My Review

This semester, I’m taking a class in Cult Film. We’ve been talking a lot about how circulation influences reception and vice versa, investigating why certain films develop small but devoted followings among various audiences that have varying reading strategies. This week’s film was Dario Argento’s Deep Red; aside from Jenifer, his contribution to Masters of Horror, this was my first encounter with Argento, and with the Italian “giallo” as a whole. (I’ve also seen Berberian Sound Studio, which is heavily influenced by giallo and is about the Italian film industry in many ways; I didn’t like it — or, more probably, didn’t get it).

My expression watching Berberian Sound Studio was something like this…

So, if we’re talking about the importance of exhibition style to reception of cult films — that is, how we discover a film influencing our attachment to it, whether it’s at a word-of-mouth midnight movie showing, a drive-in with our friends, late at night on TV, or in a mondo video catalogue — it can’t be discounted that I watched Profondo Rosso in an academic setting, after reading a detailed article about various giallo genre markers, common themes, preoccupations, influences, etc. I’d been primed on how to watch the movie. (Incidentally, that article is online here; it’s well worth a read if you’re interested in giallo).

But, wow, academic setting or not, I loved this film. It has pretty much everything I want out of a horror movie — it’s terrifying at points, has fantastic comic relief, interesting characters, phenomenal camerawork, it’s campy as hell, and above all, it’s saying something. Or, maybe more specifically, it’s saying something about the pointlessness of “saying something.” I’ll get to that later.

Watching Profondo Rosso, however, I identified more with Helga’s expression here.

First, the scary bits. Giallo films are influenced by detective fiction as much as horror, which the Needham article linked above lays out quite well. Consequently, I wasn’t certain before watching about counting this as a horror film for my #31DaysOfHorror thing. But, after watching the film, it’s clear that the movie influenced (or at least, it prefigures) a number of aspects of the slasher genre that was about to grip American horror, with the coming of Halloween three years later. Instead, the detective fiction influence informs the horror aspects quite well. Detective fiction usually deals with murder, and Profondo Rosso sure handles murder in all the graphic, tawdry, inventive ways that slasher films were soon to pick up. I wrote in my review of Sleepaway Camp the other day that slasher movies can live or die on the strength of their “kills,” and on this front, Profondo Rosso delivers in spades. The film is sometimes known as The Hatchet Murders, but unlike Freddy Krueger’s claw-glove, Jason’s machete, and Michael Myers’ knife, the killer in Profondo Rosso doesn’t stick to hatchets. People are stabbed, yes, but Helga dies at the beginning from having her throat impaled on a broken window, and during the course of the killer’s rampage, people are graphically boiled alive, they have their faces smashed against desks, they’re dragged for many blocks behind a truck, they’re burned, shot, and on and on.

Bye, Helga.

Horror movies, for me, depend as much on dread as on disgust, and Profondo Rosso certainly counts as a horror movie because of the stifling atmosphere of dread that Argento imbues in the film. Thanks in part to his virtuosic camerawork — great point-of-view sequences, in addition to lots of long tracking shots reminiscent at times of Hitchcock — we feel trapped in the film, forced into a specific perspective, watching and waiting along with the characters as we know that someone is just outside the frame, about to step into view at any moment and do something horrible.

There are two sequences where this is best employed. First, there’s the early sequence where Marc is playing the piano and he becomes slowly aware of the fact that there’s someone else in his apartment with him. As audience members, we are given a privileged point of view, the camera tracking away from Marc to show us the figure entering the apartment.

But then, once we return to Marc’s perspective, we’re stuck in the room with him, waiting, watching, trying desperately to figure out if he has heard the footsteps and whether he’ll be able to defend himself in time. When he finally leaps to his feet and slams the door shut, a voice comes through, whispering horrible, awful things to him about how he’s going to soon be killed. It’s viscerally uncomfortable, and it’s horrifying in a very different way than, say, the pus-scarred face of boiled-alive author.

The other scene that best illustrates the difference between disgust and dread, and Profondo Rosso’s masterful mixture of both, is the death of the hilariously ineffective policeman. The sequence is entirely wordless. Check it out here — apologies for the pixellation — and pay attention to the way that the camera keeps forcing us to switch our perspective so that we know someone is near and getting nearer, until finally, it traps us in the policeman’s point of view, just waiting for something to happen.

And when it does… hooooo boy. That damn puppet is perhaps the creepiest thing I’ve seen in a horror movie in quite some time, if not ever. We get whipped up into a frenzy by the fast cutting and the switching perspectives and that fantastic Goblin soundtrack, which then drops out…….. and then…….. For a minute everything you thought you knew about the film doesn’t just fly out the window, it smashes its head on the glass and slices its throat on the shards. This movie is about an evil possessed child?! Wait, is that a puppet?! Oh my god there’s a person there too! AAHHHH!

Watching Profondo Rosso, I was reminded most of Frenzy, a film considered by many to be Hitchcock’s last masterpiece. I reviewed Frenzy during last year’s #31DaysOfHorror month; you can read that review here. I talked a lot about the difference between horror and thriller, and about shock vs. suspense—questions I was also forced to consider in watching Profondo Rosso. Like Profondo Rosso, Frenzy is about a string of murders and about a detective trying to solve them. Many Hitchcock films, actually, owe much to the tradition of detective literature, too, just like giallo. And as Needham notes, many giallo films wear their Hitchcockian influence proudly — one of the most famous giallo movies is called, after all, The Girl Who Knew Too Much. Even one of the posters for Profondo Rosso pays homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo.