Michael Walters

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 1970

In one interview in Panico (2024), a documentary about Dario Argento’s life in films, Argento describes himself as being of two halves — the contented person at home, and the person who is compelled to investigate the darkness inside himself through filmmaking. When in that mode, he is completely focussed on making real the visions in his mind, and it’s clear from the interviews that, especially in the first half of his career, he had a controlling and cold edge alongside his energy and passion.

This made me want to go back to the beginning, and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a fascinating opening salvo. American writer Sam is on holiday in Rome with his girlfriend, Julia, to overcome his writer’s block. He witnesses an attack in an art gallery and gets pulled in to help investigate the case by Inspector Morosini. Other women have been attacked and killed across Rome, and the serial killer threatens Sam to not get involved, but Morosini has Sam’s passport, and Sam believes he’s getting ever closer to the identity of the killer.

Tony Musante, Suzy Kendall and Enrico Salerno make a charismatic trio. Argento makes the camera his plaything, and the cinematic flourishes are due in no small part to the editing by Franco Fraticelli who became a collaborator for the next two decades. The world of the film is vibrant and odd, with threatening pieces of art, colourful Roman characters, and the fetishistic use of gloves, knives and (of course) voyeurism.

It’s not a perfect film. The dialogue can be distractingly banal, especially at the start when the initially poor dubbing makes everything worse, and the pacing is occasionally poor, but the continual visual style, the ingenuity with the hand-held camera, and the series of imaginative set pieces make you forget the bad as soon as the film ends.

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season.

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 1971

A solid Euro-thriller-giallo that lacks the flair of Argento’s debut, but still has enough ingenuity to keep things interesting. A blind ex-journalist overhears a conversation about blackmail outside his apartment. A newspaper reporter investigates a burglary in a nearby laboratory. As people at the lab start to die, the two men join forces to uncover the story, but industrial espionage is a dangerous game and the killer knows who’s on their tail.

Argento knows how to pick faces for his films — James Franciscus as reporter Carlo looks beautiful in every shot, stealing thunder even from the more seasoned Karl Malden as the blind puzzle-loving older man who the young girl in his care calls Cookie. And I love that Argento continued to include idiosyncratic secondary characters, like the burglar who always gets caught.

There’s roving first-person camera work, a handful of clever shots and a decent car chase, but it does feel like a consolidation of Argento’s skills as a director rather than a step up from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. It’s slow in places, and the ending on the rooftops with the killer’s reveal felt clumsy.

Basing the story in a genetics lab, and making the industrial espionage secret to be about a genetic marker for violence and murder, makes this a distant cousin of David Cronenberg’s more perverse surgical labs across the Atlantic a few years later. In ‘Bird’, the killer has an untreated trauma that causes psychosis; in ‘Cat’, the killer is protecting themselves from their own family’s business. What will be the killer’s motivation in the final part of Argento’s trilogy of animals?

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season.

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 1971

Roberto, an American drummer in a band recording in Milan, chases a man who has been following him and accidentally kills him. A masked figure takes photographs and begins to torment Roberto, breaking into his house and leaving behind evidence of the crime. When people begin to die, Roberto becomes increasingly paranoid, and he has to choose who to trust.

I enjoyed this. It’s common in slashers for the killer to wear a mask, but in gialli it’s more about black gloves, so it was fun to see the effectively creepy ventriliquist’s dummy mask here. It’s hard to warm to Roberto, who seems to be a bit of a dick, but Michael Brandon has amazing cheekbones, and the blankness of his character is made up for by the array of eccentrics around him. Argento likes to use gay characters, which is great, but they are often portrayed in stereotypical ways. The private detective Arrosio is the most sympathetic character in the film — funny, likeable and tragic.

Argento continues the playful camerawork of The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, zooming, swooping and changing focus so things are never dull. The standout set piece comes when the live-in maid tries to blackmail the killer, but instead is chased through a park, almost trapped between two walls of rock, before being sliced up within earshot of a couple trying to help. A busy children’s play area is suddenly empty, and a late afternoon cuts to night. Argento creates a nightmare his victims can’t escape.

