CVLT Nation is happy to announce a new monthly column courtesy of The Secret’s Michael Bertoldini, Giallo Italiano, which will explore some of the best movies of the Giallo genre.
My first contact with Giallo happened at an early age. It was probably 1987 or 1988 and finally the first VHS movie rental shop had opened down the street to my house.
This was way before we had Blockbuster in Italy and this place was a pretty small, crappy shop that smelled of plastic, with a bored, sketchy, uncaring guy behind the counter. From what I can remember their stuff was divided by genre and basically every wall had its own section. Dramas, Comedies, Horrors and a tiny room divided from the rest of the shop with a V.M. 18 tag on top of the door that I later found out was the Porn section.
As they were good metalheads, my parents were spending their little money on records and renting a crazy amount of horror movies on the weekends. They were obviously very liberal (or maybe just lazy) and allowed to me to do/watch whatever I wanted without any kind of restrictions. My Sunday mornings regularly consisted of waking up while everybody else at my house was still sleeping, sneaking into the living room, trying to rescue the remote from the couch where some big-hair-Dokken-shirt wearing hammered dude was sleeping, making my breakfast and finally watching movies forgotten inside the VHR. Back then, American 80’s horrors like Nightmare on Elm St., Halloween, Hellraiser or Friday the 13th were obviously the most popular stuff and by far my favourites. Most stories featured American teenagers that I wished I could have been a few years later.
My family, anno 1981
Those movies had something intriguing and magical about them, and together with Twilight Zone (80’s version), they kept me glued to the screen for hours and hours every weekend. My friends would often come over to my house to watch movies with me because their parents didn’t allow them to, and this made me feel special somehow. Horror movies were seriously the coolest thing ever and meant the world to me, BUT they were far from being scary.
Even as a kid, I could already understand that the shit was 100% fake and that monsters didn’t exist. It was the same stuff as on the cover of Iron Maiden’s albums, awesome but very very fake, a mere product of someone’s fantasy.
BUT
…on a Sunday morning like many others before, something changed.
The weather was just terrible and I woke up ealier than my parents as I usually did. It was dark and the storm was raging so badly that the light was cut off for few seconds a couple of times. I went into the living room armed with a latte and biscotti and turned on the TV and the VHR, presssed play and started watching this weird movie.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t an American movie but an Italian flick directed by a filmaker a lot of people talked about back then, Dario Argento.
Dario Argento
It featured no monsters nor supernatural entities, but a bunch of people that looked like my parents and their friends at a King Crimson show in their old pictures from the 70’s. One by one, they were getting killed by a mysterious killer with gloves and the same hat that many old folks were wearing while drinking vino sitting outside the many bars of my neighbourhood. The soundtrack was an eerie melody that got stuck in my mind the moment I heard it.
The mother of Carlo (Italian actress Isa Calamai), one of the main characters, looked to me exactly like my dad’s bass player’s mother and even reminded me of my weird grandmother.
For the first time, a movie seriously scared me and I immediately fell in love with it.
I spent the night in my parents’ bed, faking some imaginary fever, too ashamed to admit that I couldn’t sleep nor look into the mirror in our hallway because of that movie.
PROFONDO ROSSO
(Deep Red)
Italy 1975
Directed by Dario Argento
Cast: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia, Clara Calamai, Eros Pagni, Glauco Mauri, Macha Meril, Giuliana Calandra
Script: Dario Argento, Bernardino Zapponi
Music: Giorgio Gaslini and Goblin
It’s basically impossible to talk about Giallo without mentioning Profondo Rosso.
“Deep Red” is, with Suspiria, Dario Argento’s most popular movie and the first flick that, despite the mixed reactions of most Italian movie critics towards his first films, projected the Roman director into the Gotha of international movie makers.
What’s in Profondo Rosso that is missing in previous Argento movies, and what made it such an important film? They’re actually not simple questions to answer, since most of the narrative elements in “Deep Red” are exactly the same as those in his previous Gialli (the so-called Animal Trilogy), “The Bird With The Crystal Plumage” (L’Uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo, ’70), “Cat O’Nine Tails” (Il Gatto A Nove Code, ‘71) and “Four Flies in Red Velvet” (Quattro Mosche Di Velluto Grigio, ’71).
The idea of a mysterious leather-gloved killer wearing a raincoat and a fedora was actually introduced by mastermind Mario Bava in his early 60’s masterpiece “Blood And The Black Lace”. Argento started from the seminal Bava movie and re-elaborates his lesson while adding a flamboyant, modern style in his early works in addition to a good amount of graphic violence in his films. But Profondo Rosso is something more than this.
In 1973, he was forced by his production company to take a break from the giallo subgenre, lasting several years, in order to direct Le Cinque Giornate, a historical movie about an Anti-Austrian riot that took place in Milan in 1848. Despite the very popular cast, the movie was a total failure at the box office and that’s probably one of the main reasons why Argento will likely never move away from Horrors and Thrillers in the future.
The same year, Argento broke up with Marilù Tolo, the woman he dated and lived with for a year after his divorce from Marisa Casale. Apparently, this affected the writing of the script in some way, and the director actually included a picture of a woman that could have been his former lover in one of the first scenes of the film.
Probably inspired by the will to interrupt this particularly unfortunate stream of events, Argento began working very hard on a few ideas he got for a script, but after a few weeks of incessant writing he ultimately came to the conclusion that he needed someone else to help him to finish his work, and hired Bernardino Zapponi.
The script, spawned by four-hands, mixes Argento’s increasing interest in a supernatural horror aesthetic and the more traditional and realistic approach of Zapponi’s writing; the result is something completely new and mind-blowing.
David Hemmings
The director initially hired pianist Giorgio Gaslini to write the score of the movie, but after listening to his first batch of songs decided that he wanted a heavier, more modern kind of musical style for the soundtrack. The decision was apparently made at the suggestion of actress and new girlfriend Daria Nicolodi. Gaslini recorded only the piano parts played by David Hemmings and quit the production, so Argento ambitiously tried to contact Pink Floyd to write the music for Profondo Rosso. The band was too busy and the Italian production budget was too limited, so Argento got in touch with a new unknown band he had got a tape from. The band played a sort of power-prog rock inspired by Emerson Lake and Palmer, Mike Oldfield and King Crimson: they are called Goblin.
Goblin in 1975
The shooting took place mostly in Turin and Rome and lasted for 13 weeks.
The working title was La Tigre Dai Denti A Sciabola (The Tiger With Sword Teeth) in order to continue the animal-based legacy present in his movie titles, but Argento ultimately chose Profondo Rosso because of the dominance of the color red through the whole movie.
The movie came out in theaters in 1975 and broke all the records at the box office.
The soundtrack sold almost one million copies all over the world and remained at N°1 on the 7” charts for 52 weeks.
The perfect balance between morbid, Freud-infused thematics, the psychedelic use of primary colors, Hithcockian tension, and Argento’s voyeuristic ability to transform fear and violence into beauty coupled with incredibly powerful and terrifying music are the keys that took Profondo Rosso a step beyond his previous work and probably at the zenith of the whole Italian Giallo production.
One of the first posters for Profondo Rosso, inspired by Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”
As for his previous work, many critics blamed Argento for lacking in solid story construction and focused on some narrative gaps in the plot, but the final result is so powerful, beautiful and scary, it throws the viewer into an unrelenting maze of colors and sounds that leaves no space for rationalization.
It’s an Italian movie that reflects Italian culture, putting aesthetic and style before functionality, a true portrait of a glorious time that seems long faded away.
MICHAEL BERTOLDINI
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