13 FOR HALLOWEEN #1: Tenebrae

“When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains – however improbable – must be the truth.” This quote, from Conan Doyle’s ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, is central to the construction of Dario Argento’s fiendishly brilliant ‘Tenebrae’.

Having scored a big hit first time out with his debut ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ – and followed it up in fine style with ‘Cat o’ Nine Tails’ and ‘Four Flies on Grey Velvet’ – Argento pretty much defined the giallo with the magisterial masterclass in mind-fuckery ‘Deep Red’. That was in 1975, when the genre was peaking. Seven years later, the giallo was on the wane but that didn’t stop Argento delivering his second flat-out classic of the form.

‘Tenebrae’ follows American thriller writer Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) as he embarks on a publicity tour in Rome. The whirlwind round of interviews and TV appearances has been organised by his European agent, an expatriate fellow American by the name of Bullmer (John Saxon). Secretary Anne (Daria Nicolodi) and Bullmer’s protégé Gianni (Christian Borromeo) round out his entourage.

He’s barely arrived when detectives Germani (Giuliano Gemma) and Altieri (Carola Stagnaro) turn up in his hotel room wondering if he knows anything about Elsa Manni (Ania Pieroni) – a kleptomaniac first glimpsed swiping a paperback copy of Neal’s latest novel – who has recently been murdered by a black-gloved killer wielding a straight-razor. Neal, understandably since this is his first time in Rome, had never met the lady. Nor can he explain why the killer had stuffed torn out pages of his novel in her mouth.

Neal soon receives an anonymous letter in cut-out newsprint quoting a line from his book. Germani warns him to be vigilant and report any further threatening correspondence. Further killings occur, including a savage attack on loose-living same sex couple Marion (Mirella Banti) and Tilda (Mirella d’Angelo). Anne thinks she spots Neal’s possessive and mentally unstable ex-wife Jane (Veronica Laria) driving past the hotel. Gianni alternates between eagerly assisting Neal (his idol) in his own unofficial investigating and lusting after hotelier’s daughter Maria (Lara Wendel). Maria, meanwhile, endures a series of escalating misfortunes after an argument with her actual boyfriend and the ministrations of a psychotic dog end with her seeking refuge in the house of a murderer.

‘Tenebrae’ befuddles, bamboozles and wrong-foots the viewer from the outset. It boasts more red herrings than a Communist fishery. Even the title misleads. “Tenebrae” is Latin for “shadows” or “darkness” (as well as being the title of Peter Neal’s latest opus), yet much of the film is shot in a cold hard light that allows neither for shadows nor places to hide. Indeed, an image of something very briefly hidden and then shockingly revealed is crucial to the bravura denouement.

The protagonist is challenged as much as the audience, mainly by TV pundit Christiano Berti (John Steiner), a man whose antagony towards Neal’s fiction seems to border on the obsessive. But even before Berti gets in on the act, the first reporter who interviews Neal – someone he is acquainted with and considers sympathetic – suddenly challenges him: “ ‘Tenebrae’ is a sexist novel. Why do you despise women so much? Women as victims, ciphers. The male heroes with their hairy macho bullshit!” Absent the macho male heroes – most of Argento’s male leads, from the edgy Sam Dalmas in ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ to the outright nervous Marc Daly in ‘Deep Red’ are more petrified than pro-active – and the accusation is one that has often been made against Argento himself, particularly in light of this controversy-baiting statement of principles: “I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man. I certainly don`t have to justify myself to anyone about this. I don`t care what anyone thinks or reads into it. I have often had journalists walk out of interviews when I say what I feel about this subject.” And indeed Argento gives us a world-class selection of women-in-peril in ‘Tenebrae’ …

… as well as creating an air of sexual ambiguity by casting transsexual Eva Robins as a seductive and vengeful femme fatale in an enigmatic and fetishistic flashback whose import is not revealed in full until very late in the day.

Pay close attention to his/her red shoes. There’s a learned paper to be written on the parallels between Dario Argento and Powell & Pressburger. The touchstones are more apparent than you might think.

