Deep Red

Patrick Willems4.0

Uses a brilliant cinematic technique where every time someone is about to die it plays the coolest music in the world so every murder scene turns into a dance party

Josh Lewis4.0

"I can feel death in this room! I feel a presence, a twisted mind sending me thoughts! Perverted, murderous thoughts..." — Me watching any Dario Argento movie.Coming out at the tail end of the Giallo’s popularity when Argento was about to lose interest and commit to making more supernatural-based horror films like Suspiria and Inferno, Deep Red represents a pretty effective crossover that’s playfully aware of the tropes of the subgenre it's weaponizing and attempts to push them to more gothic horror extremes rather than police procedural ones. To appreciate Italian Giallo (and a lot of Italian horror in general) you have to accept that about 95% of the movie you’re about to watch is some misogynistic British or American writer or musician running around Rome doing bozo detective shit, and then 5% is all the beautifully gruesome and stylish proto-slasher craziness that you are given a heads up is starting anytime the sick Goblin prog rock bassline hits. And that the ending is likely that the black-gloved, trenchcoated man who is going around serial killing people is actually a woman! Argento alone himself has made this movie 3-4 times, and I think for most people this is the best or perhaps purest example of it. (Personally, I’m partial to Blood and Black Lace and Tenebre.) It's certainly among the most visually striking and elaborate, filled with lots of formal and symphonic bravado as he moves the camera around the intensely moody design and location choices, and builds his way to his shocking gore with incredibly propulsive music and eerie sound design. A lot of it is ultimately nonsense but gorgeously staged and choreographed nonsense nonetheless. Every setpiece here is a banger: the zoom on the psychic’s head (and neck) going through the broken glass during the inciting murder, the slow-motion close-ups of the gloved hand pushing that author’s face into the scalding hot bathwater, the evil looking mechanized (and hanged!) dolls, the grotesque mural/corpse reveal behind the plaster (and subsequent hidden doors/rooms in the haunted decaying mansion), the one-two punch double finale of the garbage truck dragging + skull crush and the necklace/elevator decapitation. That hall of mirrors/paintings reveal of the killer followed by the brief cut back to the traumatizing Christmas murder prologue that has rippled its way through the events we're watching unfold is really well done. Throw in some creepy lullabies and some bizarre screwball rom-com antics and the Paul McCartney looking guy from Blow-Up shouting "be more trashy!" at his Jazz conservatory and getting increasingly stressed out as the sustained tension and atmospheric dread just keeps going for the entire last 45 minutes or so… Good ass movie! Full discussion on ep 402 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

laird4.5

If I had to explain the appeal of giallo to a space alien, I would show them the sequence in which David Hemmings madly scrapes away the plaster on a wall in a decrepit old mansion to reveal a child's drawing of an absurd, violent crime while Goblin's mismatched prog-rock jam session blares in the background. Simply the best.