blood and cuts - violent horror genius Dario Argento by Mark Kermode

blood and cuts - introduction to a filmfour season of Argento films by Mark Kermode

NOTE: This article first appeared on the channel 4 website

Correctly described by the 'BFI Companion To Horror' as "the avatar of violent modern horror" Argento is perhaps best known for giving every modern fright-film maker worth his salt a touchstone worthy of citation, homage and often outright plagiarism. Even if you've never seen an Argento movie in your entire life, you will probably have come into contact with a diluted form of his unique aesthetic thanks to the work of George Romero, Clive Barker, Richard Stanley, Brian De Palma, Michele Soavi, Guillermo Del Toro, or any one of the hundreds of other modern writers and directors who have been inspired by the Italian maestro.

During the 1980s, it was virtually unthinkable for any horror film maker to talk about his own work without acknowledging a debt to Argento. Now, in the 21st century, dropping Dario's name has become almost a cliché, like citing Hitchcock as an inspiration - after all, everyone knows he's a genius, don't they? Why should we even have to mention it?

When I first started attending horror festivals back in the mid eighties, it was generally thought that one's devotion to the genre could be accurately judged by the number of Argento films you had actually seen (rather than just read about), with the works of Mario Bava taking an important second place in the demonstration of your historical credentials.

Back then, many - if not most - of Argento's works were unavailable on the mainstream cinema circuit and had to be sought out in the kind of disreputable flea-pits in which the likes of Alan Jones (Argento's foremost champion in the UK) would stage events such as Shock Around The Clock, twenty-four-hour festivals of filth for terminal 'bat-packers' up and down the country.

When I began writing for 'Fangoria' magazine in the early nineties, one of the first questions my editor asked me was "Do you know Argento?", by which he didn't mean did I know him personally, but did I know him, in the philosophical sense...

Nowadays, you lucky people are able to slouch around in the comfort of your living room and simply tune in to the best of Argento thanks to the miracle of FilmFour (the cheque's in the post, right?). While some of the purists amongst you may wish to recreate the ambience of those eighties horror festivals by spraying crap and fag-ends all over the floor and allowing a few rats to run playfully around your toes, the rest of you should appreciate the fact that it is now possible to view gems like The Bird With The Crystal Plumage without incurring actual damage to your physical health and well-being.

But while the entire film-going world now seems to be united in the general acceptance of Argento's brilliance, there is still one section of the British film-viewing community who seem to view his entire back catalogue with utter contempt. To you and me he may be a 'maestro' (or at least, he will be after you've watched the FilmFour season of films) but to them he is simply a madman. I speak of course of our venerable film censors.

While the rest of us have been gradually wising up to the long-standing legacy of Argento, and attempting to put him up there on the artistic pedestal where he belongs, they have been attempting to push him back down into the gutter, an activity in which they are well practised. Need proof? Consider this...

In 1980, the BBFC cut Inferno for cinema release, although their records remain tantalisingly unclear as to how much material was actually lopped out; all we know for sure is that 13 years later, the video of Inferno was still running 20 seconds shy of its intended running time thanks to BBFC interference.

In March 1983, James Ferman and his cronies sliced 18 seconds out of The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, cuts which were subsequently reaffirmed on video, thus ensuring that even home-viewers were 'protected' from the terrible dangers of tasting classic Argento in its undiluted form.

In January 1990, the cinema print of Opera was duly shorn of 35 seconds of fun, while in December 1993, the video of Profondo Rosso needed to come down by 11 seconds before being rubber stamped as acceptable by the Board.

As recently as September 1999, the submitted version of Trauma was being merrily refused VRA classification by the BBFC unless 7 seconds of harmless fantasy were removed.

And most depressingly (as regular viewers of Extreme Cinema will know only too well) the legendary Tenebrae was once again declared unfit for uncut release in August 1999 thanks to a spell on the Director of Public Prosecutions' list of potentially obscene 'video nasties' back in the eighties, despite the fact that the video was already trimmed to conform with cinema cuts imposed back in February 1993. And we call this a free country...

Now, if all this sounds like simply a moaning catalogue of woe by a dreary old horror hack, then that's because that's exactly what it is. It may be boring and repetitive to have some irritable film critic simply reel off a seemingly endless list of cuts, but that list speaks volumes about the continuingly corrosive nature of film censorship in this country when it comes to horror cinema.

How would fans of Alfred Hitchcock feel if they knew that the majority (rather than the odd one or two) of the films their hero had made had been tampered with by the censors before they ever got to see them? The comparison is not entirely ludicrous; in terms of horror cinema, Dario Argento is Alfred Hitchcock.

The respect in which his work is held internationally is totally at odds with the utter contempt with which the British censors have demonstrated over the years. Then again, these are the same people who took one look at Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho back in 1960, and decided that they'd better take a large pair of scissors to the shower scene (perhaps the most highly regarded sequence in the entire history of chilling cinema) before letting the public set eyes on it. That's right - the BBFC used to cut Hitchcock, now they cut Argento. They are well practised in the business of trampling upon art. What a shameful legacy.

by Mark Kermode

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