does not show what viewers familiar with Argentos
work most expectelaborate, gory violence. While the violence done
to the Card Players victims is extreme, it occurs beyond the frame of
the streaming video provided to police, so it is also beyond the images
delivered to the films audience. Argento has described this omission
as part of a goal to show extreme sadism without any blood (qtd. in
Jones 307). Another of the films goals is to depict evil, which he has
described as present in its various forms and its different masks in
all my work. In The Card Player, and I feel keenly about this, the new
dimension is technology, its power to be employed by evil in its most
sinister, phantasmagorical and ambiguous aspects (qtd. in Jones 302).
The former goal serves the latter: the sadisms bloodlessness keeps attention on its delivery, the technology, which when captured in Argentos
frame becomes the self-conscious villain of the piece.
Do You Like Hitchcock?
Argento ratchets up self-consciousness even further in his next featurelength film, Do You Like Hitchcock? Although he prefers to cite Fritz
Lang and Ingmar Bergman as influences, by 2005 Argento had lived for
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decades with the moniker the Italian Hitchcock. Made for Italian television, Do You Like Hitchcock? is more than an homage to the original
Master of Suspense who gave Argento his nickname. It is a film about
a young man, Giulio, who studies film and starts seeing elements from
Hitchcocks films everywhere in his real life. When someone brutally
murders the mother of Sasha, a woman he has spied on from his rear
apartment window, he begins to suspect that Sasha and her acquaintance
Federica have made a deal to trade murders la the main characters in
Hitchcocks Strangers on a Train (1951). Becoming an amateur detective, he gets embroiled in a plot that condenses elements from Strangers as well as Hitchcocks Rear Window (1954) and Dial M for Murder
(1954), with shades of Vertigo, Psycho, and several other films thrown
in for good measure. Giulios suspicions turn out to be true, and after
the womens accomplice Andrea (a man) almost kills him, he and his
girlfriend Arianna bring the conspirators to justice.
Do You Like Hitchcock? is a mosaic of references to other films, both
Hitchcocks and Argentos. Virtually every shot contains some kind of
wink to the audience. Some of those winks are obvious: Giulio often visits
his video store, where Andrea is the clerk, which provides the camera
opportunities to capture movie posters as well as rows of films that have
packaging advertising their titles. The most visible movie posters are for
Hitchcocks Marnie (1964) and Psycho, but also Argentos own The Card
Player. Movie packaging tags Vertigo as well as films by Luchino Visconti
(whose 1943 film Ossessione is a forerunner of the giallo), Bernardo
Bertolucci (who cowrote Sergio Leones 1968 Once upon a Time in the
West with Argento), William Friedkin (whose 1973 film The Exorcist
whetted appetites for supernatural horror la Suspiria), and Quentin
Tarantino (whose kinetic, uberviolent style owes a well-acknowledged
debt to earlier filmmakers like Argento). Beyond these obvious winks,
Argento includes shots that look like re-creations of shots from Hitchcock films. For example, Giulio gazing out his window allows for Rear
Window re-creations, and Giulio in the shower allows for a humorous
Psycho re-creation. Re-creations also extend to memorable Argento
momentsfor example, shots of Giulio almost being drowned in hot
bathwater and Andrea being hit by a car both recall Deep Red.
The sum of these references suggests that the film is less about
Hitchcock than it is about Argento as a filmmaker both empowered

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and haunted by his forerunners. At the beginning of the film, Giulio is

writing a thesis about German expressionism, and his apartment walls
and viewing habits bring expressionist films such as The Golem (1920)
and Nosferatu (1922) into the picture. This interest tags Argentos roots
in expressionist greats like his oft-cited Fritz Lang, and when at the end
of the film Giulio says he is now doing a thesis on Russian cinema of the
Stalin era, the film suggests that he has moved on from his interest in
expressionism just as Argento left his more expressionistic style behind
with Suspiria and Inferno. Such suggestions make reading Giulio as a
stand-in for Argento very tempting, but considering that Giulio has a
very close relationship with his mother (shades of Norman Bates) and a
girlfriend who seems to play a mothering role, such a reading would also
be very awkward. Giulios Freudian characterization ultimately points
toward his fictionality; for Argento, Freud is good fun when constructing
fictions, but taking Freud as a key to truth would be an error, especially
if the truth sought is the truth about Dario.
The most telling wink at the audience in Do You Like Hitchcock?
appears at the very end, when Giulio returns to his window-gazing habits
and spies a new neighbor moving into Sashas now-vacant apartment.
The titillatingly bare-breasted neighbor is reading a novel with a yellow
covera giallo, Mary Roberts Rineharts A Light in the Window. The
ending suggests that now that Giulio has survived a Hitchcock plot, he
will soon be embroiled in a new wave of Hitchcock-inspired films, a
life in giallo. If Do You Like Hitchcock? were to have a sequel, it might
very well be Do You Like Argento? To date, it has no such sequel, but
the idea of a life in giallo becomes literalized in Argentos most recent
(at the time of this writing) crime thriller, provocatively titled Giallo.
Giallo
A movie called Giallo directed by the man who helped to create the
giallo film tradition suggests the possibility of a summative, authoritative statement about what being giallo means; one might look to a film
called Giallo for the quintessence of giallo. Instead, Argento delivers
a film that is so ambivalent about giallo that it hardly qualifies for the
genre. Indeed, it does not fully qualify for the Argento oeuvre discussed
in this essay: it is the only feature he has directed without being one
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of the original screenwriters. Its original authors, Sean Keller and Jim
Agnew, did, however, write it with Argento in mind. In an interview with
James Gracey, Keller explains:
We both loved the gialli of the sixties and seventies and thought that
a super-stylistic homage to the work of Argento, Bava, and (Sergio)
Martino would be a refreshing change to the horror scene. We wrote
a script that was a kitchen-sink giallo. It has everything: opera, cats,
black-gloved killers, flashbacks, red herrings, jazz, beautiful women
dying horribly. ... We called it Yellow. (Gracey 176)
Thus the film was conceived as the sort of quintessence that its title
suggests, but once it fell into Argentos hands, it changed: A number
of cuts were made by the director, and amongst these was the removal
of the traditionall giallo villain garb of dark leather raincoat, fedora, and
black leather gloves (Gracey 183). Argentos changes did not wipe out
the scripts giallo-ness entirely, but they did increase the distance from
giallo conventions already inherent in the main character, Inspector
Enzo Avolfi (Adrien Brody), whose job as a policeman makes him more
proper to giallos near cousin, the poliziotto. The un-giallo aspects of
Giallo give the film an overarching ambivalence toward the tradition
referenced in its name.
For the knowing viewer, this ambivalence announces itself at the very
beginning of the film. After the credits, the camera pans over the city of
Turins beautiful skyline. The scene cuts to a close-up of a mans hands,
which are handling a syringe and a liquidvillainous portentswithout
wearing the typical giallo killers black leather gloves. The absence of
this critical component, particularly important in Argento films because
the gloves allow him to use his own hands in such close-ups, plays as
a pointed break with tradition. The hands belong to a killer who calls
himself Yellow, not a deliberate reference to crime thrillers but to his
jaundiced skin, because of which he has suffered ostracism and abuse
since childhood. The revelation of the hands is a surprise break, but
its consequences are not as far-reaching as the revelation of the killers
face. Yellows face appears first in patches framed by the rearview mirror
of his taxi, then in a direct profile shot, and finally, from the midpoint
of the film onward, in many complete headshots. Enzo and Linda, the
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sister of Yellows latest abductee Celine, follow clues toward his name
and location, but the audience gets to see and know him far better and
far earlier than a typical giallo would allow.
Knowing Yellow, getting inside his head, provides the films primary
conceit: Enzo is the sort of copclichd now because of the popularity of Manhunter (1986), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and other
adaptations of Thomas Harris novelswho walks a fine line between
good and evil because to catch killers, he has to think like them (To
catch a killer, you must think like a killer is the tagline on the cover of
the Maya Entertainment Giallo). An equation between Enzo and Yellow
is anything but subtle. With the help of a great deal of make-up, Adrien
Brody plays both roles; the name credited for Yellow, Byron Deidra, is
an anagram for his. After getting to know how hard, cold, and calculating Enzo is, Linda finally pronounces, Youre just like him! Thus she
vocalizes a comparison that the film has already made by having both
Yellow and Enzo decorate their homes (for Enzo, his office is his home)
with photos of mutilated women and by having Enzo reveal that in his
childhood, he brutally murdered the man who murdered his mother.
This clichd doubling prevents police and killer from lining up easily
with good and evil, leaving audiences with no option but ambivalence
toward the films primary candidate for hero.
Giallo confirms ambivalence as the films dominant affect with an
ending that has Enzo selfishly kill Yellow before Yellow tells Linda where
Celine is trapped. The final shot shows an oblivious policeman patrolling
a parking deck. He walks by a van that has Celine bound and gagged
in its back, kicking and moaning to be free. The patrolman stops as if
he hears something, but he gets interrupted by a brief cell-phone call,
after which he turns toward the van. The camera moves toward the van,
closer and closer to a pool of Celines dripping blood. On this image, the
film freezes, and the credit Written and Directed by Dario Argento
appears. Does the policeman save Celine? Just like the moral status of
Enzos methods for hunting killers, the answer is indeterminate.
The indeterminacy and ambivalence that characterize the ending
and the detective/killer pairing also apply to the films treatments of
beauty and violence. When Linda first comes to Enzo for help finding
her sister, she leaves him a picture, and as he examines it on his own,
he remarks, Too beautiful. He hates beautiful things. This remark
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shows that Enzo has developed at least enough insight to understand his
quarrys preoccupation with beauty, but Yellows relationship with beauty
and beautiful women is not as simple as hatred. During his abduction of
Celine, he knocks her out with an injection, strokes her head and hair,
and says beautiful. He also says beautiful in an earlier sequence, as
he subdues his previous victim, Keiko. His tone when he utters this word
is of appreciation rather than loathing. The appreciation is, of course,
warped, as it is a prelude to degradation. Yellow keeps his victims over
a period of days, destroying their beauty with tortures that a table full of
tools mostly leaves to the imagination. With Celine already in reserve, he
approaches Keikos still-living face, which is lacerated in several places,
and says, So ugly ... kiss kiss, no more. He proceeds to mutilate her
lips. Yellow delights in taking beauty and its sexual advantages away from
his victims. He does not destroy beauty because he hates it; he destroys
beauty because he loves it, envies it, and resents it. His feeling is a type
of ambivalence. He has several monologues in front of a mirror, and
he bleaches his own skin to remove his yellow ugliness. Keying into his
psychology, Celine tries to demoralize him by calling him ugly, echoing
the cruelty of prettier schoolchildren shown taunting him in flashbacks,
but she only incites his anger. Her understanding does not give her a
usable strategy, but she is nevertheless right to conclude that beauty
and his lack of it are his motives for killing.
Yellows warped appreciation of beauty, an appreciation that leads
him to destroy it, recalls what is perhaps the most frequently quoted
thing Argento has ever said about his philosophy of moviemaking: I like
women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I
would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or
man. If this quotation aptly describes Argentos feelings, then he and
Yellow both like seeing the destruction of beautiful women. This proclivity is not their only commonality: Yellow takes pictures of his victims,
so he and Argento both like photographing the destruction of beautiful
women. The art of Yellow and the art of the giallo are the same in that
they focus on capturing the degradation of beautiful female flesh. Yellow
likes the images he captures very much: he likes to look at them on his
computer while he sucks on a pacifier and masturbates. Through this
revelation Giallo suggests that his destructiveness is a product of arrested
development. His reduction of beauty into indistinct ugliness suggests

