Sighs and Darkness: Argento’s Infernal, Operatic Peak

I’ve previously reviewed the early gialli of Dario Argento here, (as well as his 1985 oddity Phenomena); I capped off the former review with Deep Red, the movie which kicked off what’s generally considered to be Argento’s creative peak. I may as well cover the rest of that – or at least, where I map out his creative peak to be, since opinions vary on whereabouts he lost his mojo.

The movies I’m going to cover here – Suspiria, Inferno, Tenebrae, and Opera – are perhaps the creative works which most directly contributed to Argento getting multiple entries on the “video nasty” lists compiled by the UK’s Department of Public Prosecutions; Deep Red got on there, but as a release from a bit before the moral panic it would have probably been overlooked if these movies hadn’t come out right at the peak of the controversy.

Specifically, Suspiria ended up as a so-called “section 3” video nasty – an entry on a supplemental list of films which the Department of Public Prosecutions would not regard as worth prosecuting over, but regarded as liable for confiscation. (This was a distinction it shared with Deep Red.) Inferno hit “section 2” – films liable to be confiscated too, and formerly on section 1, but which dropped out of that when they were the subject of unsuccessful prosecutions in court. Tenebrae was Argento’s “high score” on the video nasty chart, making it to section 1 – films which the DPP would prosecute over, and which weren’t relegated to section 2 due to an unsuccessful prosecution. By comparison, Opera didn’t make the list – perhaps having come out just after the moral panic had peaked and the appetite for adding films to the list had waned. We’re going to be hitting up progressively harder stuff here, with increasing levels of violence and explorations of misogyny on the part of perpetrators as we go.

This is also the era when Argento was cultivating various padawans (or should that be Sith apprentices?) to try and cultivate the next generation of Italian horror, with Lamberto Bava and/or Michele Soavi closely associated with several of these productions. Bava, as we have seen, would pander to the worst tendencies stalking the Italian film industry of the era, whilst Soavi served his time in a range of productions from the highbrow to the schlocky before coming into his own as a director and creating some of the last truly top-flight horror movies to come from the Italian arthouse-horror tradition that Argento was the lead proponent of.

In other words, these are the movies which not only forged the future of the field (brief though it was), but which Argento’s earlier movies were building to. Along with Deep Red, this is where Argento’s vision took its purest form.

Suspiria

American student Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) arrives in the middle of a hideous rainstorm at the Tanz Academie (dance school) in Freiburg, Germany, where she’ll be honing her craft at ballet. As her taxi arrives at the school, she sees a student – Pat (Eva Axén) – exit the front door, yell something which cannot be overheard over the driving rain, and run off into the downpour. The receptionist at the school is either unable or unwilling to understand that Suzy has an invitation to come study, so she has no choice other than to take the cab back into town to stay somewhere overnight. As the taxi returns to Freiburg, Suzy glimpses Pat rushing through the forest onfoot.

Pat makes it into town and finds sanctuary with a friend, declaring her intent to leave town in the morning and never return to the school again. Pat won’t survive to do that, however – going into her friend’s bathroom to clean up, she catches a glimpse of something in the darkness outside, and then someone bursts in through the window. What follows is a vicious, over-the-top, almost ritualistic killing, which leaves Pat gruesomely slain and leaves her friend as collateral damage – killed by falling debris when Pat’s body comes crashing through a skylight. So far, so giallo – and given that Dario Argento’s 1977 masterpiece Suspiria came after a string of some four gialli, audiences at the time would have likely expected another story in the same vein as Deep Red.

But the Tanz Academie is more than just a mere co-educational dance school. Though she initially tries to stay off-campus in the flat of one of her classmates, events conspire to prompt Suzy to live on-campus in the school itself, after she has a funny turn during practice – a turn which seems to have been brought on by a strange encounter with a staff member with a mirror in the hallway. Strange breezes and sounds rattle the structure of the building. The place is decorated in strange, vivid colours according to some esoteric plan. A crate of food apparently spontaneously spoils, prompting a plague of maggots throughout the female students’ quarters. And the director of the academy is never seen.

The trail of bodies continues to pile up, and bit by bit Suzy is drawn to the centre of the school’s mysteries – one of which is the unseen director, notable for her strange, sonorous breath, which Suzy overheard during the practice room sleepover when the director slept with a curtain separating her from the rest of the students. Yet is it remotely possible that the director may be none other than the original founder of the academy – the mysterious Helena Markos, who established the place in 1895? And if that is so, and she is still alive 80 years later, is there truth to the rumour that Markos was a witch?