As with all gialli, style is everything; and ‘Tenebrae’ creates an architectural style that is dislocated, borderline surreal and utterly unique. Although it’s established from the opening scenes that the film takes place in Rome, Argento creates a Rome that is as far removed from the Eternal City of Fellini and myriad other filmmakers, a Rome that repudiates landmarks and tourist hives. A city of stark avenues, unexpected open spaces and sprawling post-modern buildings in which Argento creates some of his most memorable set-pieces, from Elsa’s flight from a rapacious vagrant only to find herself in greater danger the moment she think she’s found sanctuary to a three-minute build-up to a murder committed in plain sight that is worthy of Hitchcock. The stand-out, though, is the justly celebrated two-and-a-half minute Louma crane sequence in which the camera prowls the exterior of Marion and Tilda’s house, occasionally probing through the windows to track their movements. Scored to the thunderous and jarring music of Goblin, it’s a symphony of voyeurism and subjective excess. It exists purely for the technical achievement of pulling it off in the first place, it breaks all the rules of perspective and POV, and it’s absolutely gorgeously fucking brilliant.

The script slyly works in references to several of Argento’s previous works, including a fake death à la ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ and a conceptual homage to ‘Deep Red’ that I’d like to discuss at great length but won’t because I’d really hate to ruin the film for anyone reading this who has yet to have the experience of discovering ‘Tenebrae’ for themselves. All I’ll say is that where ‘Deep Red’ ends with a bloody but reflective shot, the implications of which are left to worm their way into the viewer’s subconscious, ‘Tenebrae’ gives us a traumatized survivor screaming and screaming and screaming even as the screen fades to black and Goblin tries to drown them out.

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GIALLO SUNDAY: Giallo

Nottingham Forest were, at best, an average football club when Brian Clough became their manager in 1975. What he accomplished with Forest was nothing less than alchemy. The 1976-77 season saw them promoted to the first division. They won the First Division English Championship the following season. They won the League Cup two years running (1978 and 1979), ditto the European Cup (1979 and 1980), prompting Cloughie’s immortal comment about Manchester United supremo Alex Ferguson that “for all his horses, knighthoods and championships, he hasn't got two of what I've got – and I don't mean balls!”

Since the Cloughie era, Forest regressed to average. And then to just plain dire. To the point at which a mate of mine, a season ticket holder of long standing, turned his back on the players after a particularly embarrassing (read: par for the course) defeat recently.

Being a Dario Argento fan is kind of like supporting Forest. Cloughie quit round about ‘Opera’. Things went downhill from there. There was the brief second tier reminder of the glory days with ‘Sleepless’ (comparable to Forest’s second division supremacy in the 1997-98 season), then it was balls-to-the-wall mediocrity all the way with ‘The Card Player’, ‘Do You Like Hitchcock?’ and ‘Mother of Tears’. True, his two episodes for ‘Masters of Horror’ were good stuff, but even a club in relegation can emerge with the occasional charity shield victory.

With Argento as with Forest: you go to each new film/match expecting nothing, generally coming away with nothing and yet still hurting like a bastard because you remember when they were on world-beating form and every film/match they directed/played was something magisterial and breathtaking and you’d be talking about it to your mates for years afterwards. You’d forgive how dull they are now if it wasn’t so easy to remember how fucking awesome they used to be.


So it was, having suffered a kick in the teeth courtesy of the awfulness of ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and abject heartbreak on account of ‘Mother of Tears’ (which, in terms of how to rape an astounding promising trilogy, is akin to J.R.R. Tolkein following up ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ and ‘The Two Towers’ with an uncorrected proof copy of Guy N. Smith’s ‘Night of the Crabs’), that I approached ‘Giallo’ with extreme scepticism. I made sure I had a few beers inside me, as well, just to be sure I was anaesthetized against the almost inevitable onset of disappointment.

‘Giallo’ opens with a ‘Seven’-style credit sequence and a moody score by Marco Werba. Derivative, I thought, but a decent enough attention grabber. The first shot, lit by the flat harsh light of a glaring lightbulb, was of a hypodermic needle drawing liquid from an unmarked vial. Then we’re at the opera in Rome with a couple of foreign students. Blowing the classical repertoire to hit a nightclub, one of them hooks up with a studly Italian lad while her friend heads back to the hotel. She hails a blandly anonymous cab. The driver takes the wrong route. The girl starts getting worried. She has every right to. The cab pulls into a secluded side street. The driver attacks her.


