Deep Red (1975)

A musician witnesses the murder of a famous psychic, and then teams up with a fiesty reporter to find the killer while evading attempts on their lives by the unseen killer bent on keeping a dark secret buried. 

Deep Red is a 1975 Italian giallo film, directed by Dario Argento and co-written by Argento and Bernardino Zapponi.  It was produced by Claudio and Salvatore Argento, and the film's score was composed and performed by Goblin. It stars Macha Meril as a medium and David Hemmings as a man who investigates a series of murders performed by a mysterious figure wielding a hatchet.

As with other Argento films, the accent in "Deep Red" is on the visuals: the artsy sets, the garish lighting, the tendency for the camera to dwell on brutal details. Unlike his film Suspiria, where the story is weak, Deep Red has a good plot element that builds to an excellent finale. Clues are very subtle, but they're there, if you pay close attention.

Argento's film thrives on offbeat sounds and images

Deep Red is about a man that sees a murder committed and then tries to unravel the mystery of finding the killer.  David Hemmings does a fine job in the lead as he walks the streets of an Italian city in search of this homicidal killer. The killings, most done with a hatchet, are inventive and decidedly gruesome.  The acting, even though most dubbed, is very good. The set locations are very atmospheric as well. Argento's camera, however, is the principal character as it shows us all kinds of images related to plot and otherwise and reached into our subconscience for real meaning. This is first and foremost a visual film.

What I did find annoying in "Deep Red" was the background music. Most viewers like the sound of Goblin. But the music was too frantic, and not really suitable for a thriller.  While I still favor "Suspiria" as Argento's best film, it's easy to see why Deep Red is considered his greatest by some. It's a terrific landmark thriller that firmly ranks as one of Argento's best!

Trivia: 

In one scene David Hemmings walks past a bar at night. The bar is styled after the famous painting "Nighthawks", by Edward Hopper.

Following the 11 seconds of cuts made in 1993 to the Redemption video the Platinum DVD restored the brief dogfight scene though one cut was retained. On a Dario Argento collection where versions could be chosen (English or Italian) the longer Italian language version showed a very sloppy cut before the unfortunate lizard was seen on-screen with a pin through its head. The shorter English language print had no such cuts. 

The closeup shots of the killer's hands, clad in black leather gloves, were performed by director Dario Argento himself.

Director trademark:[Dario Argento] Murder victim crashes through window.

Director trademark: [Dario Argento] Character recalls clues from memory.

Director Dario Argento's shop in Rome is named 'Profondo Rosso' after this film. 

Co-writer Bernardino Zapponi said the inspiration behind the murder scenes came from Argento and himself thinking of painful injuries that the audience could relate to. Basically, not everyone knows the pain of being shot by a gun, but everyone has at some point accidentally struck furniture or been scalded by hot water.

After the international success of Dario Argento's next film Suspiria (1977), Profondo Rosso was released in Japan under the title Suspiria 2 even though it has no plot connections with Suspiria and was made two years prior to Suspiria.

Even if the story is set in Rome, most of the outdoor scenes were actually shot in Turin.

The role of Carlo's male transvestite lover, Massimo Ricci, was actually played by female actress Geraldine Hooper.

"You have just seen Deep Red."

Phenomena (1985)

A young girl, with an amazing ability to communicate with insects, is transferred to an exclusive Swiss boarding school, where her unusual capability might help solve a string of murders.  

Phenomena is a 1985 Italian horror film directed by Dario Argento. An edited version of the film was released in the United States under the title Creepers.  When I was younger I remember seeing the video sitting on the shelves in the local video shop.  It was under the "Creepers" title and it looked sort of silly so I never rented it.  I'm glad I didn't.  That version for the US was butchered up with a lot of footage cut.  I've now gotten around to viewing the entire film with all the sliced footage intact.  

