Dario Argento: Panico
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 2024
This is the documentary that gave me the idea to watch all of Dario Argento’s films this year, and it was interesting to watch it again at the end of the project. It’s a good inclusion for #31DaysofBlackXmas as well. Knowing the list of Argento’s films in advance made it more of a chore, whereas with #31Days I could twist and pivot as my mood took me. I wish I wasn’t so susceptible to the power of a list. Perhaps keeping it organic and taking some pressure off is something to try in 2025.
The documentary’s conceit is that Argento is going to a hotel for a few weeks to finish writing a manuscript for his next film, which is something he’s done all his life, and a film crew will interview him while he’s there. We see the maestro arrive, and we see him leave, awkwardly and sweetly interacting with the staff all the while. The main section is a series of interviews with him about his life and career, backed up with the views and memories of family members and key collaborators.
What becomes clear is that Dario is a complicated man, and in the first half of his life he carried a lot of anger and competitiveness to be successful because, as he openly says in a seventies interview clip, he wanted to be loved. His mother was a famous film star photographer, and his father was a film producer, Salvatore Argento, who backed his son’s films right up to his death in the late eighties. He seems to have been brought up in great privilege, but also to have a lack that he was always trying to fill. He was a maverick, a risk-taker, a public personality, and he used film as a way to channel his darker instincts.
After his father died, his daughter Asia became a muse, and she starred in many of his later films. Asia’s thoughts on her father and family are the most poignant in the whole documentary. Some of the fire went out of his films in the nineties. Yes, television money became dominant and contracts required less violence, but he was still writing the scripts (with collaborators), and the later films lack the vitality and narrative quality of earlier ones.
There is almost always something to admire in even a disappointing Dario Argento film. Dracula and Giallo are the only true stinkers. He describes his need to continue to make films as an ongoing investigation of the depths inside himself. He seems to have lived the classic Jungian arc of creating a career and family with the first half of his life, then switched to a more inward journey in the second. It’s inspiring.