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an anal fetish, his pacifier suggests an oral fetish, and his masturbation
suggests a genital fetishhe is stuck in all three phases of Freudian
development at once! This diagnosis, like all psychoanalytic diagnoses
in Argentos films, rings hollow, but the film raises it as a possibility, just
as it raises the possibility of condemning the giallo tradition in film by
equating it with Yellows murderousness.
In the interview translated at the end of this book, lie Castiel asks
Argento what he has to say about the fact that women are usually the
victims in his films. Argento responds, I dont agree. I think that in my
films theres an equitable justice in victim selection. As many women as
men are murdered. Moreover, women are often the ones who solve the
mysteries. This claim about equity modifies, or perhaps simply corrects,
the earlier statement about liking to see beautiful women murdered; it
suggests that Argento does not agree with the equation of his work and
feelings with the behaviors of someone like Yellow. Yellow is the worst
possible construction that could be put on the combination of beauty
and violence that Argento captures in his gialliand in all his films. If
Yellow has a strong relationship with the giallo tradition in film, then,
he is an image of the tradition as its most ardent critics portray ithe is
the killer that Operas Inspector Santini wants Betty to be. Yellow even
looks a little bit like Argento, albeit in a horrifically distorted way. If Yellow looks like Argento, either figuratively or literally, he is Argento as he
appears in the horrifically distorting eyes of his critics. The ambivalence
and indeterminacy that suffuse Giallo extend to the relationship between
Yellow and Argento and between Yellow and the giallo tradition. The
former both is and is not the latter.
As the most recent film in a long line of works that both are and are
not repetitions of the conventions that Argento made part of the giallo
tradition, Giallo makes a rhetorical statement about the way Argentos
later works reflect on their origins. The last two decades of Argentos
filmmaking have engaged in overt negotiations with the first two, exploring tensions and finding new ways to develop without completely
abandoning their roots. Argento has never reached a point where he is
satisfied, where he is willing to stop pushing himself to grow into new
artistic territory. He seems unlikely to reach such a point for as long he
keeps making films. If fate is kind, he will continue to craft provocative
combinations of beauty and violence for many years to come.
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Notes
1.For more about horrors connection to psychoanalysis, see Steven Schneider, ed., Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freuds Worst Nightmare.
2.See Mikel J. Kovens La Dolce Morte for a complete discussion of amateur
detectives in giallo cinema.
3.The spelling of the title is debatable; it might more properly be Tenebrae,
as the film shows the cover of Peter Neals novel of that name with this spelling. I have chosen to use the spelling on the widely available Anchor Bay DVD,
which is the primary spelling on the Internet Movie Database.
4.The problems inherent to norms established by the Catholic church take
center stage in many gialli, such as Lucio Fulcis Dont Torture a Duckling
(1972), which features a classically gothic killer priest. While Christianos allusion to the church isnt completely isolated in Argentos workThe Church
(1989), which he wrote and produced, is a case in pointit never emerges as the
major concern that it becomes in films such as Fulcis. I am inclined to associate
Argentos retreat from engagement with Catholicism, an omnipresent concern
for Italian filmmakers, with the internationalism of his films, but supporting
this association lies beyond the scope of the present argument.
5.One can find politics in anything, but arguing that the early gialli have
a conscious political agenda is difficult. While I dont think these films have
specific political agendas, I am not claiming that they dont have a political
unconscious ( la Fredric Jameson) or that theyre otherwise insusceptible to
political interpretation. Everything is. For example, in Intimations (and More)
of Colonialism: Dario Argentos LUccello dale piume di cristallo, Frank Burke
provides an interesting reading of (post)colonial politics in The Bird with the
Crystal Plumage.
6.Anna Powell, drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, argues that
Suspiria extends the sensory reach of film beyond sight and sound into touch
through its emphasis on painful and abject imagery, from the razors that kill
Sara to a disgusting rain of maggots that falls in the dance academy (14245).
7.For more detailed accounts of aestheticized murder in literature and film,
see Joel Blacks The Aesthetics of Murder and Steven Jay Schneiders Murder
as Art/The Art of Murder.
8.Here a longer discussion of the Sublime tradition in gothic/horror fiction and in art more generallyspurred by the eighteenth-century thinker
Edmund Burkemight be appropriate, but it would also take us too far away
from Argentos films, which, as Ive already noted, combine the Sublime and
the beautiful in various ways. In short: in contrast to the beauty of intricately
managed gardens, the sublimity of mountains and other things much grander
than humanity has the potential to demonstrate our insignificance in an edifying
way. Among sources of the Sublime, Burke includes death and its reminders,
particularly corpses (which Julia Kristeva names as the ultimate in abjection and
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describes in Powers of Horror as having functions very similar to the Sublime).

The Sublime can excite just the sort of passion that Pater describes, and so the
consciousness of deathraised by corpses, gore, and other gruesome, violent
spectaclesoccasioned by the horror film could dilate our short interval of
existence, enhancing our moments as they pass.
9.The most typical sole survivor is what Rose seems set up to bethe Final Girl, described by Carol Clover in Men, Women, and Chain Saws. Clover
discusses the Bad Place of the horror film, a convention for which Mater Tenebrarums house certainly qualifies, but she doesnt discuss what happens when
the Bad Place replaces the Final Girl as the protagonist.
10.For comparisons of Mother of Tears to Angels and Demons, see, for example, http://whiggles.landofwhimsy.com/2006/05/mother-of-tears-cast-and-crew
-rumours.html and http://forum.cinefacts.de/90105-argentos-la-terza-madre
-mother-tears.html (accessed February 26, 2012).
11.For more about Phenomena and adolescent development, see Donald
Campbells Visions of Deformity: Dario Argentos Phenomena.
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Interviews with Dario Argento
By lie Castiel
lie Castiel, Dario Argento, Sequences: La Revue de Cinema 167
(November-December 1993): 89.
lie castiel: Your cinematic career began when you assisted Sergio Leone with Once upon a Time in the West. Did this first experience
in film influence your career?
dario argento: First of all, Id like to correct your claim. I didnt
begin as an assistant for Sergio Leone, but rather I cowrote the script for
the film you mentioned, with the collaboration of Bernardo Bertolucci.
As for the influence of this experience, its clear that early connections
leave their marks. If you watch Once upon a Time in the West today,
youll already find certain themes that I approach in the films I make
now, such as mystery.
ec: After this first experience with the Western genre, you move to
the police thriller, and next the horror film, or fantasy, if you prefer.
8/27/12 3:56 PM
da: I dont consider changing style or genre to be a change in itself,

but a different way of presenting characters. You can find the same
topics in one genre or another.
ec: When you break into horror with Profondo Rosso [Deep Red], its
evident that your approach is more parodic than otherwise. But little
by little, it seems like youre taking yourself more seriously.
da: I dont completely agree with this statement, although I approached each film with a different energy and atmosphere from the
previous film. I film above all by instinct.
ec: In Suspiria, you approached, among others, the topics of mysticism and superstition. Did you do much research?
da: Ive never believed in magic or sorcery. But during the years
when I was filming Suspiria, I thought these topics would make good
stories for the horror genre. I got interested, then, in the subject and
did some research.
ec: For as long as the horror film has existed, it has been linked with
eroticism and sadism. Along these lines, what responsibility do you have
to the audience?
da: You have to admit that theres not a lot of eroticism in my films.
What concerns me above all is that the audience appreciate the work
that I do. As for sadism, its an integral part of the genre. My responsibility to the moviegoers is to try to satisfy their curiosity.
ec: What about the question of voyeurism?
da: The cinema itself is a voyeuristic art, a gaze fixed on the world
and the individual. Moviegoers are also voyeurs, often narcissists, but
who also often like to look at and contemplate others. My films often
approach this phenomenon.
ec: Your first three films include the name of an animal in the title.
In the following films, objects replace beasts.
da: Objects have assumed an important place in our lives. And a
film director ought to have the responsibility to create resonance with
everything he films. Moreover, objects are important in the genre films
Ive made. Youll notice that animals, especially cats, are found in almost
all my films, which is a way of returning to my roots in my first film.
ec: The victim in your films is often a woman. What do you have to
say on this subject?
da: I dont agree. I think that in my films theres an equitable justice
in victim selection. As many women as men are murdered. Moreover,
women are often the ones who solve the mysteries.
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ec: Your style is often baroque. Did the Italian filmmaker Mario Bava
influence you?
da: Yes, he influenced me for the same reason as Fritz Lang with
his expressionism. I really love to work with shadow and lights. Color
can also convey subtleties. The American film noir of the forties also
inspired me.
ec: Do you think theres a future for the horror film, or have we
already reached a saturation point?
da: There will always be an audience for this genre of films, for as
long as the cinema continues to exist. Human beings often need strong
sensations.
ec: And you, do you think youll change genres one day?
da: Not at the moment. I am very comfortable working in horror. I
have no intention to change. The possibilities are enormous.
By Stephane Derderian
Stephane Derderian, Entretien avec Dario Argento, Lavant-scene
Cinema (March 2007): 69.
stephane derderian: Was the original title Deep Red always
intended to refer to the films bloodiness?
dario argento: At the time when I produced it, the film was the
bloodiest one I had ever made. After my Animal Trilogy, I wanted to do
something different, bloodier, more psychological, harder, and scarier,
too.
sd: Its the first time that there are well-defined characters, too. Was
the relationship between the characters played by Daria Nicolodi and
David Hemmings built up while you were shooting?
da: No. Nothing developed while we were shooting. Before Im ready
to shoot, everything is already on paper. I always prepare my films in
advance: I make a storyboard, I sketch out each of the characters, etc.
But its not just the characters that are important: the film is also very
psychoanalytical. During shooting, I have to determine the composition
of the shots, but thats the only new job its incumbent on me to do.
Concerning characters, everythings already written down.
sd: How did you work with the editor, Franco Fraticelli? Did you
have all the cuts in mind from the beginning?
da: We had already made four films together. He was well acquainted
Interviews
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with the way I work. I gave him the script and the storyboards; he knew
exactly what I wanted.
sd: Visual memory is a subject that often comes up in your films
(The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Tenebre, Trauma). What does this
subject represent for you?
da: Im obsessed with memory. We have a tendency to change facts
and stories because of our memory. It is greatly influenced by our personality, by our culture, and by our environment. Thats why, in The Bird
with the Crystal Plumage, Tony Musantes memory plays little tricks
on him. He saw a girl dressed in white and a man in a hat dressed all in
black. But he didnt pay close enough attention to what he saw. Well,
in our unconscious, black symbolizes evil, and white symbolizes purity.
As a result, there was this confusion that took place this time because
it was the woman who was trying to murder her husband. You can see
this problem of memory again in Deep Red. Memory often betrays us.
For example, if we see something happen in the street, and if there are
four different witnesses, there will be four different points of view. I had
talked with a chief of police about this subject, and he explained to me
that at the time of a murder, it is absolutely necessary for the witnesses
to give their depositions within forty-eight hours, because after that,
the memory starts to change things. It can twist the facts because of
our personal experience.
sd: When you were shooting Deep Red, were you sure that the viewer
wouldnt see the face of the murderer?
da: I had the idea for this challenge while I was writing the film.
Franco Fraticelli, my editor, wasnt very keen; he was convinced that
people would see the killer. In fact, in the reflection in the mirror, the
position of the killer is fixed, whereas David Hemmings is moving. The
viewers attention is necessarily going to follow the one thats moving
while he goes down the hallway; the viewer wont pay attention to the
left side of the image.
sd: You show the killer ... this is not the case in The Bird with the
Crystal Plumage.
da: Indeed, yes, I wanted to press our luck a little bit further!
sd: This film is the longest of your careermore than two hours.
Did the length concern you during shooting or editing?
da: While writing the script, one conducts a timing. My assistant saw
that it was going to be longer than usual. It was decided that I would
make it just like I had written it.
sd: Like Jean-Pierre Marielle, the antiques dealer from The Bird
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Dario Argento
8/27/12 3:56 PM
with the Crystal Plumage, the character played by Gabriele Lavia is