It has a 14-year-old Jennifer Connelly, playing a sleepwalker who has a bizarre telepathic bond with insects and uses them to help her solve a string of gory murders at a girls boarding school in the Swiss Alps. A lot of people love this film and a lot of people hate this film.  I fall right in the middle.  It's not bad but I don't find it very good either. Donald Pleasance is in the film as a wheelchair bound bug dude. But the entire time I'm watching him on screen I keep thinking he's going to burst out in a rant about Micheal Myers being the devil.  Instead he's hanging out with a pet monkey. 

Bubbles, did MJ touch you in the bad place?

 Phenomena is a surreal, magical and surprisingly beautiful film.  It also has gruesome gore with a swimming pool full of maggots and rotting corpses, a mad dwarf, a razor wielding monkey and grisly decapitations. And we get a kick ass soundtrack with Iron Maiden and Motorhead.  Partially a Giallo, and partially a horror film with psychic and transcendental elements, "Phenomena" is a creepy film that gets kind of silly of times in my opinion with the bug communication deal.

The special effects were decent, given the year. The firefly special effects were cool, and there was at least one swarm scene that I thought looked pretty neat.  A lot of people love this movie but I don't fall into that group.  It's well below Suspiria in my opinion.  But if you ever wanted to see a monkey go ape shit with a razor blade then this is a movie you want to see.

Weird

 Trivia

Shot in English and dubbed into Italian. 

Most of the Italian and other non-English speaking actors/actresses actually dubbed their own voices into English for the USA and UK distribution.

A sequel to Phenomena was going to go into production in 2001 but it was canceled due to Dario Argento's contract with Medusa.   

Director Dario Argento said that his idea for the look of the killer child came from the real genetic disorder Patau Syndrome, which causes severe deformation of the face. For this reason, Argento calls the child Patau, even though he is never named during the film. 

Director Dario Argento often cites this film as his personal favorite among his works.

The trained chimpanzee that plays Inga escaped into the woods at one point during shooting. After a few hours of searching she was found and returned to the set. 

Jennifer Connelly said in an interview that she was bitten by the chimp in this film. Apperently during one scene the chimp kept turning around and Dario Argento, not wanting to film her behind, asked Connelly to place her hand on the animal to stop her from turning. But when she attempted to do so, the chimp became enraged and bit her; and then became very hostile toward Connelly for the rest of the film.  

The film was inspired to Dario Argento after he learned that insects are sometimes used during murder investigations. 

The story Jennifer tells about her mother abandoning her was an actual story from Dario Argento's own childhood. 

Jennifer Connelly had part of her finger bitten off by the chimpanzee in the final scene at the end of the film. She was rushed to the hospital and the finger was re-attached.  

A young Jennifer Connelly

Suspiria (1977)

"Suzy Banyon decided to perfect her ballet studies in the most famous school of dance in Europe. She chose the celebrated academy of Freeborge. One day, at nine in the morning, she left Kennedy airport, New York, and arrived in Germany at 10:40 p.m. local time."

A newcomer to a fancy ballet academy gradually comes to realize that the staff of the school are actually a coven of witches bent on chaos and destruction. 


Suspiria is an Italian horror film, directed by Dario Argento.  It was co-written by Argento and Daria Nicolodi, produced by Claudio and Salvatore Argento and stars Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Alida Valli and Joan Bennett.

There is probably not a lot more I can say about Suspiria that hasn't already been said or written.  The film just isn't on the lists of top horror movies of all time....it's on lists for the top movies of all time...period.  And yet, I had never seen it.  I saw it on lists and heard how good it was. Well the day came that I picked it up. And I was floored that my stupid ass had never taken the time to see it.  It's a marvelous piece of work.

Susie, do you know anything about... witches?

There are several things that set this film apart from most. One is Argento's visual imagery. He sets scene after scene aglow with color and uses it to affect moods and feelings. Believe it or not Argento later said that he modeled the look of the film directly on Walt Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs".  Snow White couldn't have made it through this film in one piece and those seven dwarfs would have been butchered quickly.  Every single frame of this film is incredibly lit and colorful.

The score in this film may be the most effective I've ever heard.   The soundtrack was composed and performed by Goblin. The main title theme was named as one of the best songs released between 1977 and 1979 in the book The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present, compiled by influential music website Pitchfork.  The music works so well throughout the film helping set a mood of terror and dread.  Next on my agenda is picking up this soundtrack.