The surreal, unexpected choices Argento makes throughout these first films make them far more interesting than more straightforward thrillers, and some of the jumps forwards and backwards reminded me of John Boorman’s Point Blank. The identity of the killer is a surprise — the way they are caught is completely ridiculous. However, the final slow motion shot of a car being crushed under a lorry is a mark of genius. And his first three films came out within two years. That’s a hot streak.

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season.

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 1975

After making a couple of thrillers for television and a hard-to-find historical comedy that was a commercial flop, Argento returned to Giallo with a twisty, colourful, Goblin-scored mystery. Whenever the killer is about to strike, the bass jumps in and things get funky. It’s completely charming and made me smile every time.

David Hemmings plays pianist Marcus who sees the psychic living in the apartment below him murdered. He teams up with Gianna, a reporter, to investigate (played by Daria Nicolodi, who would become a creative and life partner to Argento, including mother to their daughter Asia), while also trying to look out for his troubled friend Carlo.

Marcus has more personality and humour than Michael Brandon’s Roberto in Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and his relationship with Gianna is played for laughs at times. There’s more comedy here than in Argento’s previous three Giallo films. Dolls are a recurring motif, even though the killer doesn’t have a particular connection with them — I suspect they just fitted with the aesthetic Argento was after.

There are (as you’d expect) beautifully staged set pieces where people die in gruesome ways. The killer’s unmasking works brilliantly. The tone shifts between horror, mystery, arthouse and comedy, and, along with the captivating performances, this unusual mix makes Deep Red exciting, strange and singular.

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season.

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 1977

Suspiria is a vivid, colourful dream where death stalks us, out of sight but ever-present. Characters die in complicated and fantastical ways to Goblin’s driving mix of Moog synths, bells, whispered vocals and a drum beat for the ages. And it’s a film filled with strong women. The men are all ineffectual side characters.

Suzy Bannion, an American dance student, arrives on a stormy night at the Tanz Academy in Freiberg, Germany. Initially turned away, she passes a woman fleeing the building who ends up elaborately and gruesomely murdered. Suzy’s attempts to be independent at the Academy don’t last long, and she is quickly sucked into the sinister baroque world of a coven of witches.

The Goblin soundtrack is lauded as one of the greatest of any horror film, and it injects itself aggressively into the story, not just complementing it but as a multiplier, lifting the experience to giddy heights. Argento wanted to do something radical after the murder mysteries he’d become known for. The human killers from previous films are replaced with supernatural ones, and Argento’s artistic ambitions are given full rein, using architecture, lighting, music, camera lenses — whatever he could find to fulfil his vision. It’s completely captivating.

The characters are enjoyably odd, but Alida Valli is sensational as the amusingly-named Miss Tanner, the strict dance instructor who drives the ballet students on, barking orders with sadistic glee. Valli was the luminous Anna Schmidt in The Third Man, and also Louise, the complicit assistant to Dr. Génessier, in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face. It’s a fun reminder of the variety of roles actors can find themselves taking, for many different reasons, over long careers.

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season.

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 1980

If Suspiria was a step away from the narrative rigours of a whodunnit, Inferno is a giant leap, with four (four!) protagonists in two cities — but it starts with a woman, Rose, being sold a rare occult book called The Three Mothers.

Rose wonders if the glamorous but dilapidated New York apartment block she lives in is one of three built for three powerful witches, the others being in Rome and Freiberg (location of Suspiria). She writes to her brother David, a musicology student in Rome, but by the time he arrives she has gone missing, and he sets out to find her.

Inferno looks gorgeous, and it has the signature Argento set pieces, but it’s a big departure from his previous films. The score is less coherent, the events are even more surreal, and the pace is slower, with much time spent following people wandering through baroque hallways. It’s wondrous and frustrating.

The buildings are the real stars of the film. They’re filled with arcane objects, uncanny happenings, collapsed basements, spooky acoustics and levels between levels. The ending is fun, but the beautiful characters are one-dimensional, and the story is ponderous compared with everything that’s come before.

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season.

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 1982

You see different things in a good piece of art as you get older. I wrote about Tenebre in October 2020 for the #31DaysofHorror challenge. I loved it then, and I love it now, but the protagonist is far less likeable than I remember, and the twists more surprising.