homosexual.
da: Homosexuals are part of our everyday life. In my profession, I
work with homosexuals. I also have homosexual friends. I think they
logically have a place in my films. They are part of our society, which
is made up of heterosexuals and homosexuals. And for that matter, in
Tenebre there is also a lesbian couple.
sd: In Deep Red, some sound effects and some isolated bits of dialogue stand out, like in Suspiria. Does the sound track merit as much
attention as the image?
da: Sound isnt as important as the image, but I treat it like an actor.
Its a little like dealing with the crew and the director. When I shoot,
I stop the dialogue, and I can raise the music, or vice versa. Music is a
very important character in all my films.
sd: There is talk in the film about spiritual mediums, like in Trauma.
What are your relationships with them and with esotericism?
da: I am very interested in esotericism. It is the subject of Suspiria
and Inferno. Inferno is esotericism taken to the extreme. On the other
hand, mediums are very interesting characters in as much as they make
a kind of spectacle. I simply think that in the majority of cases theyre
charlatans. I dont truly believe in sorcery, but I think that certain mediums have divinatory powers ... when they touch you, for example.
Some of them have the potential to enter into contact with things that
are beyond us. . . .
sd: What are the real motives that drive David Hemmings to take
on this investigation?
da: Its a game for him. He understands that he is very close to the
truth, but theres something that prevents him from reaching it, and
thats what pushes him to make this investigation. He talks about it, by
the way, several times through the course of the story.
sd: There is something very original, very modern in the structure
of your films: people dont look for a suspect as much as they look for
a truth. How did this come about?
da: When I write, I practice a kind of automatism. I have a film in
mind that makes an impression like a sort of universal truth. Its like I
have a blank page in front of me, and the story before my eyes. I wait
until things play themselves out. Then I commit myself to faithfully
reproducing what I read in front of me. Its the entire film that unfolds
before my eyes ... theres not a single element in the image that wasnt
in the script.
Interviews
153
8/27/12 3:56 PM
sd: Dont you suggest that the viewers could themselves become
investigators?
da: An investigation doesnt have to involve a murder. But also the
problems that present themselves to us in our lives. We have a duty to
search for more profound truths.
sd: Is the psychology of the murderer less important than the psychology of the investigator?
da: Indeed, in my films I favor the investigator. The murderer is like
a ubiquitous ectoplasm with a more simplistic psychology. Murderers
want to kill and can do incredible things. When the investigators throw
themselves into pursuing the murderer, we naturally follow them.
sd: In Tenebre, you present murder as an act of liberation.
da: In my other films, the murderer wants to satisfy a murderous
impulse. In the case of Tenebre, theres something more profound. Thats
why I included a quotation from Conan Doyle, who studied the behavior
of murderers quite a lot.
sd: In Deep Red, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and above all
The Stendhal Syndrome, the world of painting is very present. . . .
da: Not only painting, but also architecture, sculpture, and works
of art in general. They greatly influenced me when I was a child or
teenager. One time during my childhood, I was a victim of the Stendhal Syndrome myself. I was with my family in Athens, and we visited
the Parthenon. I had something like vertigo. I became very sick. I had
a feeling like climbing a mountain, going up very high. Id thought,
therefore, of talking about the syndrome in a film. Then I read a book
by an Italian psychiatrist and analyst at the Hospital of Florence. They
had a lot of cases of the Stendhal Syndrome in Florence, which is a very
beautiful city, with magnificent architecture. I read the book while I
was in the United States casting for Two Evil Eyes. I then discovered
what had happened to me and that I could easily tell the story.
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Filmography
Feature Films and Television

Directed by Dario Argento
This list includes the principal cast as well as some characters discussed
in the critical essay. Some of Argentos works were filmed without sound,
with dialogue tracks dubbed in multiple languages later. Cast members
spoke Italian, English, and other languages during shooting. Some films
were shot in Italy, some in the United States, and some elsewhere. The
original language of a title or film is therefore a vexed issue. For consistency, this filmography first lists titles most frequently used for the films
in English-speaking markets today. Other titles, including the Italian
when it differs from the first title listed, appear second.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)
Alternate Titles: Luccello dalle piume di cristallo, The Phantom of Terror, The
Bird with the Glass Feathers, The Sadist with Black Gloves
Italy, West Germany
Production: Central Cinema Company Film (CCC), Glazier, Seda Spettacoli
Distribution: Universal Marion Corporation, Columbia Broadcasting
System, Twenty-First Century Film Corporation, Blue Underground, VCI
Entertainment
Producer: Salvatore Argento
Director: Dario Argento
Assistant Director: Roberto Pariante
Writer: Dario Argento
Adapted from The Screaming Mimi, by Fredric Brown
Cinematographer: Vittorio Storaro
Production Designer: Dario Micheli
Costume Designer: Dario Micheli
Makeup: Giuseppe Ferranti
8/27/12 3:56 PM
Editor: Franco Fraticelli

Music: Ennio Morricone
Cast: Tony Musante (Sam Dalmas), Suzy Kendall (Julia), Enrico Maria
Salerno (Inspector Morosini), Eva Renzi (Monica Ranieri), Umberto Raho
(Alberto Ranieri), Renato Romano (Professor Carlo Dover), Werner Peters
(Antique Dealer)
96 min.
The Cat o Nine Tails (1971)
Alternate Title: Il gatto a nove code
Italy, France, West Germany
Production: Labrador Films, Seda Spettacoli, Terra-Filmkunst, Transconta
S.A.
Distribution: National General Pictures, Columbia Broadcasting System,
Anchor Bay Entertainment, Reel Media International, Blue Underground
Writers: Dario Argento, Luigi Collo, Dardano Sacchetti
Cinematographer: Erico Menczer
Production Designer: Carlo Leva
Costume Designer: Carlo Leva, Luca Sabatelli
Visual Effects: Luciano Vittori
Cast: James Franciscus (Carlo Giordani), Karl Malden (Franco Arno),
Catherine Spaak (Anna Terzi), Pier Paolo Capponi (Police Supt. Spini),
Horst Frank (Dr. Braun), Rada Rassimov (Bianca Merusi), Aldo Reggiani
(Dr. Casoni), Carlo Alighiero (Dr. Calabresi), Vittorio Congia (Righetto,
the cameraman), Cinzia de Carolis (Lori), Werner Pochath (Manuel), Tino
Carraro (Prof. Fulvio Terzi)
112 min.
Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971)
Alternate Title: 4 mosche di velluto grigio
Italy, France
Production: Marianne Productions, Seda Spettacoli, Universal Productions
France
Distribution: Paramount Pictures, Mya Communication, Ryko Distribution
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Writers: Dario Argento, Luigi Cozzi, Mario Foglietti