You wanted to kill Helena Markos! Hell is behind that door! You're going to meet death now... the LIVING DEAD!

The one weak point in the film is the plot. It fact, it's very weak and some things are not really explained at all.  But it really doesn't matter because that's not the main thing here. Style and atmosphere are what's important to this film and the images it provides are not easily forgotten.  It has two incredibly brutal murder scenes that linger in your mind well after completing the film.  The opening double murder may be one of the most intense in the history of film.  This one scene makes the silly murders in today's horror teenie films look tame and amatuerish in comparison.  How can such a brutal murder be so stylishly filmed?

 Acting in this film must have been difficult.  All the cast spoke in their native tongues. Yet the performances don't seem to suffer. I especially enjoyed Joan Bennett's performance.  It was obvious she was having a blast making this film and I loved her in the Dark Shadows TV series.  Sadly, this was her final film. Cult actress Jessica Harper has another nice performance and her character Suzy seems to be trapped in a nightmare.  They may be the best way to describe this film.  With the colors and intensity, it's like watching a most gruesome nightmare.

This is not a perfect film but it is without a doubt a horror masterpiece.  Every horror fan must see this film...period.  Don't be a dumb ass like me and wait. 

Trivia:
Joan Bennett's last feature film.

The first part (with Inferno and Mother of Tears) of a trilogy of films about the "Three Mothers". 

Director Dario Argento composed the creepy music with the band Goblin and played it at full blast on set to unnerve the actors and elicit a truly scared performance.

It is often incorrectly assumed that, to achieve the rich color palette, the film was shot using the outdated 3-strip Technicolor process. This is untrue. No film made after the mid-1950s was shot using this method. The film was instead shot on normal Eastman Color Kodak stock, then printed using the 3-strip Technicolor process, utilizing one of the last remaining machines. This issue has been confused somewhat by the fact that, on the 25th anniversary documentary featured in the 3-disc DVD set, a discussion of the printing process by cinematographer Luciano Tovoli was incorrectly followed by a diagram showing a 3-strip camera. 

Director Dario Argento's original idea was the ballet school would accommodate young girls not older 12. However the studio and producer (his father) denied his request because a film this violent involving children would be surely banned. Dario Argento raised the age limit of the girls to 20 but didn't rewrite the script, hence the naivety of the characters and occasionally childlike dialogue. He also put all the doorknobs at about the same height as the actress' heads, so they will have to raise their arms in order to open the doors, just like children.

The woman playing Helna Markos is not credited. According to Jessica Harper, the woman was a 90 year old ex-hooker Argento found on the streets of Rome. 

The voice heard whispering on the bizarre soundtrack by Goblin is that of Goblin band member Claudio Simonetti. Simonetti stated in interviews that much of what he whispers on the music score is just gibberish.

Dario Argento was inspired to make this film by stories of Daria Nicolodi's grandmother, who claimed to have fled from a German music academy because witchcraft was being secretly practiced there.

 The films finale was inspired by a dream that co-writer Daria Nicolodi once had. In the dream Nicolodi said she had encountered an invisible witch and most bizarrely there was a panther in the room with her that suddenly exploded. The dream was written into the film, only in the film it's a porcelain panther that explodes - rather than the real panther that appeared in Nicolodi'

Star Jessica Harper said in interviews that the most frightening scene in the film for her was the grand finale where everything explodes and shatters around her as she flees the academy. Harper said that the rigged explosions where quite unnerving as they were placed close to her on the sets.

For the wide shots of the 'maggots' falling from the ceiling the crew would drop gains of rice down onto the actresses from above.

 The film was shot over four months.

Argento had cinematographer Luciano Tovoli watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to have him model the color scheme of that film for Suspiria.

 In an interview with star Jessica Harper, she said that many of the actors on set spoke different languages during shooting. According to Harper most either spoke Italian or German and it would make communicating difficult at times. However since the film would be dubbed for American release it was deemed not to be an issue during filming.