Dark Glasses (Occhiali neri) first published by SciFiNow Giallo king Dario Argento‘s Dark Glasses (Occhiali neri) opens with a wide establishing shot of residential buildings in Rome’s leafy suburbs, and then various mobile shots looking upwards at roadside trees and apartment blocks. As it is revealed that the perspective belongs to Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli) at…
Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) first published by Little White Lies, as entry 139 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column A sweet children’s song, a Christmas tree in a cosy domestic setting, silhouettes on the wall showing one person viciously stabbing another, and then a blood-stained knife falling to the floor, by the shoes of a standing…
3rd Night first published by SciFiNow 3rd Night opens with a confusion of images: a little girl plays with a skipping rope and doll; and an adult woman, her hands bound, runs terrified through moonlit trees, before her unseen pursuer brains her with a sledge hammer. This blurring of primal scene and subsequent murder, all…
FrightFest 2009 Diary: Day 3 first published by Little White Lies Includes capsules of: Smash Cut, Hierro, Millennium: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Giallo, Trick ‘r Treat, Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl Day 3 – Saturday 29 Smash Cut (2009) At FrightFest you expect to see (and hear) all manner of horrors, but after…
Sound Of Violence first published by Movies On Weekends Slashers and other kinds of psychodrama typically feature a sequence which, in a phrase borrowed from Sigmund Freud, gets called the ‘primal scene‘ – often opening the film, or shown in flashback, and capturing the formative psychosexual moment of childhood trauma that leads a confused young…
“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe; it gives back life to those who no longer exist,” goes the text quote (from Guy de Maupassant) which opens Wyvern Hill (aka Hollow). Memory plays a key rôle in Jonathan Zaurin’s feature. The first words uttered by its sixty-something heroine Beth (the excellent Pat…
Tenebrae first published by VODzilla.co Psychological stories typically come with a primal scene – a significant, scarring incident from the past which influences what is happening in the present, and which holds the key to some sort of resolution, or at least understanding, of otherwise irrational motivations and events. Dario Argento’s Tenebrae features (at least)…
From the outset, The Woman With Leopard Shoes (La Femme aux Chaussures Leopard) both does and does not let us know what kind of film it is going to be. As an unseen woman recruits a burglar who is wearing a hood over his head to prevent him identifying her, the scene unfolds not only…
Crystal Eyes (Mirada de cristal) first published by SciFiNow There was a time when giallo was the height of fashion. In the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, Italian thrillers were the very model of genre chic, bringing a splash of style, panache and colour to the Hitchcockian whodunnit, and showing the aesthetic angle – the ‘good side’…
Videoman (Videomannen) first published by SciFiNow “I feel like King Kong in New York,” says Ennio Midena (Stefan Sauk) to Simone Karlsson (Lena Nilsson) in Kristian A. Söderström’s Videoman (Videomannen), “I should have been extinct a long time ago.” Ennio is a fish out of water in more ways than one. A ‘flat broke’ migrant who…
The Bird With The Crystal Plumage first published by Little White Lies, as the 51st instalment in my Cinema Psychotronicum column There is a sequence in the middle of Dario Argento’s assured feature debut The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo) which sets out the film’s stall. The hero Sam Dalmas (Tony…