Back then, I wrote:

Tenebre is set in Rome, but we could be anywhere, because the story stays in hotel rooms, suburban streets and modernist buildings made of concrete and glass. There are artfully sculpted gardens of stone, water and trees. These locations lend themselves to the roving camera, and Argento likes to play the voyeuristic killer. The most famous scene has the camera drift slowly around the outside of a home, music blaring from a woman’s bedroom, focussing on the roof tiles, the walls, and the window slats, moving from room to room, as the killer takes two victims.

Thriller writer Peter Neal travels to Rome to market his latest book, Tenebrae (which means ‘darkness’), but he arrives to find a serial killer is mimicking in real life the murders in his book. The killer leaves notes under his hotel room door, and Neal gets drawn in to the killer’s game.

Argento knows films are inherently voyeuristic, and is aware of the criticism against him, and while the men die, the women do die in much more elaborate ways. He plays with our expectations, and has a protagonist who takes on the charges of misogyny directly. Giallo films usually have convoluted plots that lose me by the end, but this one makes sense. The set pieces are impressive, the story moves at a pace, the locations are fantastic, and the ending works — this is now one of my favourites.

I would add to this that Peter Neal isn’t interested in helping the police catch the killer at any point until he realises that it might make him look good as a crime writer. He’s another one of Argento’s male, egotistic, emotionally distant antiheroes, although some of the later plot twists make sense of that. There is also in the final scenes one of the all-time great reveals of the location of a killer.

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season.

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 1985

Like in Suspiria, a young woman arrives at a female-run school where students are being murdered by an unseen killer, but there are no witches in Zürich—instead we have a girl who has an unexpected telepathic connection with insects.

Jennifer Corvino, daughter of a famous actor, is sent to a Swiss boarding school for the summer. On her first night she sleepwalks and witnesses a student being murdered before being led by chimpanzee Inga to the house of her owner, forensic entomologist John McGregor. There are more murders, and Jennifer comes to realise she can use her growing psychic connection with insects to discover the bodies of victims, as well as protect herself from attackers.

Donald Pleasance plays the wheelchair-bound McGregor, who is trying to find out what happened to another student of his, Greta, who he suspects was also murdered. He has the chimpanzee trained as a nurse so he can live in his secluded home cum laboratory. Jennifer’s burgeoning power over insects is implied to be linked to her coming of age, and McGregor encourages her to use a Great Sarcophagus fly, whose larvae feed on dead bodies, to lead her to Greta.

It’s all completely mad, and the final fifteen minutes throws gore and weirdness at the story faster than makes any sense. People rave about this film, but I struggled with it. It’s a mash-up of everything that’s come before in his filmography—the first-person camerawork for a killer, an occasional heavy metal soundtrack, the magical powers of Suspiria, the whodunnit of his giallos, but the pacing is off, the acting is bland (until the ending), and the story borders on incoherent. And he’s said it’s one of his favourite creations. Hm!

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season.

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 1987

Opera is the last of what’s regarded as Argento’s unimpeachable run of giallo-horror-thrillers he made through the seventies and eighties. For me, there are hits and misses (Phenomena was not my bag), but Opera is one of his best.

Betty, understudy in a version of Verdi’s opera Lady Macbeth, makes a name for herself stepping into the lead role when the famous singer Mara Cecova is hit by a car. That night, a masked figure murders Betty’s boyfriend Stefano at his apartment, making her watch. Betty becomes suspicious of everyone, and as she is made to watch more killings, she must work out who to trust before it’s her turn to die.

The world of opera, with its costumes, mannequins, stage lighting and imposing architecture, is perfect for the heightened world of giallo’s black-gloved killers, secret passageways, uncertain allegiances and naked ambition. The soundtrack uses opera music, of course, but still has Argento’s trademark heavy metal. The deaths are violent and shown in explicit detail, and like Betty, we are made to watch.

Cristina Marsillach as Betty is perfect as the insecure, vulnerable, talented and resourceful Betty. There are plenty of playful cinematic touches on display, and using ravens from the opera’s avant-garde production as a central plot point is a supremely gothic touch.

