Deep Red (Profondo rosso) (1975)
The House with Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono) (1976)
Again, these films are in some sense murder mysteries and as such they are in the vanishingly small category of films (possibly, in my opinion, the only one, to be honest) where spoiler warnings do actually count for something. One of the main delights of these movies is hermeneutic, in working out what is going on as you go, and if that matters to you, the following will completely ruin these films for you.
With that in mind, let's take a stab (or multiple! repeated! bloody! stabs) at two of the very best examples of the giallo genre.
In looking at giallo movies, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (which I covered last time) was a useful movie to approach, not because it's necessary an important giallo, because it isn't, really, but because it's pretty much bang in the centre of what a giallo is. It covers all the tropes. It's pretty much the most giallo giallo that ever gialloed a giallo. Except it isn't, because that's actually Deep Red.
Deep Red is the second most popular and famous film made by Dario Argento, and is widely regarded as his best film that isn't Suspiria, which isn't even to say that Suspiria is even necessarily Argento's best film, just that if you're not immediately the sort of person who cares deeply about forty year old stabby films, Suspiria is the only one you might even have heard of, let alone seen.
With its soundtrack by Goblin (here credited as "The Goblins") and its bright colours, there's something to be said for a basic assessment of Deep Red being "a lot like Suspiria, only still with an actual plot".
Deep Red is creepy, gory, sadistic as all get out, and also at times very funny. It admits the supernatural, but only as something that is just another part of its world.
Red curtains open on a psychic demonstration given by Helga Ulmann (Macha Méril). There is no question of skepticism here: her powers are real, but their realness is her undoing, for the demonstration goes wrong when she recognises that there is a crazed killer in her audience. Any notion you might have had that Helga might be the protagonist of this movie is dispelled, when, on leaving, she utters the fateful words, "I know who this person is."
(Note: Never do that. Never. If you're ever in the situation of being in an Italian horror film, don't ever say you know who the killer is. You will have minutes left to live. Promise me, for the love of all that is sacred. Don't.)
Helga's demise is witnessed from the street below by her neighbour, pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings), who rushes up to her apartment just a moment too late and then spends the rest of the film haunted by the horror he's witnessed and by something he saw for a split second from the corner of his eye that won't stop bothering him. He starts investigating Helga's death, and the deaths that follow, aided by reporter Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi), who has a sharp sense of humour and an on-point eyeliner game, and Helga's friend, the parapsychologist Professor Giordani (Glauco Mauri).
In Deep Red, evil is uncanny. Murder is uncanny. It doesn't need the supernatural to be uncanny. It doesn't matter if it's procedurally soluble.
I mentioned yesterday how The Red Queen Kills Seven Times tricked you visually, how it presented what people thought they saw. Argento takes a risky path and does the opposite here: you get a split-second where you see the literal solution to the mystery, and it's as if Argento is playing one of those memory games you get at school: you get a brief look at an image, and it's like you're being asked “What's wrong with this picture?” This is a tactic Argento has used before: in The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, he does the same (and in fact, we're shown the same brief scene repeatedly, as the protagonist turns it over and over in his mind, wracking his brains as to what he's missing). In the 21st century, this isn't a thing you could do: a simple application of the pause button ruins the entire film for you here. But the subliminal zap of these images make the otherwise absurd solutions entirely satisfying. We knew all along who the killer was. We just didn't know we knew.
In a lot of ways, Deep Red is a refinement, not just of the giallo genre but of Dario Argento's take on it. So there are parts – plot elements and stylistic things – that hail back to his earlier films: the sexy shiny trench coat and the way the killer prepares, in The Bird With the Crystal Plumage; the use of weird pseudoscience as fact and the horrible fate of a central character at the end in Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), for example. If you've seen the earlier films, you get the sense that Argento was fixing them a bit, if that makes sense.
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| Mike's New Car (2002) |
Where could you take Orrore Popolare after this?
Art restorer Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) arrives in a remote, poverty-stricken village in the north of Italy, where he is tasked with restoring a church fresco of Saint Sebastian painted by a now-highly regarded painter Legnani (played in flashback by Tonino Corazzari). It's an odd mural: Sebastian, fastened to a post as in his traditional representations, is here, oddly and somewhat disturbingly (given the gory vignette we see over the opening credits) pierced not by arrows, but knives.
Stefano's friend Antonio (Giulio Pizzirani), who got him this gig, suggests to Stefano that Legnani's emotive and affecting representations of people in their death agonies might have come less from a sensitive understanding of the human condition, and more from direct first-hand observation. However, he does this once more by making that classic giallo mistake of saying "I can't tell you the terrible secret over the phone, come meet me in town," and so winds up chucked off a third floor balcony just as Stefano arrives at the hotel.
In his work, Stefano uncovers images of two more figures who may be portraits of Legnani's sisters. What does the tape recording of Legnani's voice mean? What part did Legnani's sisters take in his activities? Where are they now? Who keeps destroying the evidence Stefano finds? Why is no one willing to talk about Legnani other than the town drunk, Coppola (Gianni Cavina)? And what is buried in the barren garden of the House with the Laughing Windows?
The House of Laughing Windows gives us a slow burn. We see the rising unease of Stefano, a succession of clues and their inexplicable effacement. The bodies only start to pile up in the last fifteen minutes (and once again, a gratuitous rape is shoehorned in), but there is death. The stakes rise rapidly, and so does the fear.
A second reveal comes soon after, when Stefano, mortally wounded, tries to get help: everyone hides in their houses. No one helps. Everyone knows. When this film was recommended to me, one comparison made was with The Wicker Man. And I spent most of my time watching it not quite getting why you'd make that comparison, but then we find that everyone knows, and suddenly it makes sense.
But what's different about this, and perhaps how this doesn't quite map with The Wicker Man, is that this isn't so much the classic conspiracy to murder as a conspiracy of fear and silence, something more real. No one in this village likes it. But they know, and I suppose that means they know about the third reveal, the one source of help he does find, which hides the final revelation, the one that brings destruction.
It's a brilliantly constructed film, a meditation in the end on how we allow things to happen, how there are things we just don't talk about.
I haven't seen enough giallo movies to make the assessment myself, but I've been told by people whose expertise I trust that Deep Red and The House with Laughing Windows are about as good as giallo movies ever got. Both deal with Orrore Popolare as the horror of folk, the horror of the uncanny and the prosaic, side by side, regardless of urban or rural trappings. Both of them refuse to pit the ordinary against the horrific: in both cases they make the horrific the natural result of the ordinary, its corollary. And that's why they are so terrifying, and so very good.
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