Deep Red

A masterclass in form from Dario Argento

History and culture has always conditioned how colour is experienced and talked about. Colour is not simply the terms we use to categorise everything we see across the visible spectrum of light, but carries with it connotations and associations. Because of this, colour is a powerful tool for the visual storyteller. Within colour, a filmmaker can evoke emotion and distil meaning. Dario Argento, director of Deep Red, master of the macabre, giallo extraordinaire, knows this. The deep red of this 1975 classic is the crimson theatre curtains that seem to anticipate David Lynch, the scarlet of the blood gushing from a newly opened wound, even the red packaging of a box of Marlboros. Argento establishes a pattern of colour, a colour whose connotations are often associated with hot, passionate, overwhelming emotions — violence, hatred, lust, love. “To see red is to be blinded by blood lust, to be enticed into momentary madness by the flash of crimson,” writes Maitland McDonagh. The deep red of this film is the violence that pervades the entire narrative, displayed most openly in its rampant bloodletting.

Therefore, for Argento, the spilling of blood is a spectacle. The plot revolves around a unseen assailant killing those who hope to expose a dark secret, and a musician’s vigilante-esque attempts to uncover the truth after he witnesses the murder of a famous psychic, whose premonitions set the events of the film in motion. There’s an enjoyment taken in the procession of killing, and when the violence comes, it comes as thick and fast as spilled corn syrup. Argento slowly turns the dial up to 11, with the film offing its villains in a crescendo of inventive brutality. Argento is giving his audience a privileged entry into his world of dark delights.

The director’s obsession with spectacle and spectatorship is perhaps best displayed here. The idea of voyeurism is central not only to the film’s viewing experience, but the message that it conveys. The act of looking and subjectivity has always been associated with the thriller genre. Think Hitchcock and Polanski. Argento’s camera often shoots from a distance, depicting wide, open spaces. Not only does this imbue the frames with negative space that suggests the possibility of violent apparitions, creating tension and a feeling of impending doom, but also suggests the idea of watching something from afar. This is the peeping tom aesthetic that found its place in many twentieth-century thrillers, and in turn the giallo genre. Consider for a moment and early scene where Argento’s camera literally moves between curtains that part as it passes through. This same trick is repeated throughout the film: the opening of an old, iron gate or the movement through an open window into an apartment. It is as if Deep Red is allowing us a privileged look into a private world — a world of madness and death, a world very much like our own, but darker. Redder.

This concept becomes even more interesting when you consider the casting of David Hemmings in the lead role. It establishes a strange relationship with another Italian-made thriller, Blow-Up (1966). In both films, Hemmings plays an artist, the musician Marcus Daly in Deep Red and a photographer in Blow-Up (essentially a literal voyeur), and in both the character becomes involved in a mystery after witnessing a murder. It is the act of witnessing, the act of seeing something they shouldn’t have, that ties them to the mystery thenceforth. The mystery is not so much about the solving, but more about the witnessing, and the subjective interpreting of it. Voyeurism and representations of reality warp the truth, but also satiate the natural human impulse to uncover things. And Argento knows this. There is a doubling effect established between Marcus Daly and the audience. Like Daly, we are being pulled along on this voyeuristic journey of looking and discovering by compelling unseen forces.

But perhaps what is most interesting about the not-so-coincidental casting of Hemmings is that it creates a dialogue between Argento’s Deep Red and Antonioni’s Blow-Up. And there are a number of other extra-textual references within the film, the recreation of the bar in Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks being the most obvious. Deep Red is a film aware of its own cinematic nature. Consider this quote from the poster:

“When was the last time you were REALLY SCARED!!!? PSYCHO, THE EXORCIST, JAWS… NOW THERE’S DEEP RED”

The overseas success of the giallo genre was largely due to the success of films like Psycho and Jaws, slasher films that were hugely popular before the slasher genre was cool. Audiences craved something similar yet fresh, and the Italians answered. And consider a poster for another of Argento’s films, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage:

“If you think you are being followed home from this movie, keep telling yourself that it’s all in your mind.”

Deep Red is a film that does not want us to forget that is a film. It is a perfect exercise in voyeuristic formalism. Argento was ahead of his time, seemingly deconstructing the genre whilst operating within it, and that’s why this film remains such a classic.

Argento’s cuts are as sharp and violent as the hack of a meat cleaver, and in its construction Deep Red seems to suggest an irrelevance to the killer’s true identity. Argento employs point-of-views shots that anticipate Friday the 13th’s unknown killer, and the opening moments of John Carpenter’s Halloween — a director who admits that Deep Red was a big influence on his film. And amazingly, Argento himself performed the close-up shots of the killer’s hands, clad in those classic black leather gloves. The murderer’s identity is essentially unimportant in the wider context of the film’s intentions. What is important is that we are gripped from start to finish, not necessarily by the mystery, but by the horrifying can’t-look-away violence that accompanies it. The killer is literally someone in the audience of the psychic’s presentation and throughout the film seems almost superhuman in the way he or she can pre-empt the characters’ movements. The killer is always one step ahead because he or she is the narrative manifestation of the ever-watchful director, of the voyeuristic audience, and of the genre. Through our act of looking we are committing the violence upon the characters. Not only do we consume it, but we participate in its creation. After all, you can’t have voyeurism without a voyeur. The murderer is Argento’s camera eye, the audience his accessory, and the genre conventions are the motive. This is not a story set in the real world but in the gialloverse, and Argento is its master.

Ultimately, Deep Red is the great Dario Argento at the height of his powers: shocking, manipulative and inventive. It’s always stylish, and Argento knows that it his irresistibly seductive style of shooting murder most horrid that has made him a household name. He knows that the way he creates a film, the way he is able to direct and control his audience is his greatest asset. It is a film made to thrill, and it certainly does that. Argento uses all the weapons in his cinematic arsenal to leave an impression on his viewers. Keep the audience alert and always in a state of discomfort is his motto. Deep Red is an unrelenting nightmare but one I am always excited to return to.