Dario Argento

Dario Argento: Murder Staged as Opera

In 1968 a young Roman film critic sat down with Bernardo Bertolucci to invent the story for Sergio Leone's *Once Upon a Time in the West*. He was twenty-seven and had never directed anything. Two years later he made his own first film, and within a decade he had done something that ought to be impossible: he turned the murder scene — the cheapest, most disposable unit in commercial cinema — into a form with its own grammar, colour theory and score. Nobody has taken it away from him since.

Rome, and a Critic Who Jumped the Fence

Argento was born in Rome on 7 September 1940 into the business. His father Salvatore was a Sicilian film producer; his mother Elda Luxardo was a Brazilian-born fashion photographer of Italian descent, which is worth noting, because the son's obsession with the composed, lit, artificial image did not come from nowhere. After a Catholic secondary education he washed dishes in Paris, came home to Italy at sixteen, and started writing film criticism for the Rome paper *Paese Sera*, where he made his name defending genre pictures that respectable critics ignored.

Screenwriting followed — his first produced script was a 1966 comedy — and then the Leone commission. It was an unusual apprenticeship: he learned structure not in a film school but by arguing about films in print and then by building the skeleton of one of the most deliberately paced Westerns ever shot.

The Animal Trilogy

*The Bird with the Crystal Plumage* (1970) is where the Argento problem is first stated. A man watches a struggle through a glass gallery front, is certain he has seen an attempted murder, and is wrong about what he saw. That inversion — the eyewitness who cannot read his own memory — became his lifelong preoccupation, and it is the reason his films are visually restless. If seeing is unreliable, the camera has to keep moving until it finds the thing it missed.

*The Cat o' Nine Tails* (1971) and *Four Flies on Grey Velvet* (1972) completed what became known as the Animal Trilogy. All three belong to the *giallo*, the Italian thriller named for the yellow covers of pulp crime paperbacks — a genre Mario Bava had already shaped before Argento arrived, a debt worth stating plainly. What Argento added was rigour: elaborate staging, artisanal construction, an insistence that a set-piece be built rather than merely shot.

Deep Red

*Profondo Rosso* (1975) is widely called the best giallo ever made, and Argento has named it his own favourite. It is also the film in which every element of the mature style locks together — the black-gloved killer, the childhood trauma buried in a house, the camera prowling objects rather than faces, and the score by the progressive rock band Goblin, whose driving, unlovely music became as identifiable as the images. John Carpenter has credited Argento's early work as an influence on *Halloween*, made three years later.

Suspiria and the Three Mothers

*Suspiria* (1977) abandoned the giallo's rational detective frame for outright witchcraft: a German dance academy run by a coven, rendered in a palette of screaming reds, blues and greens that no horror film had attempted. It opened the Three Mothers trilogy, continued by *Inferno* in 1980 and finally closed, twenty-seven years late, by *The Mother of Tears* in 2007. Then came *Tenebrae* (1982), a return to the procedural, *Phenomena* (1985) and *Opera* (1987).

The technical ambition through these years was constant — early adoption of the Steadicam, ferocious precision in cutting, camera movements engineered to be impossible. He said of his own evolution: "The terror is like a serpent, always shedding its skin, always changing."

The Family Business

Argento met the actress and writer Daria Nicolodi while casting *Deep Red* in 1974. Their daughter Asia was born in 1975; Nicolodi co-wrote *Suspiria* and appeared in several of his films, and the couple separated in 1985. His elder daughter Fiore, born in 1970, came from his first marriage to Marisa Casale. Asia became an actress and director in her own right and worked repeatedly for her father, in *Trauma*, *The Stendhal Syndrome* and *Dracula 3D* — a collaboration that has drawn a good deal of comment, given what he asks his leading women to endure on screen.

He also crossed the Atlantic. In 1978 he co-produced George Romero's *Dawn of the Dead*, supervising a distinct European cut released as *Zombi* with a heavier Goblin score. *The Stendhal Syndrome* (1996) was the first Italian film to use computer-generated imagery, and he shot inside the Uffizi in Florence under a permission granted to no other director.

Why Dario Is Called a Genius

The claim is not for storytelling. Argento's plots are frequently incoherent, his dialogue functional, his characters thin, and he has never much cared — narrative, in his films, is scaffolding for the sequences that matter. The claim rests on craft of a particular kind: he treats a killing the way a choreographer treats a dance, as a designed event with its own duration, colour scheme, camera logic and music. Before him, murder in cinema was an outcome. He made it a composition.

The abilities are identifiable. He deploys primary colours at saturations that ought to look ridiculous and instead produce dread. He has an original eye for camera movement, sending the lens through spaces and objects rather than around them. And he built the sound of modern horror by handing scores to a rock band, which no serious director was doing in 1975. His central formal idea — that a witness can look at the truth and fail to see it — is pursued with real consistency across fifty years.

The counter-case is substantial. His reputation rests on roughly fifteen years; the decline afterwards was steep. *Fangoria* wrote in 2010 that his later films are "sloppy, stitched together so carelessly that they leak vital fluid" — damning for a filmmaker once so precise in construction and cutting. The sadism toward women in his films is a fair charge, not a squeamish one. And he did not invent the giallo; Bava got there first. Argento perfected a style, then repeated it long after the discipline that made it work had gone.

Legacy

His influence runs further than his box office ever did. *Suspiria*'s colour, *Deep Red*'s prowling camera and the Goblin scores are now standard equipment in horror, borrowed by directors who have never sat through an entire Argento picture, and his work is a fixture of academic film study — Maitland McDonagh's *Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds* took him seriously as early as 1991. He runs Profondo Rosso, a horror memorabilia shop in Rome named for his own film, and has contributed to video games. He returned to directing with *Dark Glasses* in 2022 after a decade away, and in 2021 gave a widely praised performance as an actor in Gaspar Noé's *Vortex* at Cannes — an old man playing an old man losing his mind, which is a strange and rather moving coda for a director who spent his career insisting that nobody can trust what they see.

Achievements

• Notable work: Deep Red
• Notable work: Tenebrae
• Notable work: Suspiria
• Notable work: The Stendhal Syndrome
• Worked as film director, film producer and screenwriter