Cinematographer: Franco Di Giacomo
Production Designer: Enrico Sabbatini
Wardrobe Assistant: Giovanni Viti
Special Effects: Cataldo Galiano
Editor: Francoise Bonnot
Cast: Michael Brandon (Roberto Tobias), Mimsy Farmer (Nina Tobias), JeanPiette Marielle (Gianni Arrosio), Bud Spencer (Godfrey/God), Aldo Bufi
Landi (Pathologist), Calisto Calisti (Carlo Marosi)
104 min.
Door into Darkness (1973)
Alternate Title: La porta sul buio
Episodes: The Neighbor (Il Vicino di casa), The Tram (Il Tram),
Eyewitness (Testimone ocular), and The Doll (La Bambola)
Italy
Production: Seda Spettacoli, Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI)
Distribution: Mya Communication
Producer: Dario Argento
Directors: Luigi Cozzi (The Neighbor), Dario Argento (The Tram,
Eyewitness), Roberto Pariante (Eyewitness), Mario Foglietti (The
Doll)
Writers: Luigi Cozzi (The Neighbor, Eyewitness), Dario Argento (The
Tram, Eyewitness), Mario Foglietti (The Doll), Marcela Elsberger
(The Doll)
Cinematographer: Elio Polacchi
Production Designer: Dario Michele
Costume Designer: Dario Michele
Editors: Amedeo Giomini and Alberto Moro (The Neighbor), Amedeo
Giomini (The Tram, Eyewitness, The Doll)
Music: Giorgio Gaslini
Cast: Dario Argento (himself/host); The Neighbor: Aldo Reggiani (Luca),
Laura Belli (Stefania), Mimmo Ralmara (The Neighbor); The Tram:
Paola Tedesco (Giolia), Enzo Cerusico (Commisario Giordani), Corado
Olmi (Officer Morini), Emilio Marchesini (Marco Roviti); Eyewitness:
Maril Tolo (Roberta Leoni), Riccardo Salvino (Guido Leoni), Glauco
Onorato (Police Inspector), Altea De Nicola (Anna); The Doll: Mara
Venier (Daniela Moreschi), Robert Hoffman (Doctor), Erika Blanc (Elena
Moreschi), Gianfranco DAngelo (Police Commissioner), Umberto Raho
(Psychiatrist)
228 min. (The Neighbor: 58 min.; The Tram: 54 min.; Eyewitness: 55
min.; The Doll: 61 min.)
Filmography
157
8/27/12 3:56 PM
Summary: Argento introduces the first episode by saying that all episodes
share a common atmosphere of fear, anguish, unease. Theyre crime
stories, but theyre new and different. In The Neighbor, a young
couple with a baby move into their new apartment and discover that
their upstairs neighbor has murdered his wife. Hitchcock-like cat-andmouse suspense ensues until the neighbor captures the couple, who are
saved barely in time when their crying baby gets the attention of men
outside. Argentos introduction to The Tram sums up the premise: A
murder happens in front of everyone, but no one sees anythinghow
come? Focusing entirely on the investigation, this episode is a love letter
to classic mysteries. The solution, that the trams lights blinked out at a
critical moment, is less important than dismissive treatment of a Freudian
explanation of the killers motive (as in Bird) and last-minute commentary
about criminality and socioeconomic class. Eyewitness explores minutiae
of memory la Bird and Deep Red. Roberta thinks she saw a murder but
ultimately learns that the presumed victim, Anna, faked the scene as part
of a plot with Robertas husband, Guido, to murder Roberta and blame
Annas supposed killer. In a clear homage to Mario Bavas Blood and Black
Lace (1964), The Doll focuses on an escaped mental patient stalking and
killing a woman in a clothing factory. The episode uses intense point-ofview shots and a misleading narrative to surprise audiences with a gender
twist, also reminiscent of Bird (a man suggested to be the killer is actually
in pursuit of the female killer, whose motive is to kill her sister, who always
stole everything from her). The main mystery of this episode is the mystery
of what the camera actually shows: camera technique and narrative
confusion create the uncertainty that drives the story.
The Five Days of Milan (1973)
Alternate Title: Le cinque giornate
Italy
Production: Seda Spettacoli
Distribution: e-m-s the DVD Company
Assistant Directors: Sofia Scandurra, Franco Gambarana
Writers: Dario Argento, Nanni Balestrini, Luigi Cozzi, Enzo Ungari
Cinematographer: Luigi Kuveiller
Production Designer: Giuseppe Bassan
Costume Designer: Elena Mannini
Special Effects: Aldo Gasparri
Music: Giorgio Gaslini
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Cast: Adriano Celentano (Cainazzo), Enzo Cerusico (Romolo Marcelli),

Marilu Tolo (The Countess), Luisa De Santis (Pregnant Woman), Glauco
Onorato (Zampino), Carla Tato (The Widow), Sergio Graziani (Baron
Tranzunto)
122 min.
Summary: This dark comedy follows odd-couple-like Cainazzo and Romolo
through a series of adventures against the backdrop of the Italian
Revolution of 1848. Titles for different segments emphasize the picaresque
structure. The film opens with a cannon shot freeing Cainazzo and other
criminals from prison. In a sequence that evokes the Argento-favorite
Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936), Cainazzo hides himself behind
an Italian flag as he flees down the street, and he ends up leading a small
army that mistakes him for a patriot. The first titled scene, The Fatal
Encounter, introduces Cainazzo to Romolo. Together they flee from
various explosions. In A Difficult Childbirth, they help a pregnant woman
to deliver. They soon find themselves loading guns against a barricade
garrisoned by a countess who drinks tea while the lower classes fight. In
The Milanese, My People, the countess treats fighters to sexual favors.
Cainazzo and Romolo plan a heist as a way to profit from revolutionary
chaos. The Big Job shows Argentos increasingly politicized treatment of
the revolution in a series featuring city leaders from across Italy planning
Milans fate. In The Duke, Cainazzo and Romolo encounter a noble who
ironically tries to explain politics to the confused men: Theres no royalty
here. Were all brothers. Just call me Sir Baron. Upset by Italian treatment
of prisoners, Austrians perpetrate a massacre. Argentos trademark extreme
violence makes the tone become increasingly somber. Separated from
his pal, Cainazzo fears that Romolo is dead. The Last Words and Other
Events features a fight over the dying words of a revolutionary hero.
Long live Italy? Milan to the Milanese? Cainazzo says the last words
were really, Fuck off, all of you. Cainazzo and Romolo reunite and save
the widow of a traitor from being executed. In The Widows Bread,
Romolo has a romance with the widow, and Cainazzo leaves, only to be
captured by Austrians. He meets Zamponi, a thief acquaintance hailed
throughout the film as a revolutionary hero who has really been working
for the Austrians all along. Zamponi releases him, and he meets up with
Romolo again. Trying to stop the rape of a woman caught in bed with an
Austrian, Romolo accidentally kills an Italian leader. Romolo is executed
by a firing squad. Grieving, Cainazzo takes the stage during a revolutionary
celebration and proclaims, Weve been tricked! The Five Days offers a
combination of bawdy humor and political satire that is smart, gripping,
and far more accessible and coherent than its reputation or Argentos
others works suggest.
Filmography
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Deep Red (1975)

Alternate Titles: Profondo Rosso, The Deep Red Hatchet Murders, The
Hatchet Murders
Italy
Production: Rizzoli Film, Seda Spettacoli
Distribution: Howard Mahler Films, Anchor Bay Entertainment, EastWest
Entertainment, Reel Media International
Assistant Director: Stefano Rolla
Writers: Dario Argento, Bernardo Zapponi
Cinematographer: Luigi Kuveiller
Costume Designer: Elena Mannini
Special Effects: Germano Natali, Carlo Rambaldi
Editor: Franci Fraticelli
Music: Giorgio Gaslini, Goblin (Walter Martino, Fabio Pignatelli, Claudio
Simonetti)
Cast: David Hemmings (Marcus Daly), Daria Nicolodi (Gianna Brezzi),
Gabriele Lavia (Carlo), Macha Meril (Helga Ulmann), Giuliana Calandra
(Amanda Righetti), Glauco Mauri (Prof. Giordani), Clara Calamai (Marta)
126 min.
Suspiria (1977)
Italy
Production: Seda Spettacoli
Distribution: International Classics, Magnum Entertainment, Anchor Bay
Entertainment, Blue Underground, Genius Products
Producer: Claudio Argento
Assistant Director: Antonio Gabrielli
Writers: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi
Cinematographer: Luciano Tovoli
Costume Designer: Pierangelo Cicoletti
Special Effects: Germano Natali
Music: Dario Argento, Goblin (Agostino Marangolo, Walter Martino, Fabio
Pignatelli, Claudio Simonetti)
Cast: Jessica Harper (Suzy Banyon), Stefania Casini (Sara), Flavio Bucci
(Daniel), Miguel Bos (Mark), Barbara Magnolfi (Olga), Susanna Javicoli
(Sonia), Eva Axn (Pat Hingle), Rudolf Schndler (Prof. Milius), Udo Kier
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Filmography
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(Dr. Frank Mandel), Alida Valli (Miss Tanner), Joan Bennett (Madame
Blanc)
98 min.
Inferno (1980)
Italy
Production: Produzioni Intersound
Distribution: Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation, Anchor Bay
Entertainment, Blue Underground, CBS/Fox, Fox Video
Assistant Directors: Lamberto Bava, Andrea Piazzesi
Cinematographer: Romano Albani
Art Director: Giuseppe Bassan
Costume Designer: Massimo Lentini
Special Effects: Germano Natali
Music: Keith Emerson
Cast: Leigh McCloskey (Mark Eliot), Irene Miracle (Rose Eliot), Eleonora
Giorgi (Sarah), Daria Nicolodi (Elise Stallone Van Adler), Sacha Pitoeff
(Kazanian), Alida Valli (Carol, the Caretaker), Veronica Lazar (The Nurse),
Gabriele Lavia (Carlo), Feodor Chaliapin Jr. (Professor Arnold/Dr. Varelli),
Leopoldo Mastelloni (John, the Butler), Ania Pieroni (Musical Student),
James Fleetwood (Cook), Fulvio Mingozzi (Cab Driver)
107 min.
Tenebre (1982)
Alternate Titles: Unsane, Tenebrae
Italy
Production: Sigma Cinematografica Roma
Distribution: Bedford Entertainment, Fox Hills Video, Anchor Bay
Entertainment
Assistant Directors: Lamberto Bava, Michele Soavi
Costume Designers: Pierangelo Cicoletti, Carlo Palazzi, Franco Tomei
Special Effects: Giovanni Corridori
Filmography
161
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Music: Massimo Morante, Fabio Pignatelli, Claudio Simonetti

