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I Want To Be Loved: Dario Argento's Wild
World of Horror
by Josh Slates
Buy
Argento films NOW!
A horror stylist of the highest order with a diverse body of work
that spans over thirty years, Dario Argento is one of the few remaining
auteurs in contemporary cinema in that he leaves an identifiable imprint
on virtually every aspect of the production of his films. An endlessly
restless camera and a hyperactive musical score are the most immediately
recognizable aspects of an Argento opus, although the detached performances
that result from his notoriously ambivalent direction of actors must
also be viewed as an unfortunate consequence of this obsessive oversight.
The son of Italian film producer Salvatore Argento, Dario began his
career as a journalist and screenwriter before collaborating with
Sergio Leone on Once Upon a Time in the West. Leone,
Argento and even Bernardo Bertolucci all share credit for the screenplay
to this seminal spaghetti-western classic. It wasn’t long before
Dario found himself in the director’s chair, choosing to make
his directorial debut in 1969 with a murder-mystery that would come
to redefine Italian cinema of the seventies and beyond.
The Bird With the Crystal Plumage began as a nod
to Italian “giallo” mystery novels of the 1920’s,
sordid pulp thrillers that were characterized by the yellow background
of their suggestively illustrated paperback covers. The incredible
international success that greeted this film gave birth to so many
imitative efforts that the “giallo” film soon became something
of a sub-genre unto itself, although few of the titles that followed
exhibit the assured craftsmanship that Argento displays in this remarkable
debut.
The story, which is ultimately just a series of reversals that serve
as a vessel for Argento’s visual dynamo, concerns an American
novelist who witnesses an attempted murder through the voyeuristically
transparent windows of an art gallery. As is the norm for most of
the director’s protagonists, this gentleman begins to develop
a fascination with unmasking the culprit to the point of complete
disregard for his own personal safety.
Here Argento began to experiment with one of his favorite devices,
using the anamorphic milieu of his camera to show the subjective point-of-view
of both killer and victim. Most unusually, in this film (and in all
of his films that followed) Argento insisted on using his own gloved
hands to murder a character or abscond with crucial evidence whenever
the point-of-view of the killer is utilized. This habit carries added
subtext in his later films, where he actually portrays himself maiming
members of his own immediate family that have been cast in supporting
roles!
Dario followed this auspicious first effort in 1970 with The
Cat O’Nine Tails, which he envisioned as the second
part of a trilogy of thrillers that chose to feature fauna in their
titles. Karl Malden stars as a blind man and amateur sleuth who is
drawn into a mystery involving a burglary at a genetics research facility.
James Franciscus appears as a cynical newspaper reporter who eventually
assists Malden in his investigation after a series of strangulations
greet everyone who is seemingly connected with the robbery.
Argento has described this as his least favorite of all of his directorial
efforts, as he felt that he was too overly concerned with replicating
the success of The Bird With the Crystal Plumage
to create a satisfying work. Ultimately, The Cat O’Nine
Tails is more fondly remembered for the gruesome catharsis
that closes the film than the 111 minutes of plodding narrative that
precedes it. This is not to say that the film is bereft of creative
ingenuity; in an interview that is included on the Anchor Bay video
release, Ennio Morricone (who scored both films) discusses a form
of dodecaphany that he used to create a uniquely minimalist soundtrack
built upon a succession of scales and ranges. We also watch Argento’s
continued fascination with subjective cinematography, where one shot
is incredibly rendered from the point-of-view of a glass of milk!
1971’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet remains one
of the director’s most obscure and inaccessible titles. Paramount
owns the theatrical and video rights to the conclusion to his “animal
trilogy” and a stateside home-video release has never surfaced.
This effort does feature a jaw-dropping conclusion (which is excerpted
in Michele Soavi’s documentary Dario Argento’s
World of Horror) where Mimsy Farmer is decapitated in a car
crash that unspools in ultra-slow-motion. It is rumored that Argento
destroyed over a dozen cars before he was able to properly capture
the moment on celluloid.
Curiously, this blackmail thriller is also one of his less-regarded
efforts, with many reviews pointing to Argento’s apparent boredom
with the trappings of the “giallo” film. He spent several
years on hiatus before directing another film (the equally inaccessible
historical drama The Five Days of Milan) but came
charging back into international prominence in 1975 with a wholly
original work of the macabre: Deep Red.
