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

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:00:00 +0000

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.

Suspiria (1977): Argento's Colour as a Weapon

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Try to summarise the plot of Suspiria and you will sound like someone describing a dream to a stranger at breakfast. An American ballet student arrives at a prestigious German dance academy. Odd things happen. There are witches. That is very nearly all of it, and it is beside the point. Dario Argento’s 1977 film is one of the few genuinely great horror pictures where narrative is the least interesting thing on offer — a fairy tale wired directly to the optic nerve, printed in colours so violent they feel like an assault, and scored by a rock band who seem to be actively trying to frighten you out of the cinema. Nearly fifty years on, nothing else looks or sounds quite like it.

Italian Horror - vo.rs

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

Suspiria (1977): Argento's Colour as a Weapon