Tenebrae: Argento Turns the Knife on His Critics

Most directors answer their critics in interviews. Dario Argento answered his with a film in which the critics are murdered, one by one, by a killer inspired by the director’s own work — and then made the murderer’s motive a lecture on how the disapproving deserve to die. Tenebrae, released in 1982, is the most self-aware giallo ever made, a razor-sharp thriller about an author whose fiction is being restaged as real killings, written by a man who had spent a decade being accused of glorifying violence against women and had clearly had enough. It is cold, bright, brutal, and slyly funny, and it may be the most purely enjoyable film Argento ever directed.

It arrived after Argento had detoured into the supernatural with Suspiria and its follow-up Inferno, and it is a deliberate return to the rationalist giallo — the black-gloved killer, the whodunit structure, the plot that can, in principle, be solved. But Tenebrae is a giallo that has read its own reviews. Where Suspiria drowned narrative in colour, Tenebrae is glassy, clinical and interrogative. It wants to talk to you about what you came to watch.

The novelist as prime suspect

Anthony Franciosa plays Peter Neal, an American author of lurid crime bestsellers, who flies to Rome to promote his latest, titled Tenebrae. Almost immediately a killer begins murdering people in the exact style of Neal’s fiction, stuffing pages torn from his book into the victims’ mouths, taunting the author with letters that praise his work as an inspiration. Neal is forced into the role of amateur detective investigating crimes that are, in a sense, his own — the fiction leaking off the page and into the streets, the author made responsible for the violence he only ever imagined.

The autobiographical charge is impossible to miss. Argento had been receiving hate mail and, by his account, threats; he had been publicly accused of misogyny for the elaborate way his films killed women; and here he makes a film about an artist of stylised murder confronted by someone who has taken his art as a licence. Neal is Argento’s self-portrait as suspect, and the film’s genius is that it refuses to let him — or the audience, or the director — entirely off the hook. It is a defence and a confession at once, staged as a locked-room mystery. Argento is arguing with his critics inside the machinery of the very thing they object to, which is either the most honest or the most provocative move available to him, and probably both. I traced how central this reflexive self-examination is to his whole body of work in Dario Argento: colour, glass and the killer’s glove.

Light as a weapon

The most startling thing about Tenebrae on first viewing is how it looks. The title translates as “darkness,” and Argento shoots the film in blinding, overexposed white. Working again with cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, who had lit the deranged Technicolor of Suspiria, Argento does the complete opposite here: a sterile, sun-blasted, near-future Rome of white walls, glass, and chrome, where the murders happen in flat, merciless light with nowhere to hide. There are almost no shadows. The horror is committed in full view, and the brightness is its own kind of assault — an unblinking clarity that gives you no darkness to look away into.

It is a brilliant inversion of horror grammar. We expect the killer in the shadows; Argento gives us a killer in the glare. The famous set-piece is a single unbroken crane shot, executed with a Louma crane, that climbs the entire exterior of a house — up one wall, across the roof, down the other side, peering into windows — in one continuous, impossibly fluid movement, prowling the building’s skin while, inside, two women edge towards their deaths. It is showing off, gloriously, and it is also the film’s thesis in miniature: the camera as an all-seeing predator that can go anywhere and that implicates you, the watcher, in the looking. The score, by three former members of Goblin working as Simonetti-Pignatelli-Morante, drives the whole thing on a pulsing, propulsive synth line that is one of the great horror soundtracks of the decade.

The most notorious cut in Britain

Tenebrae has a second life in horror history as a cause célèbre. When the video nasties panic swept Britain in the early 1980s, Tenebrae was among the films seized and prosecuted, and it circulated for years only in a censored form, its most extravagant moment of violence hacked to pieces by the censor’s scissors. The film’s reputation as an object of moral danger is, of course, the exact accusation the film is about — a movie concerning the supposed real-world contagion of screen violence became a legal test case for the supposed real-world contagion of screen violence. The universe rarely offers a critic such a tidy rhyme.

That history matters because it reveals what Tenebrae was really wrestling with, a question the genre has never resolved: does stylised murder inspire the real thing, or does it inoculate against it? Argento takes the accusation seriously enough to build a whole film out of it, then declines to hand you a comforting answer. The Italian tradition of the anonymous, motiveless killer — the black glove, the mystery assailant — was already migrating into the American slasher by the time Tenebrae appeared, carrying exactly these anxieties with it, a lineage I mapped in the giallo’s fingerprints on the modern slasher.

Why the coldness works

Tenebrae is a chillier watch than Deep Red — there is no Nicolodi screwball warmth here, no couple to root for, just a cast of brittle, unpleasant Romans being murdered in a sun-bleached maze. And that coldness is the correct temperature for what the film is doing. This is a puzzle-box about the ethics of the puzzle-box, and it wants you slightly alienated, aware that you are watching a designed object about the pleasure of designed murder. The film keeps its distance so that you notice yourself watching.

The plotting is Argento at his most gleefully unfair and, simultaneously, his most rigorous — a mystery with a genuine solution that also cheerfully violates the audience’s assumptions about narration and reliability. It rewards the second viewing enormously, because the film has been telling you the truth in ways you could not have parsed the first time. For a director often, and fairly, accused of caring more for a beautiful death than a coherent story, Tenebrae is the proof that when Argento wanted to build a watertight machine, he could. He just usually preferred the dream.

Spoilers below

The film’s masterstroke is a mid-point rug-pull. Peter Neal appears to be murdered — attacked and seemingly killed — which removes the prime suspect and reframes the whole investigation. It is a lie. Neal is not dead; he is the second killer. The film has two murderers. The initial killer is a deranged fan and television journalist, Christiano Berti, who has been restaging Neal’s fiction out of a conviction that “perverts” deserve execution. Neal discovers Berti’s identity, kills him — and then, unhinged by the encounter and by a repressed trauma the film has been flashing towards, continues the murders himself, using Berti’s crimes as cover and settling private scores.

That repressed trauma is delivered in the film’s most haunting recurring image — a stylised red-lit flashback, seen throughout in fragments, of a humiliation on a beach involving a figure in red high-heeled shoes, the wound that Argento suggests made Neal what he is. The reveal is that the author was never the innocent observer of the violence in his books; the violence was in him all along, and his fiction was the pressure valve that failed. It is Argento’s most cutting joke at his own expense and his critics’ — the man who imagines murder for a living turns out to be the murderer, and the killer’s justification is that the depraved deserve punishment, the exact charge levelled at Argento’s cinema.

The finale is deliriously excessive even by his standards: a decapitation, a modern-art sculpture with a lethal spike, a final scream that seems never to end. Argento closes on chaos and blood, the tidy rationalist giallo dissolving into pure hysteria — the film’s own argument, that the line between imagining violence and committing it is thinner than anyone comfortable would like, taken to its shrieking conclusion. It is his sharpest film precisely because it turns the blade on himself.

Where to watch: seek out one of the uncut restorations — Arrow’s Blu-ray finally presents the film with the censored violence restored and the sun-blasted photography properly graded. Follow it with Deep Red to see Argento’s rationalist giallo at both its warmest and its coldest.