by Nick Taylor
If a true cinephile has opened their third eye, they know the best time to watch horror movies is whenever they want, without the pretext of a Halloween or some such ritual to pop in a scary story. But we can never take Halloween’s power for granted, and to offer fealty to all the ghosts and ghouls haunting The Film Experience, I come with tales of scary movies past (and present??). Our first offering is Dario Argento’s Deep Red, a paragon of giallo cinema.
If you choose to read on, join me under the cut... just mind the entrance wound on your way in...
One caveat to this review, which I will pose as a question: How much does it matter that I saw the 100-minute version of Deep Red hanging around on Kanopy, rather than the full, unabridged two hour cut? I’ve been told a whole subplot about the protagonist has been excised, which I don’t particularly mind. Hearing that Argento’s gore has been trimmed down worries me, but I was still plenty enthralled by the kills, so even if I know I’m missing something I don’t feel like my experience was lessened for it. Nor do I mind watching the English-dubbed version, since the actors are clearly speaking in English for their dialogue anyways. Much less dissonant to watch.
Now that we have that out of the way, how about the Deep Red I did get to see? For one, it opens magnificently. A murder plays out on the shadows of a living room wall, shot in one unbroken take as if the camera was looking up from the floor. The house is decorated for Christmas, with a children’s lullaby murmuring in the background as someone gets stabbed in the chest. The music would be ominous even without the ironic contrast of holiday cheer and pitiless killing. A child’s dainty shoes step towards the bloody knife before the image fades to black. All of this plays out with such economy I nearly mistook it for a cutely morbid opening production credit.
That’s ten seconds of perfection right there. Following this nifty scene, Deep Red jumps twenty years later to a whopper of a sequence involving a psychic named Helga (Macha Meril) publicly demonstrating her ability to sense the thoughts and actions of others in the present. Inevitably, she stumbles upon a perverse, murderous aura and screams in terror as the camera swoops up and around her. The meeting ends, if you can believe it. Not long after this the psychic is brutally slaughtered in her home by a silent, unseen figure wearing the chicest leather gloves you’ve ever seen. Only her upstairs neighbor Marcus (David Hemmings) and his drunken friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia) hear her scream from the streets below, and Marcus is the one who sees her head smashed into her window and carved on the broken glass.
This sequence is so deliriously overwhelming that I frankly took for granted the mystery of who this killer might be, or how this might relate to the murder in the prologue. Are these the same shadowy figures? Was Helga the child? Or Marcus? Did the supposed murder victim even die? Still, the real question is: what difference does it make? Sure, there’s enough of a narrative around Marcus trying to uncover Helga’s murder with the assistance of her colleague Prof. Giordani (Glauco Mori) and reporter Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi) to call it the spine of the film. Walk-on suspects make such entrancingly odd impressions that they suggest an Italy sculpted entirely of social discards and delirious freaks. Maybe we haven’t even met the killer. Maybe it’s one of Marcus’s allies. Maybe it’s you, the voyeur watching through the camera as it inhibits the killer’s POV to drown a woman in searing water.
Even so, we know narrative is not the commanding beast of giallo, but the oppressive stylization of the camera, music, and mise-en-scene. Deep Red marks Argento’s first collaboration with the band Goblin, and it’s an inspired start to their partnership. Their music is so menacing, all the more so for sometimes being weirdly jaunty and jazzy with it. Argento deploys a less extravagant color palette here than he would in Suspiria, but the cinematography is just as adept with baroque lighting and festishitic tactility. Be it the image of a squirming, injured newt at a man’s feet or the unpredictability in which the main theme is deployed during the kill scenes, the question of “what on Earth will Argento make us see and hear next?” is the film’s most potent form of bloody suspense.
I do not call myself any kind of aficionado with giallo films. If some of what I appreciate here is a novelty doomed to fade as I become more familiar with the genre, so be it. I can also tell, reading this back, that I’m being a bit generous by not pointing to longueurs where nothing much happens in the narrative or the aesthetics. The part of me that insatiably craves character detail would’ve liked more time with Nicolodi’s brassy Girl Friday. Still, these points feel much less important than what’s so strange and alluring about Deep Red. Goblin’s score’s been working its way through my brain since I saw it. The grotesque beauty of Argento’s craft is so singularly assured that the operatic highs more than compensate for occasional dry patches. Scratch that patch a little and you’ll surely find something lurking underneath.
But what about you, dear readers? What are your favorite giallo films? What discoveries have you made this October, and what frights are you hoping to catch before Halloween comes to our doors?