Three Animals, One Pigment, Many Deaths

Whilst Mario Bava is generally held to have invented the giallo subgenre, many would argue that it was Dario Argento that perfected it. With four productions in the first half of the 1970s, he would make his debut as director, craft a triptych that honed his skills (this being the “Animal Trilogy” due to the critter-themed titles), and then produce perhaps the greatest giallo ever. Let’s take a look in the menagerie…

The Bird With the Crystal Plumage

Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) is an American writer holidaying in Rome with Julia (Suzy Kendall), his girlfriend. The city is troubled by a series of killings of young women – and then Sam is troubled when he witnesses a brutal attack on a woman in an art gallery. Trapped between two reinforced-glass security doors, Sam can only watch helplessly as the victim bleeds on the floor. She turns out to be Monica Ranieri (Eva Renzi), wife of gallery owner Alberto (Umberto Raho), and thanks to Sam’s quick-thinking attempt to alert a passer-by the police and medics arrive in time to save her life.

Sam is warned not to leave Rome – mostly because he’s the only useful witness the police have been able to find so far when it comes to this suspected serial killer, but also because the police can’t 100% rule out the possibility that he did the killing, got caught between the security doors, and pretended to be an innocent witness to throw off suspicion. Sam’s not thrilled and would rather put the matter behind him – but perhaps the killer has other plans; an assailant attacks him in the fog as he’s walking back to the holiday apartment, in an attack which would have been fatal were it not from a shouted warning by a bystander, and even when he gets back to Julia and is able to take his mind off things a little he can’t help but play over the traumatic scenes he witnessed in his mind.

Sam decides that the best way to get his passport and peace of mind back – not to mention save his neck – is to help the lead detective, Inspector Morosini (Enrico Marina Salerno) crack the case; Morosini and the police are sufficiently overwhelmed by potential leads that Morosini gives Sam’s investigations his unofficial blessing. After all, Sam’s sleuthing has clearly hit a nerve – for Julia is soon targeted – and Morosini starts receiving calls from the murderer declaring their intent to commit further outrages. Can Sam and Morosini stop the murderer before Sam or Julia become the next victim?

By far the most memorable sequence in The Bird With the Crystal Plumage comes early on – that art gallery attack I mentioned earlier. Sam’s panic as he is trapped between the doors, his desperation as he first tries to get in to help her and then seek help from outside, before his dejected helplessness as he watches her bleeding out and is entirely unable to help, is Musante’s best moment in the film. Argento clearly realised he was onto something with this sequence, because it shapes much of the rest of the story: a major plot point is the idea that Sam saw something during that moment which he hasn’t yet fully understood, and there’s also the factor that the traumatic incident keeps replaying itself in the back of his mind, and between those we get snippets of that scene replayed to us over and over across the film.

Labyrinthine Phenomena

Somewhere in the Alps, in a region thought of in folklore as “the Swiss Transylvania”, young tourist Vera Brandt (Fiore Argento) just missed the bus she needed to catch. With no bus coming any time soon, Vera sets off hiking to see if she can find help. Coming across an isolated house, she enters… and somewhere inside the house, someone who’s been chained to the wall breaks their bonds. The unseen prisoner, now freed, slays Brandt and her body falls into a rushing mountain stream, speeding it away from the murder site swiftly.

Eight months later, a string of women of about the same age have disappeared in the area, and the police have only found a few body parts. Inspector Rudolf Geiger (Patrick Bauchau) and his unnamed assistant (Michele Soavi) resort to seeking the help of Professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasance) – a forensic entomologist whose expertise allows him to assess the approximate age of the grisly finds based on the extent to which insects have fed on them and spawned maggots within them.

The Professor has every reason to want to help them; his assistant Greta disappeared some time back, and given the profile of the girls who have disappeared he has every reason to believe she is another victim of the killer. Alas, an accident has left him using a wheelchair – though he’s not without help, especially in the form of his highly talented chimpanzee friend Inga (played by Tanga, also a chimp).

And more help is on the way. Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), daughter of Hollywood heartthrob Paul Corvino, has just arrived in the area to take up a place in the Richard Wagner International School For Girls, a private school based out of one of the buildings in Wagner’s old estate, as staff member Frau Brückner (Daria Nicolodi) is proud to declare. Jennifer has a tendency to sleepwalk, and seems somehow telepathically aware of the killer’s activities, being prone to visions when they are taking place. She has also has an astonishing affinity for insects – so powerful that it can inspire a male beetle to start emitting his mating pheromones even though it isn’t his species’ mating season, or a nocturnal swarm of flies.

