The ten craziest Dario Argento moments.

Dario Argento, in his prime (everything from L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo/The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1969) to Opera (1987) – after that things start to get a bit patchy) was one of the finest directors of horror and thriller movies you could ever hope to become completely obsessed with. His extraordinary camerawork, use of often deafening rock music and eye-searing colour palettes marked him as a truly distinctive voice. He was also capable of some of the most bizarre, outre, what-the-bloody-hell-was-that moments you’ll ever see. His first three films – L’uccello was followed by Il gatto a nove code/The Cat O’Nine Tails (1971) and 4 mosche di velluto grigio/Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) – had their moments of strangeness, his fourth, the less well known non-genre Le cinque giornate (1973) having none at all. But the real craziness kicked in with his fourth film, his masterpiece Profondo rosso. And he’s barely looked back ever since. Here are ten of our favourite moments of craziness.

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Profondo rosso/Deep Red (1975) – The clockwork doll

Argento’s fifth theatrical film remains his masterpiece, a beautifully shot, tautly plotted giallo let down only by some rather daft character comedy moments between leads David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi. The earlier films had their odd moments but Profondo rosso is full of them – from the prefiguring of violent deaths earlier in the film to the often incomprehensible character motivations – but the strangest, and Argento’s wackiest scene to date, is the one involving psychiatrist Giordano (Glauco Mori) and the terrifying mechanical doll that scuttles into the room, cackling maniacally to distract him long enough for the killer to strike.

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Suspiria (1977) – the bat attack

Suspiria, Argento’s first foray into supernatural horror, is again chock full of strange moments. And just when you’ve got used to a cacophonous soundtrack that screeches “witch!” at you at every turn, the sinister cooks who may or may not be preparing human flesh, the maggots raining from the ceiling and the glowing eyes that appear at a high window, we get an out-of-nowhere bat attack. Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) is slowly piecing together the mystery of the Markos dance academy when a bat flutters into her room, scaring her half to death. She sorts it out with the help of a blanket and a stool and then just carries on as if nothing had happened. Given the other odd things she’s experienced so far, maybe it was going to take more than an unexplained bat attack to faze her…

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Inferno (1980) – The hanging woman

Argento’s follow-up to Suspiria, charting the malign influence of the second of the Three Mothers, Mater Lachrimarum, the Mother of Tears, is again full of odd vignettes but none is more inexplicable than the brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of a hanged woman struggling in her death throes. We’re never told who she is, nor where she comes from, nor indeed what relevance she has to the plot. She’s just there, spliced into the flow of the film with no explanation. To this day, her presence remains something of a mystery.

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Tenebre/Tenebrae (1982) – John Saxon’s hat

John Saxon’s character, Bullmer, literary agent to writer Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa), has a hat. He’s very proud of his hat, particularly its ability to stay on his head no matter how violently he jerks it around. In a film peppered with strange flashbacks, populated by conflicted maniacs and set in a world that the director has claimed is the near future though there’s no evidence on-screen to actually suggest that, Saxon’s hat shenanigans are among the strangest. It’s the sort of oddball humour that appears in a lot of Argento’s films and raises a few chuckles, though probably for all the wrong reasons.

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Phenomena (1985) – all of it!

Unquestionably Argento’s loopiest couple of hours, Phenomena is an act of insanity from beginning to end. Just look at the plot – Jennifer Connolly plays an American tourist in an exclusive Swiss boarding school for girls where students are being murdered by what is eventually revealed to be a deformed child sometimes kept chained up in a basement by his cackling mad mother Daria Nicolodi. Jennifer enjoys psychic communion with the insect world and befriends a wheelchair-bound etymologist played by Donald Pleasence who lives with a shaky Scottish accent and a trained chimp/nurse named Inga. When her master is rubbed out by the diminutive killer, Inga disappears into the night only to return at the last second wielding an open razor and looking for bloody revenge. That’s not to mention a revolting pool of decomposing body parts, a scene where an EEG scan inexplicably causes Jennifer to flounce off exclaiming “I’m not schziophrenic!”, her white-corridor hallucinations and violent action choreographed to thunderous heavy metal. Utter madness.

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Opera (1987) – The epilogue

After all of the mayhem of Opera, during which victims are forced to watch the murder of others by having their eyes pinned open, crows are let loose in a theatre during an opera performance with predictable results and Daria Nicolodi is shot through the eye in slow motion, Argento treats us to a very odd epilogue featuring heroine Betty (Cristina Marsillach). Having escaped the clutches of her would-be killer, Betty wanders off into an empty field, waxing lyrical in voice-over about the joys of nature, eventually coming across a trapped lizard that she sets free. What any of this has to do with anything that has gone before is not at all clear and it’s so irrelevant that in the English language version, re-titled Terror at the Opera, it’s removed altogether to no noticeably detrimental effect.

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La sindrome di Stendhal/The Stendahl Syndrome (1996) – Asia Argento kissing a giant fish

Do you need to know any more than that? It’s Asia Argento – kissing a giant fish… It’s one of the hallucinations that her character Anna suffers while afflicted by the eponymous psychological condition and it remains the most indelible image for the film and one of Argento’s most surreal moments. It’s pretty meaningless but it looks amazing.

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Il fantasma dell’opera/Phantom of the Opera (1998): making a version of Phantom of the Opera without a phantom

Well there sort of is, but it’s not the Phantom we know and love from the Gaston Leroux novel. This ponderous folly features Julian Sands as a constantly unmasked and not disfigured Phantom raised in the tunnels beneath the Opéra de Paris by a pack of rats. It’s not at all clear why Argento and co-writer Gérard Brach thought this was a good way to approach an oft-filmed tale. Ten out of ten for trying something different but zero for making any kind of sense. And talking of not making sense…

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Giallo (2009) – The killer’s yellow face

As contrived a plot development as you’ll find anywhere. In Italian giallo means yellow and was the name given to the series of yellow-jacketed crime paperbacks from which the film-genre derived its name. Argento seemed to want to go back to his roots and, presumably having decided that his film should be called Giallo, he and his co-writers Jim Agnew and Sean Keller tried to come up with a justification for it. Their answer? The killer has a liver disorder that, yes indeed, makes his face yellow. To make matters even sillier, he’s played by Adrien Brody under a bad make-up effect, despite also playing his nemesis, Inspector Enzo Avolfi.

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Dracula (2012) – Dracula turning into a praying mantis

The Lord of the Vampires has been treated to many an indignity over the years but surely nothing as ludicrous as the jaw-dropping moment of silliness. By any standards, Argento’s take on Dracula is terrible – shot in 3D with a title sequence using some of the worst CGI you’ll ever see and a deeply uncomfortable scene of the director’s daughter Asia taking a bath while his cameras leer over her nakedness, it’s utterly awful in every respect. But nothing compares to this moment of insanity. Dracula turning into a giant green praying mantis. It genuinely has to be seen to be disbelieved…