In Horror Infernal, the main character Rose discovers a hole in the floor in the basement of an antique shop. When her key falls into the water below, she dives down and comes across a kind of underworld in which rotting corpses suddenly float towards Rose.
A few scenes in Dario Argento’s work make sense one after the other and yet you immediately want to frame each one and hang it on your wall. This is the only way to describe many of the films by the Italian director, who at some point even angered his fans and then disappeared for a long time. There’s a story behind it like a rollercoaster ride that fortunately has a happy ending.
Master director Dario Argento shaped an entire film genre
Before his first feature film, Argento worked as a film critic for a long time, dealing intensively with the medium. In the 1960s he also worked as a co-screenwriter on Sergio Leone’s brilliant Western A Song of Death. Anyone who watches this film will understand why Argento’s own awareness of striking image compositions and audio-visually overwhelming montages come.
Argento’s feature film debut, The Secret of the Black Gloves, was released in 1970, in which the American author Sam Dalmas, who lives in Rome, witnesses the murder of an art gallery owner. This mixture of crime and thriller is considered to be part of the giallo subgenre. In addition to Argento himself, the film style was made known by the Italian director Mario Bava and was eventually appreciated beyond Italy.
Watch a trailer for Dario Argento’s directorial debut here:
The Bird With The Crystal Plumage – Trailer (English)
Giallo translates to yellow and refers to the Italian dime novels that are sold with covers in this color. Argento established the trademarks of this niche film genre, which is usually about series of murders with a perpetrator wears black gloves and kills with a knife.
A main character always witnesses one of the murders and is therefore involuntarily involved. But the highlight of Gialli is the murder sequences. In the best case scenario, they are drawn out in an almost unbearably exciting way and designed to be so impressive despite the brutality, small works of art arise. In the end, the solution to who is behind the crimes always comes with an absurd twist. Anyone who places a lot of value on logic in films will often reach their limits here.
Dario Argento treated grubby genres like a great artist
Argento has further developed and perfected the giallo into a high-quality art form with highlights such as Profondo Rosso – The Color of Death or Terror in the Opera. In the films, which were mostly shot with an international cast and were therefore dubbed in several languages, they fell Acting and dialogue mostly bumpy and secondary out of.
Instead, the Italian used the camera like a painter. He transformed brutal murders, along with striking architecture and thrilling suspense, into over-stylized works of art.
The director’s important collaborator was the prog rock band Goblin. This gave Argento’s scenes a wild, intense soundscape that strongly dominated the atmosphere of the works.
In addition to the Giallo, Argento also made pure horror films, with Suspiria being one of the greatest genre representatives ever. The story about the American ballet student Suzy, who comes across an occult secret in Freiburg, Germany, is a audiovisual frontal attack on the senses.
For the style, the director was inspired, among other things, by bright Technicolor fairy tales such as Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to create his own version of a supernatural nightmare that can hardly be put into words.
Here you get an impression of the Suspiria style and the Goblin music:
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Dario Argento’s reputation slowly went downhill
However, at the beginning of the 90s, the director’s career slowly faded into insignificance. Films like Aura – Trauma were hardly able to make an impression in terms of production, while works like The Phantom of the Opera, an adaptation of the legendary novel, were disappointing.
Things got even worse for most Argento fans starting in the 2000s. Here the filmmaker seemed to most with low points like The Card Player, The Mother of Tears, Giallo and Dario Argento’s Dracula reached the bottom to be.
Argento’s signature style here increasingly gave way to a trashy style that was almost indistinguishable from bad video store cucumbers and amateur trash. Only Sleepless from 2001 still contained traces of the old Argento genius in terms of the sometimes intoxicating pull of the set pieces with a wonderfully classic Goblin score.
Dario Argento returned with excitement this decade
Together with the bad reputation of his more recent films, Argento has somewhat disappeared into obscurity. The name “Argento” lived only from the status of his long-ago great deeds. In 2015, he used the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo to raise money for a new horror film called The Sandman, which he wanted to make with the famous rock star Iggy Pop. Even though enough fans donated, the director couldn’t make the film.
But then his new feature film Dark Glasses – Blind Fear was released unexpectedly, which celebrated its world premiere at the Berlinale 2022 ten years after his Dracula. The excitement before Dark Glasses was correspondingly great. What does a new Dario Argento film look like after so many years? Can it return to its earlier glory days or does the film join the recent series of trashy embarrassments?
Here is a German trailer for Argento’s late work Dark Glasses:
Dark Glasses – Trailer (German) HD
Dark Glasses is Dario Argento’s worthy late work
Dark Glasses ultimately turned out to be a kind of late work in which Argento more stylish than ever since Sleepless instead of simply delivering a tired copy of his older films. The beginning in particular comes across as a hypnotic, oppressive déjà vu.
In summertime Rome there is a serial killer who murders high-class prostitutes during a solar eclipse. Suddenly all the Argento trademarks are back in the usual form and only slightly varied: the black gloves, victims who slowly wander to their destruction in mystically exalted places and a murder weapon, this time a cello string, which is presented in front of the camera like a fetish object .
Nevertheless, the Italian is not resting on a retro style exercise. With the blind prostitute Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli) and the boy Chin (Xinyu Zhang), Dark Glasses becomes an often sensitive and touching drama.
While in many Argento films the unconditional looking and inability to look away was the central theme, the protagonist’s blindness becomes the defining new motif in Dark Glasses. The director stages his late work day and night like a dim lucid dream in which dreary reality and pulsating, surreal danger constantly tilt into one another.
However, he never loses sight of the gentle relationship between the characters, which stands up against the brutal moments of violence that break into the rhythm of the narrative. Dark Glasses is light and shadow, good and evil, violence and beauty, so beguiling and sophisticated like Argento, not united for twenty years.
If it were to be the 84-year-old’s last feature film, it would be a fitting end to a long story.
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