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season.

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 1990/1993

These two odd kittens are making me wonder if my Argento project is reaching its end. The Black Cat is the second story in a double-hander, Two Evil Eyes, with George Romero. Both stories are adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe. Romero’s The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar is a plodding melodrama with some fun performances, especially Adrienne Barbeau, and a strong ending. Argento goes for more of a character study in evil.

A deranged, beret-clad Harvey Keitel plays Roderick Usher, a photographer obsessed with taking pictures of mutilated bodies. When his girlfriend takes in a stray black cat, Usher takes an instant disliking to it and kills it to take its photograph. That night he dreams of a medieval village where his wife is the local witch. She knows what he has done. This is the first Argento film with creature effects, designed by Tom Savini, but they couldn’t save a flat story.

Trauma is a traditional Giallo, but in America. Teen runaway Aura enlists the help of David, a journalist, when she comes across a killer in the act of beheading someone in the grounds of her family home. David is following the serial killer, “The Head Hunter”, who only strikes when it’s raining and uses an electric-powered garrote to decapitate victims. Freudian high-jinx ensue.

Based on that description, I feel even more disappointed that it was such an unexpectedly tough watch. I can’t put my finger on what didn’t work, and it could be that I’m getting tired of the Giallo formula and need a break, or perhaps these aren’t as carefully crafted as earlier works. Nineties America doesn’t have the allure and exoticism of Rome or Zürich, it’s too familiar… I don’t know. I’ll try one more.

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season.

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 1996

Imaginative and clichéd, intriguing and brutal, this film is primarily about rape, torture, and insanity. Asia Argento is Detective Anna Manni, sent from Rome to Florence on the trail of a serial killer and rapist. Anna collapses while visiting a gallery, overcome with hallucinations from the works of art. The killer steals her gun and uses it to capture and rape her when she returns to her hotel. Traumatised, Anna tries to continue to hunt Grossi, but her personality begins to change, and she loses her grip on reality.

It’s implied that the killer is also overwhelmed by art, although it’s not clear if he also has Stendhal Syndrome. Anna becomes more aggressive, and starts making her own art to process her trauma. Grossi kidnaps her and rapes her a second time, holding her in a cave covered in graffiti. Terrified of the hallucinations the graffiti brings on, something breaks in Anna, and the strength she finds both saves her and tips her into insanity.

Thomas Kretschmann as Grossi has something of Rutger Hauer about him with his confident killer’s persona and cropped blonde hair. At the halfway point the film switches to be more like Hitchcock, De Palma or late Paul Verhoeven. The blonde wig Anna starts to wear stretches credulity, and the twists and turns feel perfunctory towards the end. It’s a brave film, shocking, and Asia Argento is impressive in how hard she goes in the role. The film fizzes with ideas but doesn’t quite deliver.

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season.

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 1998

After Hammer’s Dracula and Ken Russell’s Frankenstein origin story, The Phantom of the Opera was an accidentally perfect pick—another turn of the century literary adaptation, another Universal Monster, and the next film in my parallel project to watch all the films of Dario Argento in chronological order.

Looking for films for #31DaysofBlackXmas, it seemed wrong not to continue the Dario Argento quest I started back in June. That stalled because the films got harder to find, and frankly I was getting bored. Argento’s The Phantom of the Opera is only available on a DVD rip of what looks like a VHS (the quality is awful, which colours everything), but it wasn’t expensive, and I didn’t want to let go of the idea without another try.

A baby is put in a basket and released into the sewer. A rat spots it, pulls it to safety, and the rats raise the child as one of their own. This makes Argento’s Phantom the king of the rats when the story starts, but also a hunky blonde stud, played by Julian Sands as beautiful, charming, and with no mask in sight. The Christine he is entranced by is (of course) Argento’s daughter, Asia, caught between the good Baron, who woos her in conventional ways, and the dark Phantom, who can talk to her telepathically, kills people, and wants to keep her forever in his dank rat cave.

