Dario Argento: Colour, Glass, and the Killer's Glove

Ask a Dario Argento film to make sense and it will look at you the way a cat looks at a closed door — briefly, then never again. This is the great scandal of his career and the reason his best films outlive tidier ones: he did not care whodunnit, he cared how the light hit the knife. Plot, for Argento, is the excuse that gets the characters into the beautiful room where the terrible thing will happen. Once they are there, logic is dismissed for the evening and the film becomes a fashion shoot conducted at the point of a straight razor. Fifty years on, his imitators are legion and his best sequences remain unrepeated, because almost nobody else was willing to be this silly and this serious at the same time.

He is the son of a film producer and a fashion photographer, and you can see both parents in every frame. From the father, the machinery of Italian genre production — fast, cheap, internationally financed, dubbed in three languages. From the mother, the eye: the sense that a human body is an arrangement of surfaces and a murder is a composition problem. Before he directed, Argento co-wrote the story for Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), which tells you he learned structure from the master of the operatic pause before he decided to throw structure out.

The animal trilogy

His debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), essentially industrialised the giallo — the Italian murder-mystery named for the yellow covers of the pulp novels it descended from. An American writer in Rome witnesses an attempted murder through a gallery’s glass frontage, becomes obsessed, and turns amateur detective while a black-gloved killer works through the supporting cast. The template locks in here: the tourist protagonist, the half-seen clue the hero cannot correctly interpret, the killer shot from behind or from the wrists down, the fetishised black leather gloves that Argento often wore himself for the insert shots.

The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) completed what fans call the animal trilogy, and they are lesser — Argento sanding the edges of his own idea. The interesting one is Four Flies, an early demonstration that he would happily sacrifice any plausibility for a single unforgettable image, in this case a retina supposedly retaining the last thing it saw. It is nonsense. It is also unforgettable, which is the whole Argento bargain in one shot.

The masterpieces

Then two films that anyone serious about horror has to reckon with. Deep Red (Profondo Rosso, 1975) is the finest giallo ever made and possibly the best-directed thing he ever did. A jazz pianist witnesses a psychic’s murder, is haunted by a detail he saw but cannot place, and the film’s central mystery is genuinely about the treachery of memory — the clue was on screen, and both he and you looked straight past it. This is Argento’s one film where the who and the how actually reward attention, and it comes wrapped in the first great collaboration with the prog band Goblin, whose pounding, childlike main theme is as much a character as any actor.

Suspiria (1977) abandoned the giallo entirely for supernatural horror and became his signature. A ballet student arrives at a German dance academy run by witches; the story is a wisp, the experience is a bombardment. Printed in the last gasp of three-strip Technicolor for reds that look radioactive, scored by Goblin at their most shrieking, it is horror as pure sensory assault, and it works precisely because Argento stopped pretending to care about anything except colour and sound and fear. Begin here if you have never seen him. It is the purest distillation of what he is for.

There is a reason Suspiria felt like a rupture even in 1977. Argento and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli deliberately hunted down an imbibition Technicolor process that was already obsolete, printing the film through dye transfer to get greens and reds no ordinary stock could hold. The academy’s interiors are lit like a stained-glass window with the sun behind it, so that a corridor becomes an emotion before a single line is spoken. Marry that to Goblin’s bells, wails and whispered title-word and you have a film that works on a viewer who has switched off the subtitles entirely. It is horror addressed to the eye and the ear, with the brain politely asked to wait outside.

Suspiria opened a supernatural loop he never satisfyingly closed — the Three Mothers trilogy, continued in the ravishing, incoherent Inferno (1980) and only concluded, disastrously, twenty-seven years later. Inferno is worth seeing for its underwater ballroom and its architecture-as-evil premise; it is also proof that Argento’s images could float entirely free of any story and still hypnotise.

Why the set-pieces work

Strip an Argento murder down and you find an unusual amount of engineering under the hysteria. He storyboards the kill as a sequence of withheld reveals — a gloved hand, a glint of the weapon, an ornament on the mantel, the victim’s reflection in something that should not be reflecting — so that your eye is doing frantic assembly while the music refuses to resolve. He shoots from impossible vantage points, threading the camera through a keyhole or gliding it along a ceiling, which puts you in the position of an intelligence that is present at the scene yet powerless to intervene. Then he slows time. His deaths take far longer than physiology allows, because the choreography is the point rather than the death, the way a body meets a pane of glass or a decorative iron railing. The horror comes from duration and design working against each other: the more exquisitely composed the frame, the more unbearable the wait for it to be broken.

The last great run and the long decline

Tenebrae (1982) is his coldest, cleverest film, a return to the giallo that doubles as a sly reply to critics who accused his work of misogyny — a novelist stalked in a sun-bleached, chrome-and-white Rome, with a roving crane shot up and across the outside of a house that remains one of the show-off camera moves of the decade. Phenomena (1985) is deranged in the best way, with a sleepwalking Jennifer Connelly who can command insects and a chimpanzee wielding a razor for the finale. Opera (1987) contains his cruellest signature image, needles taped beneath a woman’s eyes so she cannot blink or look away from the murders — Argento’s confession, encoded in torture, about what his own camera does to a viewer.

After Opera the decline is long and, for admirers, painful to catalogue. There are moments in The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) and Sleepless (2001), which reunited him with Goblin. But the craft coarsened, the effects went cheap and digital, and Mother of Tears (2007) closed the Three Mothers saga with a crudeness that embarrassed the trilogy’s earlier heights. Dracula 3D (2012) is best left in its box. His 2022 return, Dark Glasses, was a modest, watchable giallo that mostly reminded everyone what the master used to be capable of. The instinct never fully died; the resources and the discipline did.

The fingerprints on everyone after

The collector’s reason to know Argento is that the entire modern slasher has his gloves on. He did not invent the giallo — that honour belongs largely to Mario Bava, whose Blood and Black Lace (1964) is the true ancestor of the black-gloved-killer film and a direct line back to Hitchcock’s guilt-and-glamour. What Argento did was aestheticise it to the point of fetish, and when John Carpenter and the American slasher arrived at the end of the decade, they inherited the killer’s-eye camera, the elaborate stalk-and-kill set-piece, and the murder staged as spectacle. Watch the opening of Halloween with giallo in mind and the debt is obvious in the very first shot.

His influence outlasted the genre he built. Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspiria reckoned with him seriously, throwing out the colour and keeping the dread, and Peter Strickland, Panos Cosmatos and Nicolas Winding Refn all owe him their permission to let a scene run on pure sensation. Every horror director who has ever privileged an image over a plot beat is quoting Dario Argento, whether they know his name or not.

The verdict, and where to start

To love Argento you have to make peace with the deal: transcendent set-pieces welded to storytelling that ranges from careless to actively broken, performances flattened by international dubbing, and endings that frequently explain a mystery you had stopped believing in an hour earlier. Approached as narrative, most of his films fail. Approached as what they are — dream-logic engines for delivering colour, music and dread straight to the nervous system — the best of them are among the most purely cinematic horror ever shot.

Start with Suspiria for the overwhelming version and Deep Red for the disciplined one; between them they hold everything he could do. Add Tenebrae and Phenomena when you want the deranged giallo at full tilt, and treat Inferno as a gorgeous fever to be admired rather than followed. Stop, gently, somewhere around Opera. What comes after is a great filmmaker’s echo, and the echo is not why you came.