Cast: Anthony Franciosa (Peter Neal), Christian Borromeo (Gianni), Mirella
DAngelo (Tilde), Veronica Lario (Jane McKerrow), Ania Pieroni (Elsa
Manni), Eva Robins (Girl on Beach), Carola Stagnaro (Detective Altieri),
John Steiner (Christiano Berti), Lara Wendel (Maria Alboretto), John
Saxon (Bullmer), Daria Nicolodi (Anne), Giuliano Gemma (Detective
Germani)
110 min.
Phenomena (1985)
Alternate Title: Creepers
Italy
Production: DACFILM Rome
Distribution: New Line Cinema, Media Home Entertainment, Anchor Bay
Entertainment, The Roan Group, EastWest Entertainment
Assistant Directors: Michele Soavi, Bettina Graebe
Writers: Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini
Cinematographer: Romano Albani
Production Designers: Maurizio Garroni, Nello Giorgetti, Luciano Spadoni,
Umberto Turco
Costume Designers: Giorgio Armani, Marina Malavasi, Patrizia Massaia
Special Effects: Antionio Corridori
Music: Claudio Simonetti, Bill Wyman, Simon Boswell
Cast: Jennifer Connelly (Jennifer Corvino), Daria Nicolodi (Frau Bruckner),
Dalila Di Lazaro (Headmistress), Patrick Bauchau (Inspector Rudolf
Geiger), Donald Pleasance (Professor John McGregor), Fiore Argento
(Vera Brandt), Federica Mastroianni (Sophie), Mario Donatone (Morris
Shapiro), Tanga (Inga)
110 min.
Opera (1987)
Alternate Title: Terror at the Opera
Italy
Production: ADC Films, Cecchi Gori Group Tiger Cinematografica
Distribution: South Gate Entertainment, Orion Classics, Anchor Bay
Entertainment, Blue Underground
Assistant Directors: Antonio Gabrielli, Paolo Zenatello, Alessandro
Ingargiola, Michele Soavi
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Cinematographer: Ronnie Taylor
Production Management: Verena Baldeo, Alessando Calosci, Fabrizio Diaz,
Olivier Grard
Costume Designer: Lia Francesca Morandini
Special Effects: Sergio Stivaletti, Germano Natali, Giovani Corridori
Music: Renato Agostini, Antonio Corridori, Giovanni Corridori, Massimo
Cristofanelli, Germano Natali, Sergio Stivaletti
Cast: Cristina Marsillach (Betty), Ian Charleson (Marco), Urbano Barberini
(Inspector Alan Santini), Daria Nicolodi (Mira), Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni
(Giulia), Antonella Vitale (Marion), William McNamara (Stefano)
107 min.
Two Evil Eyes (1990)
Alternate Title: Due occhi diabolici
Italy, U.S.A.
Production: ADC Films, Gruppo Bema
Distribution: Taurus Entertainment Company, Anchor Bay Entertainment,
Blue Underground, Cinefear, Fox Video, Image Entertainment, Media
Home Entertainment
Producer: Achille Manzotti
Director: Dario Argento (The Black Cat), George A. Romero (The Facts
in the Case of Mr. Valdemar)
Writers: Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini (The Black Cat); George A.
Romero (The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar)
Adapted from The Black Cat and The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar,
by Edgar Allan Poe
Cinematographer: Peter Reniers
Production Designer: Cletus Anderson (The Black Cat)
Costume Designer: Barbara Anderson
Special Effects: Tom Savini
Editor: Pasquale Buba (The Black Cat)
Music: Pino Donaggio
Cast: The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar: Adrienne Barbeau (Jessica
Valdemar), Ramy Zada (Dr. Robert Hoffman), Bingo OMalley (Ernest
Valdemar), Tom Atkins (Detective Grogan); The Black Cat: Harvey
Keitel (Roderick Usher), Madeleine Potter (Annabel), John Amos
(Detective Legrand), Sally Kirkland (Eleonora), Kim Hunter (Mrs. Pym),
Martin Balsam (Mr. Pym), Julie Benz (Betty)
120 min.
Summary: This is an anthology in the style of Romeros Creepshow (1982),
but with only two episodes, both adaptations of tales by Edgar Allan Poe.
Filmography
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First, Romeros The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar updates Poes
tale by having a wife scheme to get her dying older husbands money by
having his doctor hypnotize him into signing it over. The man dies while
hypnotized, which strands his consciousness in an in-between realm where
the others eventually turn his body into the living dead and bring about
the wife and doctors deaths. The doctor dies while using self-hypnosis to
sleep, thus becoming another zombie. Argentos The Black Cat combines
a variety of Poes tales (several of which are indicated in characters names)
as the photographer Roderick Usher records brutal deaths reminiscent
of The Pit and the Pendulum and others. A resilient black cat torments
him until, in a fit of rage, he murders his wife. The cat is immured with the
body; it escapes and dies by Ushers handsaw. In a nice touch of Argento
extremity, kittens the cat had while in the wall reveal the crime to police
they have survived by eating the corpse. Fleeing, Usher accidentally hangs
himself. A grotesque dream sequence evokes witchcraft, and Ushers
morbid photography makes him yet another Argento stand-in who raises
questions about those who enjoy violent spectacle.
Trauma (1993)
Italy, U.S.A.
Production: ADC Films, Overseas FilmGroup
Distribution: Republic Pictures, Anchor Bay Entertainment
Assistant Directors: Rod Smith, Philip Elins, Daniel Carrey
Writers: Franco Ferrini, Gianni Romoli, Dario Argento, T. E. D. Klein, Ruth
Jessup
Cinematographer: Raffaele Mertes
Production Designer: Billy Jett
Costume Designer: Leesa Evans
Special Effects: Tom Savini, Greg Funk, Will Huff, Christopher P. Martin
Editor: Bennett Goldberg
Cast: Chrisopher Rydell (David Parsons), Asia Argento (Aura Petrescu),
Piper Laurie (Adriana Petrescu), Frederic Forrest (Dr. Judd), Brad Dourif
(Dr. Lloyd), Hope Alexander-Willis (Linda Quirk), Sharon Barr (Hilda
Volkman), Isabell OConnor (Georgia Jackson), Jacqueline Kim (Alice)
106 min.
The Stendhal Syndrome (1996)
Alternate Title: La sindrome di Stendhal
Italy
Production: Cine 2000, Medusa Produzione
164
Filmography
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Distribution: Blue Underground, Troma Team Video

Producers: Dario Argento, Giuseppe Colombo
Assistant Directors: Nicolo Bongiorno, Fabrizio Campanella, Filip Macelloni,
Daniele Persica, Luigi Cozzi
Cinematographer: Giuseppe Rotuno
Production Designer: Giuseppe Rotunno
Costume Designer: Lia Francesca Morandini
Special Effects: Sergio Stivaletti
Editor: Angelo Nicolini
Cast: Asia Argento (Detective Anna Manni), Thomas Kretschmann (Alfredo
Grossi), Marco Leonardi (Marco Longhi), Luigi Diberti (Inspector
Manetti), Paolo Bonacelli (Dr. Cavanna), Julien Lambroschini (Marie),
John Quentin (Annas Father)
119 min.
The Phantom of the Opera (1998)
Alternate Title: Il fantasma dellopera
Italy
Production: Medusa Film, Cine 2000
Distribution: A-Pix Entertainment
Producers: Giuseppe Colombo, Aron Sipos
Assistant Directors: Peter Racz, Alessandro Ingargiola, Enrico Tubertini
Writers: Gerard Brach, Dario Argento
Adapted from The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux
Production Designers: Massimo Antonello Geleng, Csaba Stork
Costume Designer: Agnes Gyarnathy
Special Effects: Sergio Stivaletti, Peter Szilagyi
Editor: Anna Rosa Napoli
Cast: Julian Sands (The Phantom), Asia Argento (Christine Daae), Andrea Di
Stefano (Baron Raoul De Chagny), Nadia Rinaldi (Carlotta Altieri), Istvan
Bubik (Ignace, the Rat Catcher)
99 min.
Summary: Few would call this film the best adaptation of Lerouxs novel, but
it is certainly among the strangest. An understudy to the famous Carlotta in
a Paris production of Carmen, Christine gets her chance at the lead thanks
to an intervention by the legendary Phantom, who was raised by rats in the
tunnels beneath the opera house. A love triangle forms with the Phantom,
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Christine, and Christines suitor Raoul, but Christine favors the unusually
handsome Phantom, going to him and having sex with him willingly. Their
supernaturally enhanced (they communicate telepathically) relationship
goes to extremes; as the Phantom proclaims, Hate and love are one.
Reluctantly assisted by Raoul, they end up running from an angry mob
as well as from a rat catcher, whose rat-killing gadgets and antics provide
many moments that go beyond comic relief into surreality. The final battle
between the rat catcher and the Phantom ends badly for both. Considered
by many to be Argentos worst, it does have a few wonderfully hallucinatory
momentsone involves a rat trap and a lot of writhing naked people.
Sleepless (2001)
Alternate Title: Non ho sonno
Italy
Production: Cecchi Gori Group Tiger Cinematografica, Medusa Produzione,
Opera Film Produzione
Distribution: Artisan
Assistant Directors: Ricardo Cannone, Giulietta Ravel, Marzio Casa, Luca
Grivet Brancot
Writers: Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini, Carlo Lucarelli
Production Designer: Massimo Antonello Geleng
Costume Designer: Susy Mattolini
Special Effects: David Bracci, Gastone Callori, Massimo Cristofanelli,
Gabriele Magri, Vittorio Magri, Barbara Morosetti, Franco Ragusa
Editor: Anna Rosa Napoli
Music: Goblin (Agostino Marangola, Massimo Morante, Fabio Pignatelli,
Claudio Simonetti)
Cast: Max von Sydow (Ulisse Moretti), Stefano Dionisi (Giacomo), Chiara
Caselli (Gloria), Gabriele Lavia (Mr. Betti), Rossella Falk (Laura de
Fabritiis), Paolo Maria Scalondro (Manni), Roberto Zibetti (Lorenzo)
117 min.
The Card Player (2004)
Alternate Title: Il cartaio
Italy
Production: Medusa Produzione, Opera Film Produzione
Distribution: Anchor Bay Entertainment
Assistant Directors: Fabrizio Bava, Francesco Perri, Marco Santoro
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Writers: Dario Argento, Jay Benedict, Franco Ferrini, Phoebe Scholfield

Cinematographer: Benoit Debie
Production Designers: Marina Pinzuti Ansolini, Massimo Antonello Geleng
Costume Designers: Patrizia Chericoni, Florence Emir
Special Effects: Sergio Stivaletti, Danilo Bollettini, Franco Ragusa
Editor: Walter Fasano
Music: Claudio Simonetti
Cast: Stefania Rocca (Anna Mari), Liam Cunningham (John Brennan), Silvio
Muccini (Remo), Adalberto Maria Merli (Police Commissioner), Claudio
Santamaria (Carlo Stumi), Fiore Argento (Lucia Marini)
103 min.
Do You Like Hitchcock?
Alternate Title: Ti piace Hitchcock?
Italy, Spain
Production: Film Commission Torino-Piemonte, Genesis Motion Pictures,
Institut del Cinema Catala (ICC), Opera Film Produzione, RAI Trade,
Television de Catalunya
Distribution: Anchor Bay Entertainment
Producers: Carlo Bixio, Joan Antoni Gonzalez, Fabrizio Zappi
Assistant Directors: Leopoldo Pescatori, Guido Foa
Cinematographer: Frederic Fasano
Production Designers: Francesca Bocca, Valentina Ferroni
Costume Designer: Fabio Angelotti
Special Effects: Sergio Stivaletti, Gastone Callori, Marco Monetta, Silvano
Scasseddu, Franco Simeone
Cast: Elio Germano (Giulio), Chiara Conti (Federica), Elisabetta Rocchetti
(Sasha), Cristina Brondo (Arianna), Ivan Morales (Andrea), Edoardo
Stoppa (Inspector), Elena Maria Bellini (Giulios Mother), Milvia
Marigliano (Sashas Mother)
93 min.
Jenifer (from the TV show Masters of Horror, 2005)
U.S.A.
Production: Starz Productions, Nice Guy Productions, Industry
Entertainment, IDT Entertainment
Distribution: Showtime Networks, Anchor Bay
Producers: Ben Browning, Adam Goldworm
Filmography
167
8/27/12 3:56 PM
Assistant Director: Raj Uppal