It took me a while to accept that Argento has made here a baroque mix of horror, romance and comedy, with some steampunk thrown in, and it was only the extended sequence of the rat-catcher careening through the caverns in a self-built rat vacuum-mincer where that hit home. If you’re looking for a straight horror, or a classic adaptation of the original novel, you’ll be disappointed, but if you’re able to look at this with an open mind (and find a copy of high enough quality to do the sets and costumes justice), then… you might think it works.

Looking back to his 1987 film Opera, the Phantom has always been in the back of Argento’s mind, and I wonder if it was a childhood favourite. He certainly loves theatrical spaces (like the opening of Deep Red). He’s made a long career from mysterious killers stalking artists. I wonder if there’s an interview where he talks about this? (Much scouring of the internet ensued, no evidence was found by the time this went to press.)

All films in 2024’s #31DaysofBlackXmas…

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 2001

Young Giacomo watches a hidden figure stab his mother to death with a flute. Police Chief Moretti promises the boy he will catch the killer, and he does, but seventeen years later the killings begin again. The retired Moretti teams up with adult Giacomo to catch the Dwarf Killer who seems to be back from the dead.

Doesn’t that sound like the most Argento film ever? And it’s good! It doesn’t match the pizazz of his seventies giallo films, and it’s too long, but it has many other charms, especially the opening murder on the Italian night train. Argento is always looking for the interesting shot, the killings are imaginative and brutal, the Goblin score is great, and Max von Sydow as the elderly, forgetful Moretti brings an unexpected class and lightness of touch to the otherwise pitch black story.

All films in 2024’s #31DaysofBlackXmas…

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 2004

Rome detective Anna Mari pairs up with rogue Irish cop John Brennan to find a gambling serial killer who challenges the police to games of online poker to save the lives of kidnapped women. Twists and turns (but not that many) ensue.

Some people seem to hate that the poker game in this hasn’t aged well graphically, but I prefer to think of how much it would cost a director today to replicate a period technological thriller set in 2003 and just enjoy it for the time it’s set in. It’s an odd film, though. Brennan starts the film as an aggressive idiot and never really becomes believably likeable as the love interest for Mari.

There’s one outstanding set piece in Mari’s apartment where the killer breaks in to kidnap her, but apart from that there’s not much here to make it stand out from most procedural serial killer thrillers. It’s dramatically empty—we just lurch from one game of online poker (on Windows 2000!) to another.

This might be the most disappointing Argento so far. Say what you like about his The Phantom of the Opera, but it tries for something new.

All films in 2024’s #31DaysofBlackXmas…

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 2007

A grave containing a rune-covered box is discovered outside a churchyard in Rome. Art restoration student Sarah Landy helps her tutor open the box, which contains magical artifacts including a tunic that bestows great power to the still-alive medieval witch Mater Lachrymarum. Landy escapes an attack by demonic creatures and goes on the run as Rome falls into chaos, but Landy learns she is the daughter of a powerful witch and might be able to stop Mater Lachrymarum from bringing the second age of magic.

That’s a lot of plot. Also, the police are chasing Sarah, a gang of partying goth witches are roaming the city, Sarah’s friend and lover Michael loses his son to the Mater, an alchemist gets involved, and Sarah’s dead mother can talk to her from another realm. Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi were inspired to write the “Three Mothers” films (Suspiria, Inferno, Mother of Tears) by Thomas de Quincey’s 1845 prose poetry collection, Suspiria de Profundis. That explains the involved and detailed lore that the characters discuss, which adds a layer of mystery and weight to the story, but also can be pretty confusing.

There’s a flavour of The Omen to the scenes Rome residents start doing terrible things. The brutality of the violence seems like an attempt to capture medieval tortures mixed with a vision of hell seen as the cruelties people will inflict on each other. The Mater likes to lick the tears from her tortured victims.

There are a few Argento flourishes with the camera, and towards the end there’s a subtle variation of the original Suspiria soundtrack by Goblin, which is fun. It’s a flawed film, but full of energy and life, and I respect a trilogy of films that are in the same universe with the same overarching story, but which are stylistically and in the pacing of things so different.

All films in 2024’s #31DaysofBlackXmas…

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 2009

Inspector Enzo Avolfi specialises in finding serial killers. In Turin, someone is cutting up and killing beautiful young women, and when model Celine fails to arrive to meet her sister, Linda, Avolfi has to help her search the city before Celine becomes another victim.

