the bird with the crystal plumage Who is the new style ‘Jack the Ripper’ holding Rome in a grip of terror? Writer’s blocked author Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) knows he’s witnessed a vital clue to the chilling conundrum at the chic Ranieri art gallery – but what exactly? Dario Argento’s giallo trendsetter is a glossy, stylistic and cosmopolitan whodunit firmly entrenched in Hitchcockian paranoia. A seminal work in Italian genre cinema, this classic shocker showed Argento’s flair for horrific set pieces and introduced the trademark themes he would develop in his subsequent nightmare thrillers. four flies on grey velvet Referring to the last image captured on a murder victim’s retina, the intriguing title is the only clue to the identity of a maniac pursuing and mentally torturing jazz musician Roberto Tobias (Michael Brandon). Taking the subjective camera as criminal manipulator to its shock horror peak of perfection, Argento defines his deliberately non-narrative style and radical editing techniques in a virtuoso flesh-crawler given a elegant operatic atmosphere by one of Ennio Morricone’s most beautiful themes. suspiria Snow White meets Thomas De Quincey’s fable of the Three Mothers from ‘Confessions of an Opium Eater’ in a blatantly supernatural fairytale. Guignol has never been so Grand as the stunning opening of Argento’s landmark breakthrough into new levels of cinematic sensation using pounding Goblin music, spectacular décor, dazzling lighting and gory special effects. As ballerina Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) enters a warped world of witchcraft at Black Forest High run by the Mother of Sighs, Argento carries the whole extravagant nightmare on pure power-driven style alone. A terror tour de force now duly recognized as one of the greatest horror films ever made. deep red Argento’s undisputed giallo masterpiece is a pulse-pounding descent into the baroque vortex of Freudian madness. When psychic Helga Ulmann (Macha Meril) senses the identity of a murderer at a convention, she becomes the next axed victim. And when music teacher Marc Daly (David Hemmings) witnesses her bloody death from a Turin piazza, he’s haunted by the notion he missed a crucial clue at the crime scene. His investigations lead to cruelly ingenious murders, imaginatively staged with turbo-powered visual dynamism and rhythmically choreographed to a delirious progressive rock score by Goblin. inferno The second of Argento’s still-to-be-completed Three Mothers trilogy based on Thomas De Quincey’s themes and dreams – he’s promised to get around to the highly anticipated conclusion soon – is the director’s undisputed Gothic masterwork. An alchemic tapestry, which like the music world it’s set in plays variations on symphonic screams and surrealistic magic, it focuses on student Mark Elliot’s (Leigh McCloskey) search for the Mother of Darkness in a shadowy New York apartment block. Sheer technical brilliance is the only essential narrative conveyance in a sumptuously visual experience set in a dream-like comic art landscape. Argento on top hallucinatory and brilliantly haunting form. tenebrae Argento’s ultra-modern bloodbath examines the horrors of random violence as New York crime novelist Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) embarks on a Roman book publicity tour. In a sleek and contemporary Eternal City the tourist rarely sees, Neal crosses the path of a deranged killer homicidally inflamed by his latest bestseller. A deceptively traditional Agatha Christie-style mystery is cruelly and sexually subverted in bizarrely resonant ways in this disturbing mindbender with the bloodiest conclusion. One of Argento’s most talked about and acclaimed set pieces – the roof-crawling camera prowling around the lesbian victims’ apartment – is a jaw-dropping highlight. opera There’s no Phantom in Argento’s Opera, just a mentally deranged maniac obsessed with ingénue singer Betty (Cristina Marsillach) as she rehearses an unlucky production of ‘Macbeth’. But this aria of savage beauty contains Argento’s single most potent and self-revelatory image about his own extreme work – Betty forced to watch orchestrated murders unable to close her eyes to the horror due to needles taped under her eyelids. Argento’s relentless search for stylistic outer limits takes an autopsy-turvy turn reaching dizzying heights – literally, as his swirling camera swoops from the opera house rafters to auditorium level. And who could Ian Charleson’s tyrant director be based on? two evil eyes Gruesome twosome George Romero and Argento teamed up again after hitting the splatter heights fifteen years before with their classic Zombi (Dawn of the Dead). This two-part anthology, based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe (Argento’s dark mentor and admitted inspiration), showcases their favorite tales of terror. Romero’s ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ delivers his scintillating brand of Living Dead chills. Argento’s ‘The Black Cat’ cleverly embroiders on Poe’s themes – adding other story threads (‘The Pit and the Pendulum’) and characters (Berenice, Annabel Lee, Mr. Pym) – to give a gripping first-person perspective on photographer Roderick Usher (Harvey Keitel) as he sinks into a morally perverse and murderous quagmire. sleepless Argento artfully combines shimmering set pieces and trashy red herrings with full throttle pulp friction in his latest achievement in the giallo format cleverly referencing themes contained in his early ‘Animal Trilogy’. After three Turin women are horrendously mutilated, widowed detective Ulisse Moretti (Max Von Sydow) is pulled out of lonely retirement to help puzzled police investigate the new batch of crimes bearing the hallmarks of a past serial killer. Geared around clever visual and aural clues to the identity of the assassin using the dark nursery rhyme ‘Death Farm’ as a murder blueprint, Argento’s scintillating return to the cool sleight-of-hand virtuosity of his – and Goblin’s - past glories is a major cause for celebration. la porta sul buio di dario argento The four episodes in Argento’s groundbreaking 1973 RAI TV series that he introduced like Alfred Hitchcock. ‘I Vicino di Casa’, directed by Luigi Cozzi, stars Aldo Reggiari and Laura Belli who set up home in a new house only to discover their upstairs neighbor is a murderer. ‘La Bambola’, directed by Mario Foglietti, stars Mara Venier menaced by Robert Hoffman who may be an escaped lunatic. ‘Testimone Oculare’ stars Marilu Tolo in a Diaboliques-style tale of possible homicide. Argento took over the directing reins on that segment from Roberto Pariante Argento also directed ‘Il Tram’, using the alias Sirio Bernadotte, focusing on a supposedly impossible murder inside a streetcar which cop Enzo Cerusico recreates with the help of the passengers. Both episodes use a stylish docu-realism approach and both are elongated reprises of sequences originally conceived for inclusion in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

Alan Jones 2003

[top of page]

|home|darknews|biography|filmography|dariobase|

|reviews|asia|audio/visual|links|comunicazione|map|