Dario Argento: Giallo and Profondo Rosso (Deep Red)

"In such an intense physical act as murder, a very sensitive, somehow deeply erotic relationship is established somewhere between the killer and his victim. There is something unifying between these acts, an erotic act and a bloodthirsty act…the orgasm of death and the sexual orgasm" Dario Argento (1)

Below you will find a link to a piece I recently wrote for the 62nd Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier (2013) published in Senses of Cinema. The piece is about Dario Argento's giallo films, particularly Profondo Rosso (Deep Red, 1975). After Mario Bava, Dario Argento (b. 1940- ) is the most significant Italian horror filmmaker of the twentieth century. Of course, other Italian filmmakers such as Lucio Fulci (Zombie,1979; L’aldilá (The Beyond), 1981), Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust, 1980), and Antonio Margheriti (Naked You Die, 1968; Cannibal Apocalypse, 1980), have made innovative horror films. Many of these films have proven to be influential on filmmakers in Italy and in other parts of the world. Moreover, many of these films have now become legitimised as canonical examples of 'bad' exploitation cinema. (2) 

Bava and Argento have also been important in the same way as filmmakers like Fulci, Deodato and Margheriti. However, for a number of reasons, Bava and Argento have also been more important. In terms of the latter, for example, an entire genre underwent transformation when, in the beginning of the 1970s, three films were made that re-invigorated and re-imagined the giallo cinema.

These films were L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, 1970), Il gatto a nove code (Cat o’ Nine Tails, 1971) and Quattro mosche di velluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, 1971). These three films eventually became known as Argento’s “animal trilogy”. What these films did was add a new level of narrative density and aesthetic textuality to the embryonic giallo movie, which had been sporadically in production since Mario Bava's La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl who Knew Too Much, 1962) and Sei donne per l’assassino (Blood and Black Lace, 1964). In the "animal trilogy", Argento also marked the giallo genre with his own inimitable vision of darkness, abnormality, and violent sexual perversion. 

Argento's direct engagement with the brute energies and contradictions of the unconscious can still trouble a number of seasoned veterans of horror cinema, even those who have survived the cycles of slasher films, splatter pics, and body horror movies made since the late 1970s. In the words of American filmmaker John Carpenter, Argento "couples violent death with almost sexual beauty, so that the deaths have a sexuality to them and that's extremely disturbing to people". (3) In other words, distinctions between sexual desire and murder are conflated rather than separated out, a fusion that is most seductively and sensuously expressed in Argento's film Tenebrae (1982), a giallo that pushes the boundaries of eroticised violence. (4) 

If you would like to read the full article please click on this link: 

http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/issue-67-july-2013/dario-argento-giallo-and-profondo-rosso-deep-red/ 

Endnotes 

(1) This quote is cited in James Gracey's (2010) Dario Argento, Kamera Books, London, pp. 18-19. 

(2) Initially, when Italian horror and giallo films were being distributed in third-rate cinemas in Italy and in grindhouse theatres and drive-ins in countries like the United States, they were generally ignored, dismissed or vilified by the mainstream press, by those working within the Hollywood system, and also by scholars and ‘serious’ film critics. This is not to say that such films were unpopular; indeed, both in Italy and in many countries abroad the films did commercially well. It is rather to suggest that they were considered 'bad' cinema in the negative sense of that term - derivative, exploitative films constrained by generic conventions, motivated by industrial objectives, and made primarily for the purposes of generating money through entertainment, shock, and lewdness. Hence, they were considered to be films with no connection to Italian national culture and no real artistic or aesthetic merit. However, since the early- to mid-1990s, such films have received much more critical attention by scholars and professional critics, with one result being a re-evaluation of their function within society (in terms of how they relate to both national and transnational, global culture) and an accept of their legitimate place within film culture. In other words, what was once 'bad' cinema in a negative sense has now become 'bad' cinema in a positive sense. 

(3) See the documentary Dario Argento: An Eye for Horror (2000). 

(4) In films such as Tenebrae Argento also presents mistaken identities and sexual ambiguities in a way that, arguably, muddles rather than reinforces oppositions between male and female sexuality (oppositions that characterise the dominant binary-system of gender in Western society). To take but one example, in the film there are memory flashbacks to an episode on a beach in which a feminine looking figure sexually humiliates a young man by sticking the heel of one her red shoes into his mouth, orally raping him. The feminine looking person is in fact played by the transgendered actress Eva Robins.