1982 @ 40: TENEBRAE

Bestselling whodunnit writer Peter Neal travels to Rome for a promotional tour of his latest thriller, Tenebrae. It's not just interviews and signings, though. He's barely landed before a series of murders starts in which the killer leaves notes for him, quoting his work, effectively calling him the inspiration for the killings. Detectives is on the case but Peter, himself, has his own ideas and quietly begins his own investigation. Is it the weirdly bent journalist, his frenzied fiancé, a member of the  of the LGBTQ+ community in Rome making a point? All shall be revealed (but not in this post).

While the first twenty minutes of this entry into Argento's giallo cinema can feel a little cramped and awkward, once it gets into second and hits the road it's one of his tightest and effective thrillers. There are plenty of stunning camera moves like the survey around the house that is part stalker and part supernaturally powered killer or some of the breathtaking murder scenes. Goblin's score veers between ethereality and the nasty end of prog and is always welcome in an Argento joint.

International stars Anthony Franciosa as the urbane, ratpack style author works a treat as does John Saxon, playing against his B-movie action single-cell dimensions to comic effect. Argento's partner in life and writing Daria Nicolodi, so welcome on screen in Deep Red, provides most of the ethical gravitas to proceedings. My favourite of the cast has to be Guiliano Gemma as Detective Germani who reads libraries of thrillers but never guesses the killer. He is the end of a long line of Argento cops who steal all their scenes from Crystal Plumage on.

I always forget the strange, dreamlike sequences of the woman on the beach with the teen boys. There is a creeping unease beneath its beauty that recalls filmmakers far further to the margins than Argento, like Zulawski, Pasolini or even Jodorowsky. There are two of them, both mixing a brooding sexuality with sudden violence, and their appearance is always arresting by both their progress and the interruption to the more muscular giallo style of the rest of the film. They are centrally relevant to the plot but it won't be apparent as to why until the end and it is so difficult to attribute them to a character that they become more compelling than the murder mystery. It's as thought the film itself is daydreaming a kind of pleasant version of the movie until brought back by violence it cannot mask.

Another aspect that strikes me about this one is that the sensationalism in the treatment of LGBTQ+ people is kept to the novel of the title and the mind of one of the characters. It is not normalised; the jealousy mind games between the lesbian couple are not played for laughs and their sexuality is only the cause of their slaying by a figure whose savagery prevents empathy. This is not unusual in Argento's work but the beige naturalism of the depiction feels pleasant from an era where even edgy comedy played on stereotypes.

Dario Argento was still on a career high at the beginning of the '80s and it would continue for years more before the following decade's patchiness threatened to soften his name (see also John Carpenter and George Romero, just quietly).  While Suspiria before it and Opera after featured more eyepopping violence the kills here are in character with a murderer making statements. The double murder of the two women and then the startling noonday sun in the piazza slaying are as crafty as anything he has done.

If Argento has muddied his own waters with later works, to my mind we can still keep the room we've made for him on reservation for all the stunners he brought to the genre which levitated its bar and kept the genre in the realm of great style. If I chose this film for a rewatch it's always as a casual pick but it always ends up reminding me of how compelling it gets, how soon and with what mastery. It wasn't the last time Argento made all of this work so fluently but it's still one of the best.