Dario Argento Panico
The son of a Sicilian film producer and a Brazilian photographer who specialised in glamour photography for film stars, Dario Argento was born into the arts and raised in the cinema, his family accustomed to the company of actors and directors and he first working as a cinema reviewer before moving into screenwriting and finally directing with the thriller L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) in 1970, the first in what would be regarded in his “animal trilogy.”
Il gatto a nove code (The Cat o’ Nine Tails) following in 1971 then 4 mosche di velluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet) in 1972, they brought international attention and American stars such as Karl Malden and Michael Brandon to Argento’s productions before a brief and poorly received switch to comedy before pushing the giallo style to extremes with Profondo rosso (Deep Red), a film which also marked the beginning of two enduring creative partnerships, with actor Daria Nicolodi with whom he would have a daughter, Asia, and with musician Claudio Simonetti and his band Goblin.
His career having spanned almost sixty years, his most recent feature Occhiali neri (Dark Glasses) having been released in 2022, Argento is interviewed alongside family, collaborators and admirers by director Simone Scafidi in Dario Argento Panico, the title referring to Argento’s professed intention to provoke that profound reaction from his audiences, beyond fear and horror, and while there is archive “behind the scenes” footage from numerous productions all the interviews are recently conducted.
While this includes contributions from Simonetti as well as Argento’s sister and his first wife, former associates Michele Soavi and Luigi Cozzi, now directors themselves, and Guillermo del
Toro, Gaspar Noé and Nicolas Winding Refn, other than Cristina Marsillach, the lead in Opera, the only other actor who contributes is Asia Argento, many of his former stars including Nicolodi, Malden, Tony Musante, John Saxon and Rutger Hauer now sadly passed but the absence of Brandon, Suspiria’s Jessica Harper or even Phenomena’s Jennifer Connelly a disappointing omission, the absence where their insights might be like excisions in the flesh.
Refn describing Tenebrae as “a surreal fashion show” to which Simonetti contributed “the first disco horror soundtrack,” while Argento was undoubtedly groundbreaking in many ways, pushing his genre in his own particular direction of extremity, his vision as an artiste is not always shared by his backers, he proceeding from a European arthouse perspective where visual style is sometimes favoured over coherent narrative while the American financiers of Inferno had more conventional expectations, compromises which Argento struggled to incorporate, his later films often failing to impress his devotees or more general audiences.
The producer Vittorio Cecchi Gori insisting that his friend has a sense of humour, there is little evidence of such presented with even Argento’s daughter commenting that he once refused to speak to her for two years after her own professional commitments prevented her taking a role in one of his films, Dario Argento Panico offering a chronological overview of the career of the subject but like many of his films existing in a cold vacuum, his work admired but the man always at a distance, consciously an enigma as much his films.
Dario Argento Panico will be available on Shudder from Friday 2nd February