Introducing elements of supernatural horror and teaming with upstart
experimental rock n’ roll outfit Goblin to create the outrageous
musical score, Argento successfully unified his many tangential obsessions
and his undeniable talents as a filmmaker to create this ambitious
and audacious creation. After witnessing the murder of a psychic at
the hands of a hatchet-wielding maniac, David Hemmings becomes consumed
with cracking the case and discovers a strange link to a long-forgotten
homicide from the distant past.
Deep Red is also noteworthy in that it represents
the first of the director’s many collaborations with Daria Nicolodi,
who co-stars in the role of whip-smart investigative journalist Gianna.
Brought together by their interest in the occult, love blossomed between
Nicolodi and Argento off-screen and they gave birth to two daughters,
Fiore and Asia. Inspired by the works of Thomas DeQuincey and tall
tales told to Nicolodi by her eccentric grandmother, the lovers co-authored
what is regarded by many as their most spectacular contribution to
world cinema: the 1977 witchcraft epic Suspiria.
Suspiria stars Jessica Harper as Suzy Banyon, a timid
young American ballerina who is chosen to attend a prestigious school
of dance in Germany. Shortly after her arrival, the school is enveloped
in paranormal phenomena as maggots rain from the ceilings and Suzy
is stricken with unexplained bouts of sickness and fatigue. Under
the hushed whispers of her peers, she is informed that the school
itself is a front for a coven of witches bent on destroying Suzy simply
to satiate their own bloodlust and greed.
In the sense that it proved to be an invaluable influence on an entire
generation of horror filmmakers who often make overt (and sometimes
overtly plagiaristic) nods to its famous set pieces, Suspiria
may be Argento’s most important work. The director also began
to expand his mastery of cinematography beyond the use of oblique
angles and subjective mise en scene, hiring director of photography
Luciano Tovoli to lens the film utilizing a now-defunct three-strip
Technicolor process.
This process, originally used for such Hollywood epics as The
Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, uses
a special camera where three individual rolls of 35mm film are exposed
in synchronization. Each strand of negative is dedicated to yellow,
cyan and magenta hues and a dye-transfer procedure produces the final
positive image. The richness in image quality that this color separation
affords is nothing short of eye-popping and it brings the film’s
garish production design to super-saturated life.
Argento and Nicolodi soon decided to frame Suspiria as the first film
of a trilogy based upon the short story “Suspiria De Profundis”
by Thomas DeQuincey and began to collaborate on the second installment.
The maestro also found the time produce another seminal horror film
of the seventies, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.
Featuring a score by the now-ubiquitous Goblin, Argento co-financed
the film in an effort to secure its foreign theatrical rights. He
also re-edited it to better suit European tastes and the resulting
release, titled Zombi, is a leaner work with a running time of 118
minutes.
Little did anyone realize that a fledgling filmmaker named Lucio Fulci
was helming an unauthorized, in-name-only sequel entitled Zombie
2 which would eventually be released stateside as Zombie:
The Dead Are Among Us. While Romero and Argento dismissed
it as a rip-off, it has developed a cult reputation of its own and
features an improbable but highly entertaining underwater battle between
a soggy zombie and a grouchy shark.
When Argento emerged in 1980 with Inferno, the second
part of his now-christened “Three Mothers” trilogy, it
was given an extremely limited release by 20th Century Fox. The studio
reaped a tidy profit from its domestic release of Suspiria but was
apprehensive about rushing this head-scratching effort into a wide
release. The dream-like structure of the piece gives it an oddly hypnotic
texture but it offers a bare minimum of momentum.
Always anxious to try something different, the director side-stepped
Goblin and entrusted the composition of the original music to keyboardist
Keith Emerson, receiving a rousing but oddly generic synthesizer score
as a result. Argento also teamed with horror impresario Mario Bava
(largely in the form of special effects fabrication and uncredited
assistance on one particularly complex underwater sequence) but it
would unfortunately be Bava’s swan song, as the veteran filmmaker
died shortly following production. For one of any number of reasons,
Argento decided to set aside the third slice of his still-unfinished
trilogy and return to the giallo mysteries that ushered in his career.