Writer: Steven Weber
Adapted from the short story by Bruce Jones
Cinematographer: Attila Szaly
Production Designer: David Fischer
Special Effects: Sarah Graham
Editor: Marshall Harvey
Cast: Steven Weber (Frank Spivey), Carrie Fleming (Jenifer), Brenda James
(Ruby), Harris Allan (Pete)
58 min.
Summary: Police detective Frank Spivey comes upon a shabbily dressed man
about to murder what appears to be a beautiful woman, Jenifer. He shoots
the man dead and soon learns that Jenifer has a hideously deformed,
predatory face. She scratches him, which may be the means through which
she makes him incapable of resisting her, even after he discovers that she
likes to murder and eat people. Gradually, he loses his family and career,
becoming just like the shabbily dressed man in the beginning. On the brink
of murdering Jenifer, he is shot by a hunter, and the cycle begins again.
Pelts (from the TV show Masters of Horror, 2006)
Canada, U.S.A.
Production: Starz Productions, Nice Guy Productions, Industry
Entertainment, IDT Entertainment
Distribution: Showtime Networks, Anchor Bay
Producers: Ben Browning, Adam Goldworn
Assistant Directors: Ian Samoil, Darren Robson, Ania Musiatowicz
Writer: Matt Venne
Adapted from the short story by F. Paul Wilson
Cinematographer: Attila Szalay
Production Designer: David Fischer
Costume Designer: Lyn Kelly
Special Effects: Howard Berger
Editor: Jacqueline Cambas
Cast: Meat Loaf (Jake Feldman), Link Baker (Lou Chinaski), Emilio Salituro
(Sergio), Elise Lew (Sue Chin Yao), Ellen Ewusie (Shanna), John Saxon
(Jeb Pa Jameson), Michal Suchanek (Larry Jameson), Brenda McDonald
(Mother Mayter)
58 min.
Summary: Jeb Jameson and his son Larry trap raccoons on the forbidden
land of Mother Mayter (an Argento wink at audience members who know
168
Filmography
8/27/12 3:56 PM
the Three Mothers), discovering that the creatures have exceptionally fine
fur. Unfortunately, these magical raccoons pelts carry a curse that drives
their handlers to commit extreme acts of violence and self-mutilation. Jake
Feldman, a coat maker, retrieves the pelts from the Jameson home (father
and son are dead) and decides to have his sweatshop make a fur coat to win
him the love of a stripper, Shanna. The coat gets made, and Jake, Shanna,
and others die in some of the most extreme gore in the Argento oeuvre.
The Mother of Tears (2007)
Alternate Titles: La Terza Madre, The Third Mother
Italy, U.S.A.
Production: Film Commission Torino-Piemonte, Medusa Produzione, Myriad
Pictures, Opera Film Produzione, Sky
Distribution: Myriad Pictures, Genius Products
Producers: Claudio Argento, Dario Argento, Marina Berlusconi, Giulia
Marletta
Assistant Directors: Leopoldo Pescatori, Luca Padrini, Nicola Rondolino
Writers: Jace Anderson, Dario Argento, Walter Fasano, Adam Gierasch,
Simona Simonetti
Production Designers: Francesca Bocca, Valentina Ferroni
Costume Designer: Ludovica Amati
Special Effects: Sergio Stivaletti, Danilo Bollettini
Cast: Asia Argento (Sarah Mandy), Cristian Solimeno (Detective
Enzo Marchi), Adam James (Michael Pierce), Moran Atias (Mater
Lachrymarum), Valeria Cavalli (Marta Calussi), Philippe Leroy (Guglielmo
DeWitt), Daria Nicolodi (Elisa Mandy), Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni (Giselle
Mares), Udo Kier (Father Johannes), Jun Ichikawa (Katerina), Tommaso
Banfi (Father Milesi), Franco Leo (Monsignor Brusca), Silvia Rubino
(Elga)
102 min.
Giallo (2009)
U.S.A., U.K., Spain, Italy
Production: Hannibal Pictures, Giallo Production, Footprint Investment
Fund, Media Films, Opera Produzione
Distribution: Maya Entertainment
Producers: Adrien Brody, Rafael Primorac, Richard Rionda Del Castro
Assistant Directors: Fabrizio Bava, Jim Agnew, Stefano Ruggeri
Filmography
169
8/27/12 3:56 PM
Writers: Jim Agnew, Sean Keller, Dario Argento

Production Designer: Davide Bassan
Costume Designer: Stefania Svizzeretto
Editor: Roberto Silvi
Music: Marco Werba
Cast: Adrien Brody (Inspector Enzo Avolfi and Yellow), Emmanuelle Seigner
(Linda), Elsa Pataky (Celine), Robert Miano (Inspector Mori), Valentina
Izumi (Keiko)
92 min.
Dracula 3D (2012, projected)
Italy, France, Spain
Production: Enrique Cerezo Producciones Cinematograficas S.A., Film
Export Group, Les Films de lAstre
Distribution: Film Export Group
Producers: Enrique Cerezo, Roberto Di Girolamo, Sergio Gobbi, Franco
Paolucci, Giovanni Paolucci
Writers: Dario Argento, Antonio Tentori, Stefano Piani, and Enrique Cerezo
Production Designer: Massimo Antonella Geleng
Adapted from Dracula, by Bram Stoker
Editors: Daniele Campellis, Marshall Harvey
Cast: Rutger Hauer (Abraham Van Helsing), Asia Argento (Lucy Westenra),
Thomas Kretschmann (Dracula), Marta Gastini (Mina Harker), Unax
Ugalde (Jonathan Harker)
Summary: Shot in Turin by a team of Argento veterans, this film reinterprets
the classic story, Argento-style. In the horror film magazine Fangoria 308
(November 2011), Roberto DOnofrios article Dracula 3D: Profondo
Vampire quotes interviews with Dario Argento, Thomas Kretschmann,
Asia Argento, and Unax Ugalde. After lovingly describing his use of an
Alexa and a Sony F3 camera (Argento is the first Italian director to use
the latter) for shooting the film entirely in 3D, Argento comments on
the Italian locations he selected to capture the original storys period
flavor, authentic castles of a sort currently unavailable in Transylvania,
where the film is set. Argento emphasizes that the film will be a Dario
Argento movie, describing gory killings, with blood splattering out of the
screen, and a Dracula whose powers of transformation have expanded to
include flies, a giant mantis, and even a spider ... a half-human spider!
170
Filmography
8/27/12 3:56 PM
Kretschmann emphasizes that his Dracula is much more like Christopher

Lees than Gary Oldmans interpretation. He also comments on the
strangeness of once again having to violate and torture Asia in front of her
father; he recalls Dario telling him to think of it as a Stendhal sequel.
Asia herself seems happy to play Lucy rather than Mina, even though
Minas is traditionally the larger role: mentioning that her sister Fiore
Argento and mother Daria Nicolodi have both died in her fathers films,
she seems proud of a beautiful moment in the film, set in a crypt, where I
die for the first time in a film directed by my father. Ugalde comments on
Jonathan Harkers expanded presence and darker interpretation, alluding
to the films extended treatment of Harkers relationship with the Count.
Filmography
171
8/27/12 3:56 PM
8/27/12 3:56 PM
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Index
abjection, 7, 9, 77, 115, 147n6, 147n8

aestheticism, 4, 52-53, 88-93, 101, 111,
117-18. See also under rhetoric
Aja, Alexandre, 5, 49
Albani, Romano, 121
alchemy. See science: occult
Alighieri, Dante, 101. See also hell
Animal Trilogy, The, 38, 135, 151. See
also Neo-Animal Trilogy, The
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 4, 52
architecture, 71, 74-75, 78-79, 97-102,
107, 110, 154
Argento, Asia, 2-3, 17-22, 52, 109, 116,
127, 130-36
Argento, Claudio, 2
Argento, Fiore, 2, 121, 138
Argento, Salvatore, 2
Arnold, Gary, 85-86, 89-90
Audition, 4
auteurism, 3, 5, 52, 90, 94, 127-28
Bava, Lamberto, 128
Bava, Mario: influence on Argento 4,
30, 108, 143, 151, 158; reputation
increased by Argento, 128; work with
Argento, 99
Bennett, Joan, 77
Benshoff, Harry M., 37, 57
Bergman, Ingmar, 135, 140
Bertolucci, Bernardo, 2, 141, 149
Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The, 2,
23-43, 50-53, 58-62, 64, 66, 72, 74-75,
84, 119, 128-29, 132, 134, 140, 147n5,
152, 154, 158
Black, Joel, 147n7

Black Belly of the Tarantula, 38
Blow-Up, 52-53
Bolter, Jay, 139
Bordwell, David, 51
Brandon, Michael, 45, 62
Brody, Adrien, 135, 143-44
Brown, Dan, 117-18, 148n10
Buuel, Luis, 100
Burke, Edmund, 147n8
Burke, Frank, 27-28, 147n5
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The, 86, 108
camp, 90, 114, 117-18
Campbell, Donald, 148n11
canonicity, 4. See also Antonioni,
Michelangelo; Fellini, Federico;
giallo
Card Player, The, 3, 127-28, 134, 137-41
Carpenter, John, 4
Carrie, 120
Carroll, Nol, 51
Caruth, Cathy, 130-31
Castricano, Jodey, 94
Cat o Nine Tails, 37-43, 50, 58-62, 7475, 84
cats, 39, 99, 102, 104-5, 143, 150, 163-64
Cavara, Paolo, 38
Chien Andalou, Un, 100
Church, The, 128, 147n4
Cigarette Burns, 4
Cinque Giornate, Le. See Five Days of
Milan, The
Clover, Carol, 6-7, 51, 148n9
8/27/12 3:56 PM
computer-generated imagery (CGI), 18,