Could you have a more generic plot than that? Perhaps after finishing Mother of Tears Argento wanted something simpler to work with. Ironically, this isn’t a giallo, it’s closer to Silence of the Lambs or Seven in its story structure. We still get flashbacks to childhood that reveal motivation, but the inspector gets them far more than the killer, who has a deformed face and the rather obvious desire to deface beauty in others.

The script has nothing to it. There are several gratuitously ugly torture scenes whose only purpose seems to be to make sure we know how fucked up the killer is. Once we see him sucking on a baby’s dummy and masturbating to photos of cut up faces, it’s fair to say no more proof-of-fucked-up-ness is required. Put some story in there instead, screenwriters!

Adrien Brody played both the killer and the cop, and he also sued the producers of the film for not paying his full fee, blocking it from being released in the US. Argento has disavowed the film, saying he didn’t like the producer’s cut of it, but he also was saying at the time he felt blacklisted in Hollywood because it couldn’t get distribution. It’s a depressing state of affairs all around.

All films in 2024’s #31DaysofBlackXmas…

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 2012

There’s a moment when Rutger Hauer’s Van Helsing arrives two-thirds in and my spirits lifted because perhaps the film could be saved, but the moment he started to say his lines, I knew it was actually a stake through my heart.

There are shades of Phenomena in the wildlife and insects being sometimes sentient, but here they are in league with the villain. This Count Dracula has lots of powers not given to the 1959 Hammer Dracula, and seems closer to the original novel. He can project an image of himself into others’ minds, has telekinesis, can transform into animals, and mesmerise people to do his will.

I wonder what changed between the rather good Mother of Tears in 2007, the troubled (and terrible) Giallo in 2009, and this monstrosity. It was made in 3D, which might explain the bad CGI. Perhaps they were the bits that would have come out of the screen. The scene where Dracula is a seven-foot preying mantis and ripping a man to pieces in a hallway wouldn’t look good in any format. I don’t know what happened. Was there no money? Did something go wrong behind the scenes? What’s the story behind this film?

All films in 2024’s #31DaysofBlackXmas…

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season

Director: Dario Argento

Release year: 2022

Diana, a sex worker, is chased by an unknown assailant, leading to a car accident that kills the parents of a young boy and leaves her blind. She slowly adapts to her new life and temporarily takes in the orphaned boy, but the killer returns to finish the job.

This was the final Dario Argento film in my 2024 challenge and an interesting contrast to what’s come before. Giallo was modern, but still had an otherworldly quality because of the flashbacks and Adrien Brody’s energy in his dual performance. Dracula was a straight-up homage to Hammer. Dark Glasses is a straight thriller that feels like it was made today, but includes classic Argento moves—the blind protagonist and child (as in Cat O’ Nine Tails), a random animal attack (see Inferno), a black-gloved killer, and a pounding soundtrack.

This is Argento reckoning with all the people he’s killed in his films, mostly female, and presenting a more empathic view of what it might be like to survive an attack by one of his murderers. Ilenia Pastorelli does an excellent job of playing a woman who goes through incredible trauma only to have it continue when she’s most vulnerable.

I can’t think of an Argento film before this one where we see an actor really act. That’s quite a statement, right? One of the joys of his earlier films are the lightness of the characters while terrible things happen. People show emotions, but his characters don’t go through an arc—they don’t change. The Stendhal Syndrome’s Detective Anna Manni is the closest I can think of, but Asia Argento was young and relatively inexperienced, and her transformation was from sane to insane. Diana’s world is portrayed sensitively and the horrors of her blindness not ignored.

That realism also makes the film less fun. The initial draw of Dario Argento was the wildness, the unexpected, the ideas, the return always to art, theatre, performance, architecture, and the charismatic faces, the variety of characters, the roving camera. Empathy seems to have replaced experimentation, but that can be no surprise in a director who is eighty-four years old. I wonder if he has another film in him?

All films in 2024’s #31DaysofBlackXmas…

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season

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.

All films in 2024’s #31DaysofBlackXmas…

Part of my DARIO ARGENTO season.