Tenebre is a queer duck of a murder yarn that stars
Tony Franciosa as a writer who is plagued with strange death threats
while promoting the publication of his new book. John Saxon also appears
as a devil-may-care playboy-cum-plot device. The true star of the
film is Luciano Tovoli’s roving camera, which behaves like a
rabid dog that has finally broken free from the confines of its tethered
leash. It is the hero of this film, dismissive of any obligation to
provide a subjective or even objective document of the narrative unfolding
around it. Argento also had a very public row with Franciosa during
the production and claims that the actor was drunk in every scene
in which he appears.
Argento later took some time off from directorial duties to finance
and present two films directed by the son of his late mentor, Mario
Bava. Lamberto Bava’s Demons is a gory but
only intermittently imaginative tale of fanged beasties who mutilate
an audience gathered for a sneak preview of a mysterious horror movie.
An inevitable sequel soon followed, concerning demons that emerge
from television sets airing a documentary about the events of the
original film. Asia Argento also made her debut as an actress at the
age of eleven in Demons 2.
Jennifer Connelly had an unusual introduction to the film industry.
Her on-screen debut was in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon
a Time in America as the childhood form of Elizabeth McGovern’s
character in the film. The young actress would soon find herself wading
through maggots and gore in a dungeon-like moat on the set of Argento’s
Phenomena, a wacky tale of a famous actor’s
daughter who uses her psychic relationship with insects to battle
a mad slasher who is on the loose at an exclusive Swiss boarding school.
Suggesting the narrative insistency of a satisfying bowl of beef stew
that takes about 110 grudging minutes to finish, Phenomena also features
Donald Pleasance in an expectedly intense performance as a wheelchair-bound
pathologist who uses a laser pointer to teach a domesticated ape to
do his bidding. The soundtrack features many diverse musical selections
from Goblin, Bill Wyman, Simon Boswell and Lemmy Kilmister. New Line
Cinema originally released the film shorn of 28 minutes under the
title of Creepers.
Argento describes the making of Opera in 1987 as
“unpleasant.” After an unsuccessful attempt to mount “Rigoletto”
on the stage, the director decided instead to bring an opera-themed
horror story to the screen. In an ironic and tragic twist, his plot
concerned an opera company’s adaptation of the supposedly cursed
Shakespeare play MacBeth and Argento soon found his own production
plagued with difficulties and misfortune.
Shortly before the beginning of principal photography, Vanessa Redgrave,
who was to have played a short-tempered soprano who receives a gory
comeuppance, walked away from the production and forced the director
to replace her with another actress. His father and co-producer, Salvatore
Argento, also died of a heart attack the age of 73 during the course
of the production. The director soon also ended his twelve-year relationship
with Daria Nicolodi, who appears in Opera in the
role of Mira.
Following this troubled production and the dissolution of his relationship
with the mother of his two daughters, Dario Argento decided to briefly
relocate to the United States where he and George Romero began developing
Two Evil Eyes, a two-part film where each helmer
had an opportunity to adapt a separate work by Edgar Allan Poe. Romero
chose to direct Adrienne Barbeau in The Facts in the Case
of M. Valdemar while Argento cast Harvey Keitel and Sally
Kirkland in an updating of The Black Cat. The surprisingly
subdued result of their efforts spent years gathering dust on its
distributor’s shelf before it was released on video in 1991.
A year later, Argento also appeared in a cameo as a paramedic in John
Landis’ Innocent Blood.
The release of Trauma in 1993 both marked the last
of his American productions and the first of many subsequent on-screen
collaborations with his daughter, Asia. The two films that followed,
The Stendhal Syndrome and an adaptation of Phantom
of the Opera, are perhaps Argento’s weakest efforts
as a director but remain of importance to completists who are curious
to see the squeamish lengths to which Argento will travel to sexually
objectify and brutalize his own daughter on-screen.
Trauma stars Asia as an anorexic runaway named Aura
who runs afoul of a sinister psycho who uses a loop-saw to behead
both of her parents after a seance goes awry. Piper Laurie, Brad Dourif
and Frederic Forrest all phone in adequately hysterical performances
but it is Asia who sinks this tepid mess with her unsympathetic and
outlandish performance. Subplots involving a recovering drug addict’s
voyeuristic lust for her nude form and his subsequent attempts to
cure her of her anorexia are unsettling.