133
Comstock, George, 14
Connelly, Jennifer, 120, 125, 135
Cozzi, Luigi, 48, 92
Crane, Jonathan Lake, 10, 13
crane shots, 71, 121
Creed, Barbara, 77, 115
Creepers. See Phenomena
Dali, Salvador, 100
Dario Argento: Master of Horror, 92
Dario Argentos Door into Darkness, 24,
126, 157-58
Dario Argentos World of Horror, 7
Dark Dreams website, 21-22, 106
Dark Shadows, 77
Darnton, Nina, 103
Dawn of the Dead, 92
Dead Alive, 114
Death Proof, 4
Deep Red, 3-4, 24, 42, 47, 51-62, 66,
70,73-74, 76, 84, 86, 104, 108, 114,
119, 123, 129, 132, 134-37, 141,
150-54, 158
Deleuze, Gilles, 147n6
Demons, 3, 128
Demons 2, 2, 128
De Palma, Brian, 7
De Quincey, Thomas, 88-93, 96-97, 112
desensitization, 14
Dial M for Murder, 141
Doane, Mary Ann, 6
Dont Torture a Duckling, 147n4
Door into Darkness. See Dario Argentos
Door into Darkness
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 84, 154
Do You Like Hitchcock? 128, 134, 140-42
Dracula 3D, 2, 129, 170-71
dreams: in Argentos films, 50-52, 126-27,
130-31, 164; and Argentos style, 61-62,
75, 94-96
Edelstein, David, 117
Escher, M. C., 76, 139
Exorcist, The, 141
expressionism, 74-75, 86, 142, 151
182
fairy tales, 75, 77, 85, 96, 104, 122-23, 126

Fellini, Federico, 4, 66, 94-95, 102
feminism, 6, 62, 117
Firestarter, 120
Five Days of Milan, The, 2, 76-77, 118,
158-59
forensics, 32, 52, 125. See also science
Four Flies on Grey Velvet, 38, 42-53, 55,
59-62, 66
Frankensteins monster, 11-12, 48-49
Fraticelli, Franco, 151-52
Freedman, Jonathan, 14
French cinema, 5
Freud, Sigmund: on dreams, 50-51,
61-62; on homosexuality and perversion, 36-37, 49, 53, 57-60, 66, 146; on
memory, 31, 33, 68; on oedipal identification, 25-26, 35, 142; on trauma
and repression, 56, 130, 132. See also
gender; homosexuality; identification;
psychoanalysis
Friday the Thirteenth, 11, 128
Friedkin, William, 141
Fulci, Lucio, 38, 128, 147n4
Fury, The, 120
Gallant, Chris, 7, 9, 70
gender: and identification, 6, 7, 9, 35, 48,
53, 60; and normativity, 33-34, 114,
117, 125, 158; and violence, 5-9, 146,
150
genetics, 38-43, 52, 123. See also science
genre: categorizing films, 1, 24, 49, 77,
95, 149-51; challenged in films, 2, 4,
106, 118-19, 124; history of, 11, 2324, 37, 89-92, 128, 142; reflected on
in films, 31, 62, 72 . See also giallo;
slasher; supernatural, the
giallo: amateur detectives, 29, 37, 52-53,
62, 82-84, 106, 114, 118-20, 134, 141,
147n2; costumes, 30, 32, 36, 56; definition, 24, 49, 62, 103, 127-28, 133-36;
evolution, 53-54, 119-20, 124, 126, 129,
141; reflected on in films, 62, 72, 84,
142-46
Giallo (film title), 2, 127-28, 135, 142-46
Goblin, 55, 76-77, 85, 121, 126, 135
Index
8/27/12 3:56 PM
Golem, The, 142

gore: examples of, 9, 53, 66, 101-2, 114,
116, 126, 169; as hallmark of style, 1,
103, 118, 140, 148n8, 170. See also
aestheticism
Gracey, James, 86, 143
Green, David Gordon, 85
Grusin, Richard, 139
Haflidason, Almar, 134
Halloween, 11-12, 127-28
hands (Argentos), 36, 94, 143
Harper, Jessica, 76
Harris, Thomas, 144
Harvey, Dennis, 113-14, 117
hell, 101, 122
Hemmings, David, 52, 61, 151-53
High Tension, 4
Hitchcock, Alfred: compared to Argento,
7, 24, 36, 74, 158; Italian Hitchcock
(Argentos nickname), 24, 26, 141;
legacy of, 5-6, 23-24, 26; mentions
Argento, 24. See also Do You Like
Hitchcock?; Psycho
Holmes, Sherlock, 84, 124
homosexuality: in Bird with the Crystal
Plumage, 36, 39, 152-53; in Cat o Nine
Tails, 39-41; in Deep Red, 57-59, 15253; in Four Flies on Grey Velvet, 49-50;
in horror film, 11; in Mother of Tears,
115-16; in Tenebre, 63-65. See also
Freud, Sigmund; gender; identification; norms
Hooper, Geraldine, 58
Hopper, Edward, 73
identification: and psychoanalysis, 11, 17,
25-27, 33-35, 46, 53, 60; and trauma,
19-20, 36-37, 48, 134; with screen
violence and characters, 6-7, 9-11, 106.
See also Freud, Sigmund; gender; homosexuality; norms; sadistic voyeurism;
spectatorship
Inferno, 3, 62, 73, 88, 91, 94-108, 110,
112-15, 117, 126, 142, 153
influence: of Argento, 4-5, 38, 56, 108,
118, 141; on Argento, 74, 76, 92, 108,
140-41, 149, 151, 154; of violence on

spectators, 13-15, 17-18, 20-21. See
also Antonioni, Michelangelo; Bava,
Mario; Bergman, Ingmar; Escher,
M.C.; Fellini, Federico; Hitchcock,
Alfred; Lang, Fritz; Poe, Edgar Allan
insects, 43-45, 50-51, 120-26, 170.
See also Four Flies on Grey Velvet;
maggots
Jackson, Peter, 114
Japanese cinema, 4
Jenifer, 47, 117, 129, 167-68
Jones, Alan, 26, 39
Jungian archetypes, 96, 99
Kandinsky, Wassily, 74
Keitel, Harvey, 92
Kier, Udo, 82, 110
Knee, Adam, 7, 9
Koven, Mikel, 49, 73, 128, 147n2
Kristeva, Julia, 7, 147n8
Lang, Fritz, 74, 140, 142, 151
Laugier, Pascal, 5
Laurie, Piper, 130
Lavia, Gabriele, 104, 135, 153
Lee, Nathan, 117-18
Leone, Sergio, 2, 141, 149
Lizard in a Womans Skin, 38
lizards, 57, 104-5, 129
Macbeth, 9-10, 16
maggots, 91, 124, 126, 147n6
Magherini, Graziella, 17, 134
Manhunter, 144
Marnie, 141
Martyrs, 5
masochism, 6, 10-11
Masters of Horror, 4, 47, 117, 129, 167-69
McDonagh, Maitland: Broken Mirrors,
Broken Minds, 4, 83; interviewing Argento, 119; on post-Opera films, 108,
133; on pre-Opera films, 43, 49, 73-74,
88, 95-96, 98, 126
Medved, Michael, 14
memory: reconstruction 18-19, 31-34,
Index
183
8/27/12 3:56 PM
53, 59, 119, 124, 129, 132-33; replayed

on soundtrack 43, 99, 130; repression,
52, 129-32; unreliability of, 32-34, 132,
135, 152, 158
Miike, Takashi, 4
Miracle, Irene, 100
misogyny, 5-7, 9, 63, 115, 145-46
Modleski, Tania, 6
monsters, 11-12, 21-22, 58, 121-23. See
also Frankensteins monster
Morricone, Ennio, 27
Mother of Tears, 2-3, 73, 82, 88, 91, 10720, 126, 128, 148n10
Mulvey, Laura, 5-6
Munch, Edvard, 53-54, 75
Murnau, F. W., 11
Musante, Tony, 30, 52, 152
Nazism, 78
Neo-Animal Trilogy, The, 134. See also
Animal Trilogy, The
Nicolodi, Daria: personal connections,
3, 94, 108, 116, 171; roles, 57, 68, 102,
121, 151
norms: of film, 3-4, 6, 9, 11-12, 16; of
gender, 5-6, 33-35, 125; of sexuality
11-12, 36, 38, 64-67, 115-16, 147n4.
See also Freud, Sigmund; gender; homosexuality; psychoanalysis
Nosferatu, 11, 142
objectification, 5. See also feminism; misogyny; norms
Once upon a Time in the West, 2, 141,
149
ONeill, Phelim, 85, 89-90
Opera, 3, 5-17, 20, 23, 30, 46, 62, 72, 119,
129, 146
Opera Film Produzione, 2
Ossessione, 141
paintings: influence on films, 73-76, 139,
154; shown in films, 18-20, 27, 34-37,
53, 56
Pater, Walter, 93, 148n8. See also aestheticism
Pelts, 47, 117, 129, 168-69
184
Phantom of the Opera, The (film by Argento), 2, 129, 165-66

Phantom of the Opera, The (novel by
Leroux), 8, 165
Phenomena, 3, 73, 119-28, 135, 148n11
Pleasance, Donald, 120
Poe, Edgar Allan, 7, 92-93, 98, 163-64
point of view: of killers and victims, 7-10,
71, 121, 125, 129, 158; through special
effects, 32, 51, 100, 126-27. See also
identification; spectatorship
police: as critics, 12-17, 22; as ineffective,
25, 27, 29-32, 36-38, 59, 66, 124, 132;
as problematic protagonists, 42, 109,
133-34, 137-40, 143-44, 168
poliziotto, 128, 133, 137, 143
Pollock, Jackson, 75
postmodernism, 4, 71-74, 117
Powell, Anna, 147n6
Profondo Rosso. See Deep Red
Psycho, 6, 23-29, 58-61, 106, 141
psychoanalysis: Argentos interest, 17,
23, 33, 95-96, 151; centrality in film,
4, 23-26, 52, 147n1; challenged by
Argentos films, 27-33, 37, 50-53, 6061, 67-70, 73, 82, 129, 132-34, 146;
defining gender and sexuality, 35-37,
46, 58-59, 64. See also Creed, Barbara;
feminism; Freud, Sigmund; gender;
homosexuality; Kristeva, Julia; Mulvey,
Laura; norms
queerness, 48-49, 50, 58, 116. See also
homosexuality; norms
rape, 18-22, 36, 48-49, 122, 134, 159
Rear Window, 141
reflections: on film as art 2, 4, 9, 18, 49,
51, 60, 68, 106, 146; on gender and
sexuality, 7, 35, 116; mirror images, 53,
60-61, 122-23, 138, 143, 145, 152. See
also self-consciousness
Renzi, Eva, 36
repression: and memory, 52, 56-57, 129,
131; and sexuality, 11-12, 59. See also
Freud, Sigmund
rhetoric: about aesthetics, 60-62, 70, 96;
Index
8/27/12 3:56 PM
about film, 3, 14, 63, 140, 146; film as,

