Dario Argento's Bio 2

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.

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Realizing that there was gold in "them thar giallos," especially ones with black-clad killers and funny animal titles, Argento launched his second outing, "The Cat O'Nine Tails" (1971), which opens with a bungled break-in at a genetics lab, and soon escalates to homicide. Overbearing reporter James Franciscus and blind habitual puzzle solver Karl Malden appoint themselves civilian detectives to try and catch the killer. Though the film drags in the middle boredom is spelled by a slate of sick secondary characters and some delightfully dumb dialogue. For example, after the killer nearly asphyxiates Malden and tries to poison Franciscus, the latter remarks to his girlfriend, "They're playing a little rough."

Suspense mounts in the final third of the film when Malden's niece is abducted and Franciscus is locked inside a mausoleum. The murderer is unmasked in a literally bone-crunching climax, with the heroes fighting for their lives as the police close in; before the bloody battle is over, the killer reveals that an extra Y chromosome in his genes is what drove him to mania.

The "Cat O'Nine Tails" is much too long at 112 minutes, but Argento livens the pace up with a spooky cemetery sequence, several gory murders, and a rope-burn number that leaves viewers' palms stinging for weeks afterward. The film also boasts a likable protagonist in Malden's character---an unusual departure from Argento's overall body of work.

"Four Flies on Grey Velvet" followed in 1971. Featuring Mimsy Farmer, Michael Brandon and another throbbing Ennio Morricone score, the film relies on the outdated premise that a killer's image is imprinted on the retinas of his victims. Quite bloody and gruesome in its original form, the film was heavily trimmed by Paramount for U.S. release.

Argento's influence was felt early on, if only superficially. After "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" turned a profit, other directors trotted out generally lame thrillers with titles in a similar vein, such as "Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye" and "Scorpion with Two Tails". With the possible exception of Lucio Fulci's grisly "Don't Torture a Duckling", this subgenre offered little that was either new or shocking. But when titles began to reach such absurd extremes as "The Black Belly of the Tarantula", the subgenre at least offered terror triviologists a few laughs.

In its original cut, Argento's "Deep Red" (1976) easily lives up to its name. A renowned psychic lecturing in Rome senses a killer in the auditorium and then is summarily murdered by the cleaver- maniac. The butchery is witnessed by her neighbor, pianist David Hemmings, who, like any good Argento protagonist, immediately rushes to the murder scene unarmed. Hemmings takes it upon himself to solve the case---partly as a challenge to his intellect and possibly to get the best of some arrogant Roman cops. He also wants to match wits with dynamic journalist Daria Nicolodi. (Hemmings also evidences some outdated notions regarding women as the "gentler, weaker sex," which are dashed to pieces by the time the film is over.)

While retreading ideas from Crystal Plumage, Argento lays on gallons of gore this time around. Sundry knifings and hackings are augmented by a decapitation via elevator and the shocking sight of a victim's teeth being smashed out on a stone mantelpiece. The throbbing score was supplied not by Morricone this time but by a group called Goblin, which later scored George A. Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" (1979), a film Argento co-produced.

In his first four pictures, Argento veiled the identities of his killers by showing the black-garbed miscreants only in long shot, or by employing close-ups of the psychos' gloved hands and feverishly rolling eyeballs, or by not showing them at all, just the results of their handiwork. Until the murderers seems to be more ghostly than flesh-and-blood real. Possibly taking a cue from this, Argento plunged headlong into the world of the supernatural with his next two films, beginning with "Suspiria" (1976), the first film of a projected trilogy about sorceresses living and killing in Rome, New York City, and Argento's fictional Friburg, Germany. Student Jessica Harper arrives at her Tanz Akademie in time to witness the bloody murders of two fellow students. With screwy Argento logic, the school remains open in spite of this. We quickly find out that the Akademie is the lair of the Mother of Whispers, and in no time our heroine is fighting for her life. Argento pulled out all the stops in this one, cranking up the Goblin sound track and employing garish-colored gels and flying cameras to create a dizzyingly nightmarish atmosphere. The influence of Roger (for man's "The Masque of the Red Death" (1964) and "House of Usher" (1960) is evident in Argento's ghastly red/blue/black color schemes and the film's holocaust of an ending, which makes up in pure pyrotechnics what it lacks in logic and narrative punch. Argento also set out to please the gorehounds by providing them with an open-heart slaying, the killing of a blind man, who is then partially devoured by his bewitched Seeing Eye dog, and a frequently imitated but never equaled "maggot storm."

The second installment in the "Three Mothers" trilogy was "Inferno" (1980). Co-star Irene Miracle inadvertently unleashes evil forces as she investigates the legend of three witches who rule the world from their respective houses, all built by an architect named Varelli. Her search leads to a flooded cellar full of corpses and her eventual bloody death. Her brother (Leigh McCloskey), a music student living in Rome, comes to visit and, like Jessica Harper in Suspiria finds herself in a hotbed of sorcery and violence. One character is attacked by wildcats. A sadistic antique dealer drowns cats by the sackful until he's deservedly shredded by rats, then hacked to death. A servant is found dead, his eyes ripped out, while another is burned alive. In one sequence sure to offend highbrows everywhere, a painful double knifing is accompanied by a chorus from Verdi's Nabucco These proceedings, scored by Keith Emerson and lighted like Suspiria, are punctuated by some of the most frightening imagery in the Argento canon, including an alchemist's lair complete with bubbling cauldrons. That these diverse elements don't quite add up when the obligatory fiery finale rolls around may explain why Argento has yet to complete his trilogy.

As the violence in Argento's movies escalated, so did accusations that his films existed for the sake of their bloody violence alone This criticism tended to overlook the fact that Argento lavished equal care on his lighting, music, and cinematography, if not always his scripts. In terms of screen slaughter, neither repelled critics nor adoring gorehounds had seen anything yet, however.

The title of his next film, "Tenebrae" (1982), refers to the novel written by its lead character, and to the darkness in man's soul. Murders commence when writer Anthony Franciosa travels to Rome to promote the novel. Victims are slashed to ribbons and pages of the book are c rammed into their mouths. Before long, we find out there are two killers at work, making for the messiest Argento movie to date. Uncut prints contain the now-infamous scene in which a woman whose arm has been cut off literally sprays her kitchen wall with her gushing blood. "Tenebrae" itself was butchered and retitled "Unsane" for U.S. release; true-blue Argento fans should accept no substitute for the unexpurgated original, however.

For the 1985 "Phenomena" (known in the United States as "Creepers"), Argento spent more than two months auditioning actresses to play the heroine, then settled on Jennifer Connelly. She plays an actor's daughter sent to a girl's school in Switzerland. Like Jessica Harper, she arrives during a wave of gruesome murders. Police have not found a single intact body, just the odd head or severed limb. Resident entomologist Donald Pleasance helps the police pinpoint the times of the murders by analyzing maggots in the body parts. Our heroine has always had an affinity for insects, we're told, and she soon goes into spells of sleepwalking where she can see through the eyes of insects. This doesn't win her any popularity contests with the teachers and other students, but it does enable her to get closer to the killer---and thus become next on his "hit" parade.

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©1994 John McCarthy

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