With his first features hitting the big screen in the early 1970s, maverick auteur Dario Argento steadily made his way to become the pioneer of the giallo genre he’s regarded as today. Glove-handed serial-killers, vertiginous camera angles, over-the-top oneiric deaths, alluringly eerie scores: these are just some of the ingredients that make up his unsettling, hallucinatory body of work. With a trademark style deeply influenced by “Master of Suspense” Alfred Hitchcock and a directorial vision daringly unbound by the rules of logic, Argento’s cinema experiments with the rules of the erotic thriller to frightening yet entertaining results.
We celebrate the season of horror cinema that is October with five of the maestro’s finest, most terrifying works. Starting with The Cat o’ Nine Tails, which builds itself around a tense detective story fueled by unusual staging and knotty plot-lines, through to the unfathomable terrors of The Stendhal Syndrome—there is ceaseless dread to be found in between. Happy Halloween!