When Jennifer and the Professor cross paths, he turns out to be the best ally she can find in the area, especially after Jennifer’s roommate Sophie (Federica Mastrolianni) is slain by the killer. The school headmistress (Dalila Di Lazzaro) and the other students hate and fear Jennifer for her abilities, but the Professor sees them as a gift – a gift which might make Jennifer a uniquely capable detective. But this is a Dario Argento movie, so you know the killer’s not going down easily…

A Fistful of Blu-Rays

Arrow Video may be best known for their blu-ray releases of cult horror cinema, but they’ve had a fine line in Westerns over the years; here’s a couple of releases from them I’ve found particularly interesting, both from the boom of Spaghetti Westerns that followed Sergio Leone’s classic Fistful of Dollars and its sequels. These two are particularly interesting for the very different attitudes they have – one is morbidly nihilistic and melancholy, the other is intensely moral (but not without reservations).

Cemetery Without Crosses

Our story begins with Ben Caine (Benito Stefanelli), husband of Maria (Michèle Mercier), falling foul of the brutal Rogers family; they kill him and force Maria to watch, and then go and burn the ranch house that the Caines shared with Ben’s brothers.

Before the disaster, Ben and his siblings seem to have scammed the Rogers somehow; the surviving brothers make sure to split the loot between themselves and Maria. She takes her share and brings it to Manuel (Robert Hossein), who used to be a good friend to Ben and her. Manuel is a strange, haunted gunslinger who lives in a ruined ghost town and who always puts on a single black glove before he’s about to get violent. Maria commissions him to help her get revenge – which comes in a form she didn’t expect, but is more than happy to exploit if it will twist the knife in her enemies’ hearts. In the long run, a terrible confrontation is inevitable.

The Sophisticated Soavi

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Italian horror cinema is generally held to have had a peak of creative accomplishment in the 1970s and a rather sad decline in the 1980s, with the former masters of the genre suffering from diminishing returns and a tidal wave of second-rate material glutting the market.

A happy exception to this critical slump is the work of Michele Soavi. After serving an apprenticeship with a number of small acting parts and stints as an assistant director or second unit director for more prominent directors like Lamberto Bava, Joe D’Amato or Dario Argento, Soavi would direct four movies that are often taken to represent the best in Italian horror of the 1980s and 1990s.

Unfortunately, his career was derailed when he was forced to step back his involvement in the industry to care for his terminally ill son, though in the 2000s he did make some non-genre TV movies, and it’s still possible that – particularly with recent blu-ray releases of his own movies and those projects he assisted on coming out – the stars might align to allow him to produce another horror feature one day. If he does, these are the films that work will be measured against.

Dario Argento’s Horror Disasterclass

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Italian horror cinema had a funny old journey in the 20th Century. After returning from the dead in the 1950s, when the Fascist-era ban was repealed, it didn’t really catch fire until Mario Bava gave it a welcome shot in the arm in the 1960s. Then a new generation of Bava-inspired auteurs (and utterly shameless ripoff merchants) rose in the 1970s, with Dario Argento reigning as the decade’s dark overlord. However, by the time the 1980s got into full swing the wheels were beginning to come off. Older hands were slowing down or becoming regrettably inconsistent, and the balance between stylish, artsy originals and schlocky formula material – the two types of movie the scene was best known for – started to swing dangerously towards the “disposable bullshit” side of the coin.

The Demons series seems to have been Dario Argento’s attempt to mentor the next generation of Italian horror directors. Enjoying a break from directing after wrapping up his Phenomena, Argento took on the role of producer and co-writer, with Lamberto Bava (son of Mario Bava) in the director’s chair. Perhaps the most important thing Argento brought to the table was his name, since it was one of a select few with genuine gravitas outside of the Italian horror bubble and it allowed him as producer to secure a budget for the movies that was well in excess of Lamberto’s earlier efforts.

Another protegee of Argento’s, Michele Soavi, acted as assistant director on the first movie and performed a couple of cameos in it, having collaborated with Lamberto in a similar capacity in his earlier A Blade In the Dark. In the long run, Lamberto Bava’s reputation has tended to be overshadowed in horror critic circles by his father’s, and he seems to have had most success outside of horror with his Fantaghiro series of fantasy TV movies. Conversely, Soavi seems to have done rather better out of the deal, with Argento giving him the same producer-and-cowriter help to produce his subsequent movies The Church and The Sect; moreover, Soavi’s final horror movie, Dellamorte Dellamore, is widely seen as the best Italian horror release of the 1990s, if not the final movement of Italian horror’s golden age. And Soavi… well, he doesn’t look back on the Demons films too fondly, writing them off as “pizza schlock”. Is he being unfair or ungrateful, or does he have a point? Best way to find out is to crack open the two-disc Arrow Video rerelease of the movies and see for ourselves…