While Mario Bava may have invented the Giallo, it was Dario Argento who popularized it in 1970 with The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Without that film, we wouldn’t be talking about Giallo at all. Then in 1975, he perfected the genre with Deep Red.
While the genre was a very popular one, it had its critics. Many criticized its overt sexualization of violence and its graphic violence towards women. In 1982, just over a decade after making The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and thus creating the Giallo craze, Argento made Tenebrae, a film that can be viewed as the director’s direct response to the criticism of his films. While the genre would continue to be popular throughout the 1980s and Argento would make several more, Tenebrae can also be looked at as a final statement about the genre from the director.
While The Bird With the Crystal Plumage opens with the killer typing something on a typewriter – he is the creator of the art, Tenebrae opens with the killer reading an already-published novel – he is an audience to the art. That novel, also titled Tenebrae, was written by our protagonist Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) and it could rightly be considered a Giallo. It is about a killer who attacks women he considers to be perversions to society.
The real killer acts like a copycat to the killer inside the book (inside this film). We see him murder a woman who offers herself up sexually in order to get out of a shoplifting charge, and then later a lesbian couple with an open relationship. Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, the killer believes he has been sent to rid the streets of so-called scum.
Peter Neal is in Rome for a book tour celebrating Tenebrae. His agent Bullmer (John Saxon) keeps booking him interviews in which Peter is constantly being asked about what effects the violence in his book may create in society. That’s Argento getting meta, as he was often asked similar questions about his movies.
When one of the murder victims has pages of his book inserted into her mouth the police begin asking Peter questions. Later the killer will slide quotes from Tenebrae under his door. Peter and his assistant Anne (Daria Nicolodi) start their own investigation.
The film is filled with scenes exactly what you’ve come to expect from an Argento-directed Giallo. There are sly camera angles, extreme close-ups, surprising jump-scares, blood-soaked violence, and a righteous score from Goblin (well, three of the members at least).
While the film does present lots of questions about violence and art – does it create violence in society or is it simply a depiction of the existing violence in society? Argento doesn’t give us any concrete answers. His on-screen surrogate, Peter Neal bats the questions away with pat answers, but the movie seems to indulge the idea both ways. Perhaps his films are a reflection of the real-life violence Argento was surrounded by, or perhaps his films influenced others to violence in society. Maybe a little bit of both occurred. It is clear Argento loved depicting violence in his films. I suspect he was never ever to truly untangle the reasons why. I love his films and abhor real-life violence so I have no pat answers either.
What we are left with is a pretty darn good little film filled with stylish violence and an interesting mystery. That is more than enough for me.
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