Dario Argento's Bio

The following bio was taken from the book "The Fearmakers" by John McCarthy. This book looks at some of the greatest masters of suspense and terror (i.e. Tod Browning, James Whales, Roger Corman, William Castle, Terrance Fisher, George Romero, Dario Argento, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, and many more). I highly recommend this book to all horror aficionados.

Born in 1943, Dario Argento, the son of Italian film producer Salvatore Argento, segued from his early career as a film critic to assistant to Italian shockmeister Mario Bava to full-time screenwriter (and cowriter with Bernardo Bertolucci and Sergio Leone of the rightfully revered epic spaghetti "Western Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968). He has since parlayed his phobias into a directorial c career that marks him as the Italian cine ma's reigning king of bloody terror.

Argento's fear filmmaking is skewed at best and full of contradictions. Horror-film characters have always been apt to run foolishly into dark attics or cellars often with known killers or monsters lurking about. But Argento's characters are ten times as likely to commit such foolish acts, and much else, to propel the plots of his pictures from one shock scene to the next. His characters often share psychic bonds with animals, even insects.

Argento the film festival guest professes to love animals but Argento the director kills them off on-screen with alarming frequency. Nineteenth-century criminology and pounding synthesizer scores often inhabit the same film. He usually keeps his chillers cold, distancing viewers from his characters emotionally, while using his fluid camera style to bring audiences and characters together physically—in some cases by taking the viewer right into the victim's eyeball or brain pan.

Popular and critical reaction to Argento's work is likewise divided. Some people, witnessing Argento's creeping camera, garish lighting, and convoluted story lines, accuse him of placing style over substance. Others rationalize his excesses as attempts to choreograph nightmares. Extreme reactions dismiss him as a no-talent hack or over praise him as "the Italian Hitchcock." Argento may have his flaws, but provoking lukewarm reaction is not one of them.

Nineteen-seventy saw the release of "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage", Argento's directorial debut and the first of his skin" of "giallo" (or "yellow"---in Italy the "color of fear") shockers. American writer in Rome Tony Musante sees a woman attacked by a crazed-knife wielder in an art gallery. He alerts the police and they reward him by withholding his passport, stranding him in Rome. On his way back to his apartment from the police station, he almost has his head taken off by a meat cleaver and he takes it upon himself to catch the killer with the help of his girlfriend (Suzy Kendall). One of the clues to the killer's identity is a macabre painting of a black-clad murderer attacking a young girl; the artist is a demented reclusive who fattens felines for dinner.

Argento opens this flick with shots of the killers' black-gloved hands (a la Mario Bava's "Blood and Black Lace", (1964) and emulates Hitchcock with lingering shots of several gleaming knife blades. Hitchcockian voyeurism is also introduced early on: in fact, this theme recurs in nearly every Argento picture. The gore is fairly restrained compared with the all-out massacres of his later "Inferno" and "Opera" a remarkable degree of suspense is sustained throughout, and the title even makes sense by film's end.

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©1994 John McCarthy

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