Nothing earth-shattering or genre-defining going on here, but staged, shot and edited for optimal impact. Next up, fashion model Celine (Elsa Pataky) hurriedly makes plans to meet up with her air hostess sister Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) before hitting the catwalk and strutting her stuff in the latest fashions. The show over, she grabs a cab and calls Linda en route. The signal is lost, the driver takes the wrong direction and Celine ends up a captive of a hideously deformed and jaundiced psychopath. Meanwhile, Linda reports Celine’s disappearance, but the only person who will listen is Inspector Enzo Avolfi (an expatriate Italian who has lived in New York for a while). Avolfi is investigating a series of brutal crimes against women undertaken by a “pattern killer”.

Okay. Out-of-her-depth heroine driven by need to explain sister’s disappearance hooks up with maverick-cop-haunted-by-inability-to-save-someone. So far so generic, but none of it actually bad. Half an hour in, I was being to wonder why ‘Giallo’ had attracted so much hate. It wasn’t great – in fact, by dint of the gamut of screenwriting clichés, it was only just running to borderline good – but by the same standards it wasn’t exactly a repellently nauseating POS either.

I kept watching. Linda persuades Avolfi to let her tag along to crime scenes and autopsies (yeah, whatever); much is made of Avolfi’s understanding of the psychopathic mindset yet it’s Linda who figures out a crucial clue (yeah, whatever); Avolfi’s investigative methods seem to consist of showing his face at crime scenes, having a quick word with the forensic boys, barking something out reports on his desk then beetling off for a quick drink without even bothering to talk to witnesses (yeah, whatever). It was all kind of ordinary. But it wasn’t a stinker.


And as the film reached the halfway mark, then crept towards the hour, I was convinced that ‘Giallo’ was nowhere near the clunker I’d been lead to believe. I was beginning to relish the composition of a revisionist review.

And. Then. It. All. Went. Tits. Up.

And not even tits up in an interesting way, when a film that’s been shaping up for greatness goes off the rails in such spectacular style that it’s almost impressive. No, ‘Giallo’ adheres to what, with a nod to T.S. Eliot, you might call “not with a bang but a wimp-out”.

Here’s a good time to spend a paragraph on the background to the film. And, anticipating what’s to come in the next paragraph, to throw out a SPOILER ALERT. ‘Giallo’ was written by Jim Agnew and Sean Keller (Keller had written the TV movies ‘Kracken: Tentacles of the Deep’ and ‘Gryphon’; it was Agnew’s first credit) as an homage to gialli. The script met with incomprehension in Hollywood. A European producer was interested and – in what must have seemed like a dream come true to the writers – the property found its way into the hands of Argento. At this point, serendipity found itself wrongfooted, hamstrung and hog-tied. The producers interfered, Argento announced his dissatisfaction with the theatrical cut, it premiered at the 2009 Edinburgh International Festival to complete indifference, word of US and UK distribution was muted, and then it emerged – in 2010 – that Adrien Brody was suing the producers over non-payment of his fee. In November 2010, a court ruled that Brody’s image could not be used to promote the film until his fee was paid in full. In January of this year, the case was reported to be settled.


Now, it’s difficult to gauge just how badly producer interference damaged Argento’s take on the material, but what’s inarguable is that ‘Giallo’ gives us Brody’s worst ever performance. Seigner, not the most expressive actress at the best of time, at least suggests more emotional involvement in the proceedings. The rest of the cast sleepwalk. A promising first hour suddenly gets the plug pulled on it as the final act inexplicably jettisons much of what has gone before and plods towards an arbitrary and pointless conclusion that doesn’t leave you thinking “WTF?” so much as “SFW?” The main part of the problem is that Avolfi is played by Adrien Brody while the killer – known as Yellow – is essayed by Byron Deidra (I’ll leave it to word puzzle fans to make the connection), a casting decision that makes no sense whatsoever given that : (a) cop and killer are unrelated, (b) cop and killer have no shared experience or (c) cop and killer are never revealed as two sides of the same coin. In other words, Argento introduces a subtext, plays on it for a little while and then all but walks in front of the camera, shrugs and says, “Oh by the way, that subtext? Fuhgeddaboutit!”

Going further than this: the killer’s motivation – a pathetic hint at he-kills-what’s-beautiful-because-he’s-ugly (oh, fuck right off; none of my three completed novels have been published, but I don’t go around bumping off authors at bookshop signing sessions); the young Avolfi’s escape from his mother’s killer – never explained; Avolfi’s insistence on a certain line of questioning with a witness – never revisited; Avolfi’s seemingly important purchase from a bookshop – an entirely superfluous scene (unless a subsequent scene was hacked); a couple of jarring transitions between day and night (further suggestion of editorial butchery). It all adds up to a turgid, uninvolving and structurally flawed piece of work. When the end credits rolled, I was left not with a feeling of frustration, confusion or even outright animosity, but simply one of abject disinterest. And you can’t say much worse about a film than that.

