Tenebrae, 1982.
Directed by Dario Argento.
Starring Anthony Franciosa, John Saxon, Daria Nicolodi, Veronica Lario, John Steiner and Giuliano Gemma.
SYNOPSIS:
An American author visiting Rome, finds himself embroiled in the hunt for a serial killer who seems to be drawing inspiration from his latest novel.
Happy Halloween Everyone!!! It’s October 31st (or November 1st if you read this a day late), and after a packed month of vampires, sex zombies, mind-possessing assassins, car sex, evil angels, and Nicolas Cage acting with the destructive power of the hydrogen bomb, we’ve sadly reached the end of another year of October Horrors. So to cap off our year, I’ve picked a good old-fashioned murder mystery from one of the masters of the Italian Giallo. Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, this is Dario Argento’s ultra-violent, ultra-stylish slasher masterpiece, Tenebrae.
After his hyper-colourful dalliances with the supernatural in Suspiria and Inferno, Tenebrae marks a return for Argento to his Giallo roots, the film featuring various tropes from his cinematic past, such as a black-gloved killer, a non-Italian outsider forced to play amateur sleuth and scenes of vicious, highly stylised violence.
While he may use the film to relive early glories, Argento also uses Tenebrae’s story as a kind of self-examination of his career and the reaction that his work has inspired from viewers and critics. Protagonist Peter Neal, a writer of murder mystery novels, is essentially an Argento stand-in, a creative whose work courts controversy due to its violence and accusations of misogyny due to recurring scenes of women being viciously murdered. Argento even uses the film to examine the still controversial idea that violence in fiction is the cause of real-life violence, that a horror fan might be inspired to take up a knife based on what they see on screen or read in a book.
I did have a smug chuckle to myself when Neal, responding to police inquiries about his work leading to murder, quips that police don’t interview the president of Smith & Wesson when one of their guns is used in a murder. While the film examines these ideas in a highly defensive manner, it can come across as a tad hypocritical when it comes to the accusation of misogyny, especially since nearly every murder victim is a woman, with this possible hypocrisy only made more potent by the brutality of the violence inflicted upon them. Although the film does attempt to temper the hypocrisy by suggesting that misogyny is the root cause of the murders themselves. How successfully this deflects the issue is very much up for debate.
While the themes of self-examination and media violence add some meat for the more pretentious critics to chew, Tenebrae also excels as an ultra-violent murder mystery that plays like a grisly love letter to the likes of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. There’s even an angry hound who wouldn’t look out of place stalking the Baskerville estate. As with all Giallos, the real fun is in trying to follow the breadcrumbs and figure out the identity of the killer sporting the black leather gloves and why he is so fixated on Neal.
The clues are plentiful, but you’ll still be surprised by the twisted road the film takes you down, with the mystery only made even more complicated as every new suspect seems to meet a violent death. The final reveal of the killer’s identity stands out as one of my favourites unmaskings out of all the Giallo’s I’ve seen. It might seem somewhat random, but it still comes off (to me, at least) as a genuine surprise and a brilliant twist on the Giallo formula.
After the colourful nightmares of his supernatural films, Tenebrae sees Argento opt for a more realistic and grounded visual style. Gone are the flashy colours and heavy dream-like atmosphere, and in comes a much more muted colour scheme in what seems like a deliberate effort by Argento to distance himself from his previous work. While this approach might make Tenebrae sound visually dull, the muted colours only serve to make the scenes of bloody violence all the more outrageous and eye-catching.
The stand-out sequence is an ambitious several-minute-long unbroken take in which the camera moves out from a window and cranes around the outside of a house, moves along the edges and begins peering into other windows to show us where the characters are. And then, finally, it shows the killer arriving on the scene. It’s a frankly unnecessary and self-indulgent sequence that doesn’t add much to the overall story, but damn it if it isn’t cool to watch.
Tenebrae, due to its violent content, was one of many Italian horror films that found itself on the infamous “Video Nasties” list of the 1980s. While not the goriest of the various Italian horror films I’ve watched (Lucio Fulci’s films are way more sadistic than Argento’s), there is plenty in Tenebrae to disturb squeamish viewers. There are several scenes of throats slashed by a straight razor, the sharp swish of the blade followed by blood erupting like a fountain, with the disgusting sound design giving us a sickeningly watery sound as it does so. Then there is perhaps the film’s most famous murder scene in which a woman’s hand is severed with an axe, the blood erupting from the wound like a burst hose pipe and damn near repainting the walls red in a gruesome but visually striking image.
This being an Italian production, much of the cast is dubbed, although most of the English-speaking actors, such as leading man Anthony Franciosa dub themselves, and all give perfectly serviceable performances, even if their voices and mouths don’t always sync up perfectly. The dubbing of the Italian cast is mostly decent, with the occasional spot of overacting from the voice actors that can sometimes threaten to kill the atmosphere. However, by this point, I’ve seen so many of these dubbed European horror films that the imperfect dubbing is part of the overall charm.
The score composed by Simonetti, Pignatelli and Morante of the band Goblin is a treat, moving away from the prog-rock stylings of their work on Argento’s Deep Red and Suspiria and opting for a more synthesiser-heavy, disco-influenced sound. The main theme, which blasts our ears with a funky bass hook, an electronic voice singing the title, and the sounds of a church organ perfectly sets the tone for an ultra-stylised, hyper-violent slasher that only Argento could have made.
The story is brilliant, boasting a suspenseful whodunnit mystery that will keep you doubting everything and everyone. The visual style is filled with masterfully choreographed scenes of murder in which the camera glides around the set, complimented by edits that come as sharp as a blade. And it is all scored to a frightfully funky musical score by the masters of Italian horror music. Quite simply, Tenebrae is one of Dario Argento’s best films and arguably one of the best Giallo’s ever made.
Thanks again for joining me on another month of October Horrors whether it be throughout the whole month or just this final entry. I hope we can do this again, so do feel free to send suggestions on Twitter at Flickering Myth @flickeringmyth and Graeme Robertson @robertsong93. Till then, have a very safe and Happy Halloween.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Graeme Robertson