The Stendhal Syndrome was heralded as Dario Argento’s
return to his Italian roots and he celebrated by reuniting with composer
Ennio Morricone. This 1996 release also marks the director’s
first experiments with computer-generated special effects, as the
central conceit requires that characters walk into paintings hanging
on the wall of an art gallery. An awesomely miscast Asia Argento stars
as a police detective who is repeatedly and gratuitously traumatized
by a razor-wielding rapist and begins to fear for her life. These
molestations are rendered in such thorough detail that Miramax Films
refused to release The Stendhal Syndrome in the United
States without pruning over twenty minutes of violent content. (Troma
eventually released the film uncensored and uncut.) After she murders
her tormentor and attempts to move on with her life by donning a blonde
wig and exhibiting increasingly erratic behavior, the narrative grinds
forth to a “surprise ending” that anyone familiar with
the director’s earlier efforts might have anticipated from the
outset.
The Phantom of the Opera is a fitfully ludicrous
and only sporadically gruesome rehash of Gaston Leroux’s classic
story. Asia finds herself in the role of Christine Daae, a beautiful
opera singer who prances through most of the film with a dead bird
stapled to her hat. In one of the maestro’s many changes to
the original source material, Christine now seems to have a telepathic
relationship with the titular fellow and this often sends her into
fits of fainting and extreme overacting. Julian Sands’ portrayal
of the phantom differs from past and contemporary interpretations
in that he finds himself engaging in a lot of doggy-style sex with
Asia Argento.
Just as his father helped finance his first film, Dario was a good
sport and he funded Asia’s directorial debut as well. Scarlet
Diva is perhaps the ultimate in quasi-autobiographical, supposedly
confessional and vaguely feminist diarist-filmmaking. Asia herself
stars as Anna Batista, an internationally known actress whose trailer-bound
sexual hijinks with Schoolly D do little to endear her with the production
assistants who are sent to fetch her during her many liaisons. Joe
Coleman (whose own life is documented in Rest in Pieces) plays a producer
who forces her to rub massage oil all over his belly while pitching
her a starring role in a project scripted by Gus Van Sant. Her assertion
that none of the many scenes of sexual intercourse were simulated
may lead some to question the inspiration for her debut feature. Taking
a cue from her father, Asia casts her mother (Daria Nicolodi) in the
film only to dispose of her character in an unceremonious fashion.
Michele Soavi, Argento’s longtime assistant director, also reaped
the benefits of his generosity as a producer in that his directorial
efforts The Church and Stage Fright
were both bankrolled under the maestro’s auspices. Soavi also
directed the documentary Dario Argento’s World of Horror and
later went on to helm Dellamorte Dellamore, an adaptation of the “Dylan
Dog” comic book that was released as Cemetery Man in the US.
Proving that the Argento birthright brings with it a savvy knack for
film production, Dario’s younger brother Claudio established
himself as a producer with the 1989 release of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s
Santa Sangre. Rumors swirled around their attempts
to bring a sequel to El Topo to the screen but those
hopes were quashed by a threatened legal challenge from ABKCO chairman
Allen Klein, who owns the rights to the original film.
Nonhosonno, which was recently released in the states
by Artisan Entertainment as Sleepless, is Dario’s
latest expedition into hyperbolic graphic violence and is also something
of a nod to the murder-mysteries that ushered in his career. Max von
Sydow stars as an insomniac police inspector who is forced to revisit
a case involving a dwarf-sized sadist (and amateur “giallo”
novelist) after a copycat killer begins wreaking violent havoc some
seventeen years later.
There are few polite gestures in this briskly paced slash-‘em-up,
which is quite brutal even by Argento’s demented standards and
also features a wonderfully funky score by Goblin that often recalls
no-nonsense Italian police thrillers of the seventies. This time around,
Asia is nowhere to be found on-screen and merely authors the sing-song
nursery rhyme that drives the killer and foreshadows the bloody carnage
that ensues.
Dario Argento is currently working under a three-picture contract
for producer Vittorio Cecchi Gori. His next project, a giallo film
titled Occhiali Neri, was announced in the summer
of 2001 but the start of production has since been cancelled. He is
now rumored to be working on a sequel to Phenomena
but will likely continue to greet his ardent fans with a surprise
or two regardless of what he chooses as his next project.
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