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GIALLO SUNDAY: The Wax Mask

Wikipedia cites the Dario Argento produced ‘Wax Mask’ in its list of notable giallo titles, which was pretty much the only reason I approached it yesterday. I’d dispute its classification as a giallo, but not having watched any other giallo-rific titles in the last week, it’ll have to do for today’s post.

The story behind the film is possibly more notable than the film itself, so let’s start there. When the project got off the ground in 1996 it was intended as something of a comeback for Lucio Fulci, who hadn’t made anything for five years since the unfairly overlooked ‘Door to Silence’. Fulci collaborated with Argento on the screenplay (Daniele Stroppa also takes a script credit), the funding was lined up and pre-production completed. Just weeks before principle photography was due to start, Fulci died. Directing duties were swiftly assigned to SFX guru Sergio Stivaletti (Italy’s answer to Tom Savini). Stivaletti hadn’t directed before and has chalked up only three more directing credits since – two of them for television. The completed film was dedicated to Fulci and is something of a mixed bag.


Loosely based on a story by Gaston Leroux – the same story that, equally loosely, provided the raw material for Andre de Toth’s ‘House of Wax’ and Jaume Collet-Serra’s yawnsome remake – things kick off in Paris on New Year’s Eve 1900, fireworks bursting over the city in stark contrast to the crime scene Inspector Lanvin (Aldo Massasso) is called to. A couple have been gorily murdered, their hearts ripped out by a cloaked figure with a mechanical hand. Their young daughter, hiding, escapes the slaughter.

Twelve years later we’re in Italy and Boris Volkoff (Robert Hossein) is preparing for the grand opening of his wax museum, a place that is already being spoken about as a chamber of horrors. Aristocratic layabout Luca (Daniele Auber) accepts a bet to spend a night there, intending to blow his winnings on the company of pert hooker Giorgina (Valery Valmond). He doesn’t live long enough to collect them. Volkoff pretends he’s aghast, but is secretly delighted at the potential publicity. Meanwhile, journalist Andrea (Riccardo Serventi Longhi) senses a story and romances Sonia (Romina Mondello), newly employed as a costumier at the wax museum, with a view to getting close to the enigmatic Volkoff. Sonia, in case you haven’t guessed, is the girl who survived the attack in Paris. And no sooner has she commenced employment with Volkoff than she’s a mite curious (not to mention slightly traumatized) as to how Volkoff has managed to capture her parents’ murders in such accurate detail for one of his macabre tableaux.


I guess the not-particularly-engaging mystery element, Sonia and Andrea teaming up to unearth the incredibly transparent truth behind Volkoff’s creations, just about permits a case to be made for ‘The Wax Mask’ as giallo. The set design, particularly the baroque layout of the museum and the gothic stylizations of Volkoff’s workshop, are more in keeping with Argento’s ‘Suspiria’. In fact, if the filmmakers had reimagined Volkoff as a female character, played by – say – Mercedes McCambridge, this could easily have been a part of the ‘Three Mothers’ mythos. Come to think of it, for all its tired genre tropes and general air of predictability, ‘The Wax Mask’, retuned slightly to incorporate Mater Lachrymarum, would have still presented a better conclusion to the trilogy than Argento’s own ‘Mother of Tears’.

In its defence, ‘The Wax Mask’ is prettily shot in a BBC costume drama kind of way (not that your average BBC costume drama would feature a scene where two people’s hearts are ripped out and impaled on what looks suspiciously like a kebab skewer but, hey, that’s just one of the ways the Beeb misses out!), while Maurizio Albeni’s lushly romantic score is so deliriously OTT that it swiftly emerges as one of the film’s chief pleasures. Hossein, Mondello and Massasso turn in perfectly acceptable performances. Valmond, as the sparky but ultimately ill-fated Giorgina, is much better than the material gives her any right to be in what was the second of only two film appearances. The gore scenes do what they need to do, there’s enough nudity to keep the horny toad as entertained as the gore hound, the whole thing ends in a massive conflagration, and there’s the obligatory twist ending that you’ll be able to see coming like an ocean liner on a duckpond.