5; politics, 116; about psychoanalysis,
35, 50, 53-54
Rinehart, Mary Roberts, 142
Robins, Eva, 67
romanticism, 4, 88, 92. See also De
Quincey, Thomas; Poe, Edgar Allan
Rome, 18, 62, 72-76, 97-98, 104-13, 117
Romero, George A., 4, 17, 92, 163-64
Rosemarys Baby, 84
Sacchetti, Dardano, 38
Sade, Marquis de, 5
sadism: and sadistic voyeurism, 5-6, 9-17,
23, 52; and violence, 19, 29, 43, 109,
138, 140, 150
Sarris, Andrew, 94
Saw, 56, 108, 118
Scarlet Diva, 2
Scarlet Street, 77
Schneider, Steven Jay, 147n1, 147n7
Schulte-Sasse, Linda, 77-78
science: critiqued by films, 37-38, 43-44,
48, 50-53, 61, 70, 73, 119, 132-33; extremes of, 121-26; occult, 83-84, 95-96,
111-13, 153
Scream, 137
Sect, The, 128
self-consciousness, 7, 51, 54, 62-72, 88,
92, 140-46. See also reflections; spectatorship
sensationalism, 4, 151
sexuality. See under Freud, Sigmund;
homosexuality; identification; norms;
psychoanalysis; reflections; repression;
sadism
Shining, The, 120
Silence of the Lambs, The, 144
slasher films, 11-13, 127-28
Smith, Joan, 14
Snow White, 84
Soavi, Michele, 128
Sontag, Susan, 117
spectatorship, 2, 6-10, 13, 17, 52, 70, 140.
See also identification; point of view;
reflection; sadism; self-consciousness
Staiger, Janet, 90
Stendhal syndrome (condition), 17-19,

22-23, 134, 154
Stendhal Syndrome (film), 2-3, 5, 17-23,
42, 52, 118, 127-28, 133-34, 137, 154,
171
Stivaletti, Sergio, 122, 128
Stoker, Bram, 121, 170-71
Strangers on a Train, 141
sublime, the, 17, 86, 121, 147-8n8
supernatural, the: and genre, 1, 62, 77,
84, 118-20, 124-29, 141; and plot elements, 12, 53, 82, 114, 117, 120-23,
129, 166
surreality, 94, 99-100, 166. See also
dreams
Suspiria, 3, 17, 62, 73, 75-120, 126, 139,
141-42, 147n6, 150, 153
Tarantino, Quentin, 4, 141
Technicolor, 86
Tenebre, 2-3, 42, 62-75, 84, 115, 119, 134,
136-37, 152-54
Terror at the Opera. See Opera
theory. See auteurism; feminism; psychoanalysis; rhetoric; science
Third Mother, The. See Mother of Tears
Three Mothers Trilogy. See Inferno;
Mother of Tears; Suspiria
Tovoli, Luciano, 86
trauma (condition): childhood, 48, 53,
55-58, 67; sexual, 19, 27, 34, 66-67. See
also memory; psychoanalysis; repression; Trauma (film)
Trauma (film), 2, 52, 127-34, 126, 152-53
Two Evil Eyes, 17, 92, 154, 163-64
Unsane. See Tenebre
Untraceable, 137
Valli, Alida, 102
Verdi, 10, 16, 104
Vertigo, 74, 141
Visconti, Luchino, 141
von Sydow, Max, 135-36
voyeurism: represented by Argento,
30,46, 72, 150; sadistic, 5-6, 9-17,
23,52
Index
185
8/27/12 3:56 PM
Wax Mask, 128

Whale, James, 11
When a Stranger Calls, 137
Wiene, Robert, 74. See also Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari, The
Wilde, Oscar, 93. See also aestheticism
Winter, Douglas, 15
186
witchcraft: in apocalyptic narrative, 10915; and Daria Nicolodi, 3; and genre,

62, 95, 119; as irrational agency, 77-86,
95, 98, 164
Wood, Robin, 11-12, 57
Zapponi, Bernardino, 55
Index
8/27/12 3:56 PM
L. Andrew Cooper is an assistant professor of film
and digital media at the University of Louisville

and the author of Gothic Realities: The Impact
of Horror Fiction on Modern Culture.
8/27/12 3:56 PM
Books in the series

Contemporary Film Directors
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Darlene J. Sadlier
Terrence Malick
Lloyd Michaels
Abbas Kiarostami
Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan
Rosenbaum
Sally Potter
Catherine Fowler
Joel and Ethan Coen

R. Barton Palmer
Claire Denis
Judith Mayne
Wong Kar-wai
Peter Brunette
Edward Yang
John Anderson
Pedro Almodvar
Marvin DLugo
Chris Marker
Nora Alter
Abel Ferrara
Nicole Brenez, translated by
Adrian Martin
Jane Campion
Kathleen McHugh
Jim Jarmusch
Juan Surez
Roman Polanski
James Morrison
Manoel de Oliveira
John Randal Johnson
Neil Jordan
Maria Pramaggiore
Paul Schrader
George Kouvaros
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Elizabeth Ezra
Atom Egoyan
Emma Wilson
Albert Maysles
Joe McElhaney
Jerry Lewis
Chris Fujiwara
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Joseph Mai
Michael Haneke
Peter Brunette
Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu
Celestino Deleyto and Maria del
Mar Azcona
Lars von Trier
Linda Badley
Hal Hartley
Mark L. Berrettini
Franois Ozon
Thibaut Schilt
Steven Soderbergh
Aaron Baker
Mike Leigh
Sean OSullivan
D.A. Pennebaker
Keith Beattie
Jacques Rivette
Mary M. Wiles
Kim Ki-duk
Hye Seung Chung
8/27/12 3:56 PM
Philip Kaufman
Annette Insdorf
John Sayles
David R. Shumway
Richard Linklater
David T. Johnson
Dario Argento
L. Andrew Cooper
David Lynch
Justus Nieland
8/27/12 3:56 PM
The University of Illinois Press

is a founding member of the
Association of American University Presses.
Designed by Paula Newcomb

Composed in 10/13 New Caledonia LT Std
with Helvetica Neue LT Std display
by Celia Shapland
at the University of Illinois Press
Manufactured by Thomson-Shore, Inc.
University of Illinois Press
1325 South Oak Street
Champaign, IL 61820-6903
www.press.uillinois.edu
8/27/12 3:56 PM
FILM STUDIES
Dario Argento
L. Andrew Cooper
L. Andrew Cooper is
an assistant professor of
film and digital media at
A novel and interesting approach to Argentos

oeuvre. Coopers interrogation of authorial style
and theoretical readings of the films are thorough,
insightful, and astute.
Realities: The Impact of
Brigid Cherry, coeditor of Twenty-first-century Gothic
Horror Fiction on Modern
Commanding a cult following among horror fans,

Italian film director Dario Argento is best known
for his work in two closely related genres, the crime
thriller and supernatural horror, as well as his influence on modern horror and slasher movies. In his
four decades of filmmaking, Argento has displayed
a commitment to innovation, from his directorial
debut with 1970s suspense thriller The Bird with
the Crystal Plumage to 2009s Giallo. His films, like
the lurid yellow-covered murder-mystery novels
they are inspired by, follow the suspense tradition of
hard-boiled American detective fiction while incorporating baroque scenes of violence and excess.
While considerations of Argentos films often
describe them as irrational nightmares, L. Andrew
Cooper uses controversies and theories about the
films reflections on sadism, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, aestheticism, and genre to declare the
anti-rational logic of Argentos oeuvre. Approaching
the films as rhetorical statements made through
extremes of sound and vision, Cooper places
Argento in a tradition of aestheticized horror that
includes De Sade, De Quincey, Poe, and Hitchcock.
Analyzing individual images and sequences as well
as larger narrative structures, he reveals how the
directors stylistic excesses, often condemned for glorifying misogyny and other forms of violence, offer
productive resistance to the cinemas visual, narrative, and political norms.
the University of Louisville

and the author of Gothic
Culture.
A volume in the series

Contemporary Film
Directors, edited by
James Naremore
Cover photo: La Sindrome

di Stendhal (1996) a.k.a. The
Stendhal Syndrome. Directed
by Dario Argento. Shown: Asia
Argento. Credit: Photofest.
Cover design: Paula Newcomb
University of Illinois Press

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
www.press.uillinois.edu
ISBN 978-0-252-07874-3
90000
9 780252 078743

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What is the book about?

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What genres of film does Dario Argento work in?

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C O N T E M P O R A R Y

Contemporary Film Directors

The Contemporary Film Directors series provides concise,

A list of books in the series appears

2012 by the Board of Trustees

The Stendhal Syndrome 17

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage 26

The Cat o Nine Tails 37

Four Flies on Grey Velvet 43

Mother of Tears 107

The Stendhal Syndrome (Revisited) 133

The Card Player 137

Do You Like Hitchcock? 140

Interviews with Dario Argento | 149

Filmography: Feature Films and

and others at QRFV were very supportive. My first presentation about

actress in the Argento-directed Phenomena (1985) and had major roles

Doing Violence on Film

connect the films to broader tendencies in film history. Even as it shows

of filmmakers represented by the French filmmakers Alexandre Aja

Doing Violence on Film

against these obsessions and assumptions (1516). By reacting against

a similar argument in the 1985 documentary Dario Argentos World

Doing Violence on Film

Figure 1. In Opera, the opera singer Betty

Doing Violence on Film

Doing Violence on Film

as a policeman, and if he is an analog for the critic, he suggests that critics

Doing Violence on Film

Doing Violence on Film

terms, a violent demonstration of how watching horror films to condemn

Doing Violence on Film

Doing Violence on Film

be an art student. In her new guise, she begins a romantic relationship

dane actions receive extreme representation: for example, when Anna

Doing Violence on Film

Doing Violence on Film

became an international success, Argento quickly earned the title of

Doing Violence on Film

This explanation relies on psychoanalytic theory about identification,

Doing Violence on Film

be a true-to-genre title based on the weak whodunit aspect of the plot,

Doing Violence on Film

Figure 2. In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage,

Sams quest makes him both patient and analyst in a psychoanalytic

Doing Violence on Film

Argento slides easily from a claim about psychoanalysis, to an idea about

Doing Violence on Film

This misidentification works contrary to cultural expectations and

Oedipal identifications, which are the prototype of all identifications,

Doing Violence on Film

Doing Violence on Film

films beginning, during which Argentos camera carefully notes police

giordani: Nine leads to follow. Its a cat with nine tails.

Doing Violence on Film

Giordani exhibits unflappable poise as he delves into the world that