Dario Argento

Dario Argento is considered by many horror fans to be one of the most stylish and visually imaginative directors alive today. He came to the business young, starting his career as a screenplay writer where at the age of only twenty he joined Bernado Bertolucci in writing the screenplay for Sergio Leone’s iconic western, Once Upon A Time In The West. But it is for his Horror films that he is best known.

Over the last thirty five years Dario has directed sixteen films, many of them falling into the Italian genre known as Giallo, meaning Yellow. This is a reference to the lurid Yellow covers of murder mystery novels popular at the time and just like the novels, Giallo movies are a heady mix of gritty American detective caricatures blended (and in Dario Argento case quite often literally) together with a European, Baroque viscosity of violence and excess.

To say that Dario’s moves are visual is putting it mildly. Less concerned with character or plot he focuses on the visually disturbing. Probing the human mind, (again, quite often literally) for the things that make people squirm and writhe. He languishes in the cruel and mindless violence that would leave normal people at a loss as to how they would remove such thoughts from their minds should they ever have sprung up there in the first place.

He is, after all, the man who showed us what it would be like to be held down while a woman in red high heals repeatedly stamps and stamps on our mouths. Or what it looks like for a woman to be torn apart by barbed wire. Or, how it might look if an old cripple is eaten half to death by hungry rats, only to survive to be hacked apart by a random, cleaver wielding maniac. As to what Dario has to say on the mater it’s this.

“I like when people are disgusted, because it means you’ve made an impression on them.”

No ambiguity there.

Subtlety is not his forte. In fact it seems to abhor him almost as much as his films abhor their viewers. And when it comes to the lusty, beautiful women in his movies he is really quit clear. I quote “I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.”

Of the Sixteen film directed by Dario Argento, Deep Red and Suspiria are considered to be his best work. Suspiria, made in the seventies, was the first in “The Three Mothers” trilogy he planed to make about three ancient witches living in three modern cities. In the eighties he made the second movie in the series called Inferno. The third

Film in the series is finished and is currently awaiting release. Three other films Argento made in the early seventies, The Cat O Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet and The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, have been linked together in the minds of the people who admire him and are commonly referred to as the “Animal Trilogy”

There is no doubt that Dario Argent is a master at what he does and like him or loath him he has inspired many of the best know horror makers around the world today. John Carpenter has said that he was greatly influenced by Dario’s work when he was making his own, Horror epic, Halloween. In fact it could be said that if Edgar Allen Po had had access to the technology that Argento does now he probably would have films every bit as gruesome.

To sum up I will leave with the words of the Maestro himself.

“Horror by definition is the emotion of pure revulsion. Terror by the same standard is that of fearful anticipation”—Dario Argento