What you probably won’t see coming is an unrivalled moment of what-the-fuckery in during the fiery denouement where the film makes a sudden, jarring and jaw-droppingly inexplicable lurch into science-fiction. It sure ain’t Leroux’s original tale, I’ll tell you that.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: today’s Giallo Sunday offering, a blood-drenched, wax-spattered horror/sci-fi/costume drama with just a soupcon – maybe – of giallo.

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MASTERS OF HORROR: Jenifer and Pelts

Continuing the Dario Argento love from yesterday’s entry, I thought I’d take a look at the two episodes he directed for ‘Masters of Horror’.

‘Jenifer’ – a title I find strangely unfinished in its only-one-“n” spelling – was the fourth episode of season one. Adapted from a Bruce Jones short story by Steven Weber, who also plays the lead role, the basic set-up is that world-weary cop Frank Spivey (Weber) shoots a cleaver-wielding and crazy-looking guy who is about to despatch a facially disfigured young woman – the Jenifer (Carrie Anne Fleming) of the title. He has a hard time adjusting to the aftermath of his first fatal shooting and quarrels with his well-meaning wife and his moody teenage son. Distraught that Jenifer has been taken to a psychiatric institution, he insists on moving her into the family home, a decision that precipitates his family’s acrimonious departure.

As well as being disfigured, Jenifer is incapable of speech. At best, she whimpers or lets loose a throaty growl. She expresses herself emotionally with the pitiful nuzzling and licking of a pet; and physically with the sexual urges of a nymphomaniac who’s been mainlining oysters, ginseng and Spanish fly. A mutually dependent relationship develops between Frank and Jenifer, but when he discovers the true extent of her animalism, he installs her in a rickety cabin in the woods in the misguided hope that no further unpleasantness will ensue.

Did I say “unpleasantness”? The make-up department make a repulsively good job of turning Fleming (a woman who doesn’t even reside in the same hemisphere as the ugly stick – do a Google image search if you need proof) into a grotesque she-beast … albeit a grotesque she-beast with the body of a centrefold. Argento plays up the psycho-sexual elements to the hilt, as well as emphasizing the “beast in man” (or in this case woman) subtext with maximum visceral impact. Before the halfway mark, there’s a set-your-teeth-on-edge sex scene that takes its pointers from the crude old adage about not looking at the hearth when you’re poking the fire, followed by a bit of woman-on-feline violence that gives a whole new meaning to “cat food”.

The second half of ‘Jenifer’, with Frank off the force, sans family and relocated to the aforementioned cabin, sets up a potential dynamic when our increasingly troubled hero meets sympathetic local shop owner Rose (Cynthia Garris), only to resolve with an ironic circularity. While the means by which Argento and Weber arrive at the payoff might confound expectations, the twist itself is as easy to see coming as an ocean liner on a duckpond, establishing ‘Jenifer’ as an x-rated episode of ‘Tales of the Unexpected’, but no less perversely entertaining for all that.

‘Pelts’ – episode six of season two – seems, in its first quarter of an hour, to be setting up two stories: that of Jeb Jameson (John Saxon) inculcating his son Larry (Michael Suchanek) into the ancient and ignoble art of laying traps for small unsuspecting furry animals whose pelts are a saleable commodity; and that of Jake Feldman (Meat Loaf), an ill-tempered furrier who bullies the ethnic workers in his sweatshop and lusts after exotic dancer Shanna (Ellen Ewusie), the star attraction at a strip-joint he frequents.

Then Argento curtails the Jeb/Larry subplot in notably gory fashion and shifts the focus to Jake. If ‘Jenifer’ is an x-rated ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ episode, then ‘Pelts’ is an x-rated M.R. James tale. As James made the artefacts which his unerringly academic protagonists came into contact with the receptacles of some nameless and inexplicable evil, so ‘Pelts’ gives us raccoon fur as a purveyor of something unnatural, unholy and more or less unexplained (there’s a scene which hints at the provenance of the ground the raccoons inhabit, but for the most part Argento is content to leave it to the audience’s imagination; this is one of the smartest things a horror writer or director can do), the difference being that M.R. James would never have had one of his mild-mannered intellectuals angling for a lap-dance from a curvaceous stripper.

Essentially, ‘Pelts’ unfolds as an hour-long PETA commercial where the idea of having famous actresses declare that they’d rather go naked than wear fur is taken to a whole different level. It doesn’t work its way sneakily towards the spelled-out-in-flashing-neon denouement of ‘Jenifer’, although there is a sneaky bit of foreshadowing early on. There is also a lot more in the way of dark humour in ‘Pelts’. In fact, it’s one of the few Argento titles I can think of which trades on graveyard humour. I’d be hard pressed to say which is the better of these two episodes.

