Do Panic: Dario Argento’s Cinema

There’s a second in “Dario Argento Panico,” a brand new documentary concerning the Italian horror film maestro Dario Argento, that made me marvel if I’ve misunderstood why his assertively macabre and stylishly grotesque movies so deeply give me the willies. It comes late within the movie in Argento’s personal phrases — phrase, really — as he talks about what makes his scary motion pictures scary.

“I’m looking for panic,” he says.

Panic: terror’s extra dire, fast, bodily inescapable bizarre sister. The Italian phrase for panic is true there within the title of Simone Scafidi’s humanizing and absorbing documentary (on Shudder Feb. 2), and it programs by Argento’s filmography.

But I used to be caught off guard listening to that phrase on Argento’s lips, as a result of it laid naked what I really feel once I watch his movies, a sensation I assumed was mere fright. Its real-world parallel is the intestine punch I acquired one night time when the lights went out in an elevator I used to be in, simply because it got here to a shuddering halt between the eighth and ninth flooring. Trapped in dangling darkness, I bought scared, after which rescued. But first, I panicked. We all know that feeling, however Argento feeds on it, monstrously.

Starting Jan. 31, Argento followers and the curious uninitiated have a terrific probability to pattern the 83-year-old grasp’s disquieting work when Shudder and the IFC Center in Manhattan current — right here’s that phrase once more — “Panic Attacks: The Films of Dario Argento.”

The 13-movie retrospective, which continues by Feb. 8, options the director’s best-known titles, together with the 1977 supernatural dance academy shocker “Suspiria” (additionally streaming on Tubi), the extra conventional whodunit “Deep Red” from 1975 (on Shudder), and the much less heralded (and sadly extra cornball) fare like “Dracula 3D” from 2013 (on Amazon Prime Video in 2-D). Not included is Argento’s most up-to-date movie, “Dark Glasses,” starring his actress-director daughter Asia Argento, which got here out in 2022 to combined opinions and is streaming on Shudder.

The sole non-Argento choice is a doozy: Gaspar Noé’s “Vortex” (2021), a despairing snapshot of an growing older Parisian couple performed by Argento and the actress Françoise Lebrun. In Scafidi’s documentary, Noé, an Argento acolyte, rightly likens seeing an Argento movie for the primary time to a baby first sipping Coca-Cola.

But for my cash, the one movie to see within the collection to actually get a way of Argento’s renegade artistry is his 1970 function directing debut, “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage.” Yes, it’s streaming on Amazon Prime Video, however it’s best seen large, as it is going to be on the IFC Center, which is displaying it in a 4K restoration.

Argento was already a longtime screenwriter, having penned greater than a dozen movies, when he wrote and directed “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage.” Filmed in Rome, it’s an extravagantly glam thriller starring Tony Musante as Sam, an American author who witnesses a gallery proprietor get slashed and finds himself caught in a madman’s bull’s-eye.

The knifing is among the most stylishly sordid assaults in horror. In just some determined minutes, we see a younger lady in a wonderful white jumper get stabbed in a stark white gallery. A set of huge glass doorways separates the sufferer from Sam’s assist — a chilling and theatrical mixture of tightly choreographed alarm and aspirational class. It additionally helps that Argento known as on the composer Ennio Morricone to write down a bracing rating, in addition to on the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (who would later win three Oscars) to trend the movie’s good-looking look.

Argento was an early pupil of cinematic grandeur. From dressing rooms, younger Dario watched his photographer mom, Elda Luxardo, seize Italian divas, together with Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, in sensuous black-and-white portraits. Argento’s father, Salvatore, was an esteemed movie producer who later backed a number of of his son’s motion pictures. Argento has pointed to the spectacular 1943 Claude Rains-starring model of “Phantom of the Opera” as a significant early affect.

“The Bird With the Crystal Plumage” was an surprising worldwide box-office hit, and was the primary in Argento’s weird “Animal Trilogy,” which incorporates his 1971 follow-ups “The Cat O’Nine Tails” (on Tubi) and “Four Flies on Grey Velvet” (on Plex), each to be proven on the IFC Center.

Most importantly, “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage” firmly positioned Argento, alongside along with his Italian contemporaries and auteurs Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci, as a virtuoso of the giallo, a lurid murder-mystery style with parts of pulp fiction and exploitation horror that shook Italian cinema within the Nineteen Seventies.

Argento’s filmic world is characterised by what the movie scholar Maitland McDonagh, in her definitive ebook “Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento,” calls “twisted logic, rhapsodic violence, stylized excess.” Glistening knives slash the air earlier than penetrating tender flesh. Lights in ruby and different jewel tones forged menacing shadows throughout elegantly apportioned rooms that really feel alive. The soundtrack is Italo disco and European electronica like that of Goblin, the prog-rock band Argento labored with for many years. No psychopath is absolutely dressed with out black leather-based gloves.

Giallo nonetheless has a maintain on horror, most vividly within the movies of Peter Strickland (“In Fabric”) and of Nicolas Winding Refn (“The Neon Demon”). James Wan has stated the most important affect on his movie “Saw” was Argento’s movies of the Nineteen Seventies.

For some, the giallo’s emphasis on fashion over substance and alchemy over readability is eye-rolling. This newspaper bought it proper when it stated “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage” evinces an “elegant, enterprising, occasionally desperate sensibility much given to fabricating sequins from non sequiturs.” From my homosexual vista, that intersection of the stylish and the abject is what provides Argento’s movies a maverick, darkly queer sensibility that is still almost unmatched in horror.

But I’ll give the director Guillermo del Toro the final phrase. In “Dario Argento Panico,” he makes use of the apt metaphor of a hostage negotiation to explain why Argento issues.

“You come out of the bank and say, ‘I’m going to shoot a hostage,’” del Toro says. “The audience doesn’t believe you, so you shoot the hostage and the audience goes, ‘Oh my God, he’s serious.’ Argento does that.”

Time to panic.