Taken together, though, these two hours of television add up to the best thing Argento has put his name to in the last decade. Both play wryly on his earlier work: ‘Jenifer’ features a recurring child-like musical cue that recalls the nursery rhyme in ‘Deep Red’, plus the ‘Stendahl Syndrome’-like riverside death of an antagonist; while ‘Pelts’ evokes ‘Opera’ in a shot of an eye nervously squaring up to a peephole and a jarringly weird moment where the camera seems to burrow into a bug-infested bit of grassland, homages both ‘Cat o’ Nine Tails’ and ‘Deep Red’ in an extended elevator/pool of blood set-piece, throws in a cackling old hag who comes across as a hillbilly second cousin to the Three Mothers, and suggests ‘Suspiria’ in the décor of Shanna’s garish apartment.

The acting performances are generally very good, with Meat Loaf giving an early indication of his reality TV stand-off with Gary Busey in ‘Pelts’ and Fleming, in ‘Jenifer’, playing the half-tragic-half-monstrous anti-heroine in a bravura turn that ranges from vulnerable to predatory by way of coquettish and aggressively erotic – and all without uttering a single coherent word. It’s a powerhouse bit of acting that makes me wonder why Fleming isn’t headlining movies right now.

I’ve seen barely any ‘Masters of Horror’ episodes outside of these two – John Carpenter’s ‘Cigarette Burns’ and Takeshi Miike’s gruelling ‘Imprint’ being the honourable exceptions – but on the available evidence, I doubt there’s much else from either season that reaches these heights.

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Dario Argento

Happy 71st birthday to Dario Argento. I’m assuming the knife is purely for cake-cutting duties.

Here’s a large glass raised to you, sir, and what say we forego “Happy Birthday To You” in favour of this little number?

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GIALLO SUNDAY: Sleepless

Posted to coincide with Max von Sydow’s 82nd birthday

Broadly speaking, the glory days of the giallo were the mid 60s to the late 70s. But the genre never entirely went away. Still hasn’t. Dario Argento saw in the new millennium with ‘Sleepless’, a rather calculated return to form that gave him the biggest hit in his native Italy that he’d had since ‘The Stendahl Syndrome’ five years earlier.

A prologue set in 1983 has world-weary cop Inspector Moretti (Max von Sydow) promised the young son of a murder victim that he’ll bring the killer to justice if it takes him the rest of his life. A promise he thinks he’s fulfilled when the dead body of the dwarf identified as the killer is retrieved and the case is closed.

Eighteen years later, Moretti has retired, the young lad Giacomo (Stefano Dionisi) is now in his twenties and embarking on a relationship with harpist Gloria (Chiara Caselli), and Moretti’s successor Inspector Manni (Paolo Maria Scalondro) finds himself reopening Moretti’s old case when an identical series of murders occur.

There are two ways to look at ‘Sleepless’: an old-school return to the giallo stamping ground that Argento made his name with; or a “greatest hits” package that simply rehashes former glories. Indeed, the case for the latter hardly needs to be made. There isn’t a single set-piece that doesn’t recall an earlier example of Argento’s filmography, with ‘Deep Red’ in particular being worked over (major plot points involve a child’s nursery rhyme, a buried childhood memory, a character poking about in an old dark house, and a victim menaced by a mechanical doll marching inexorably out of the shadows) like there’s no tomorrow. A secret unearthed in a graveyard recalls ‘Cat of Nine Tails’; a victim framed between the windows of a train is reminiscent of the huge glass doors both framing and denying prevention of the murder in ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’; some prowling camerawork in a concert hall is straight out of ‘Opera’, and the plot device of a novelist whose opus the killing spree seems to be patterned on is ‘Tenebre’ writ large.

However, coming after the abysmal ‘Phantom of the Opera’, and providing the last hurrah of satisfyingly stylish Argento goodness prior to a decade’s worth of offerings (‘The Card Player’, ‘Do You Like Hitchcock?’, ‘Mother of Tears’, ‘Giallo’) that has seen his stock plummet to a new low, even something as deliberately reflexive as ‘Sleepless’ is to be embraced: it’s a reminder, however self-derivative, of what you love about Argento.

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