Deep Red

By Alexia Kannas

The release of Italian director Dario Argento's Deep Red in 1975 saw both a return to form for the director and the crystallization of tropes of the giallo genre. While the film's immense popularity in Italy spawned a wave of copy-cat formula thrillers, this enthusiastic reception was not replicated by English-speaking audiences on its theatrical release. With its loosely woven narrative and hyper-stylized violent set pieces, Deep Red was critically panned in the United States and the UK as clichéd and exploitative Euro-schlock. Tracing the film’s history of censorship, re-edited releases, and its subsequent celebration by cult film audiences, this book considers how these competing discourses have helped to transform the film’s cultural status and to fashion it as an exemplar of cult cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Release date: Jan 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9780231851060

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

FALLING FOR DEEP RED

In Australia it was possible to grow up watching Italian horror on free-to-air television. As a kid, I didn’t realise how remarkable this was. I lived in a corner house at the intersection of two innocuous streets in Melbourne’s northern suburbs; the kind of place with freshly-mown lawns, a local milk bar and plenty of gum trees. Family dinner was eaten at the table, but the television was usually on, and we’d spend most of the time leaning over on our seats to see past whoever was sitting in the way to steal glimpses of the screen. Afterwards, plates were washed and everyone retired to their quarters to play video games or talk to friends on the phone. But, if it was a Friday or Saturday night, in just a few hours, we might reconvene around the television. Shuffling through the dimmed lounge room wrapped in gowns and blankets, a blank VHS tape was loaded into the machine, ready to record whatever extraordinary weirdness materialised on the screen. The films changed every week, but the ritual was the same: this was the hour of the SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) cult film.

It was via SBS that I first encountered Jesús Franco’s psycho-sexadelic Vampyros Lesbos (1971),¹ and it was the same station that introduced me to the sleazy delights of Erotic Ghost Story (dir. Ngai Choi Lam, 1990). But the films I looked forward to the most were the Italian horror films. My first, I think, was Camillo Mastrocinque’s Terror in the Crypt (1964). I was about fifteen. I remember experiencing that night, for the first time, some sublime state between slumber and entrancement; nothing seemed to be happening in the film, yet still I couldn’t tear myself away. Sometime later, SBS’s screening of Michele Soavi’s Cemetery Man/ Dellamorte Dellamore (1994) initiated my family’s quest to see as many Italian zombie films as we could get our hands on. Such campaigns were usually spearheaded by my father, who believed that commercial television programming was toxic, but had an, at times, frustratingly resolute trust in the cultural value of whatever aired on SBS.

The fact that I encountered Italian horror movies on the same channel my father watched the morning Greek news is significant. SBS is an Australian television station that started out as a radio broadcasting service catering to ethnic minority communities living in Australia. Full-time transmission on Australian television began in 1980, with a programme made up of foreign-language news slots, educational programmes and documentary specials. In The SBS Story, Ien Ang, Gay Hawkins and Lamia Dabboussy note how ‘in its earliest days, SBS imported a very European sensibility, and much of its material was brought in from Europe’ (2008: 132). Through the 1980s and 1990s, SBS was the only television station that broadcast foreign-language and art-house cinema in Australia and had weekly hour-long programmes dedicated to showing experimental Australian and international short films.² The service was also committed to screening films that had been banned by Australian censors – a policy ‘driven by a desire to provide Australians access to films that were part of a world cinematic culture they had so far missed out on’ (ibid.). In retrospect, I can see that SBS was a place for all kinds of otherness: a home for tastes, languages and cultures that fell outside of whatever dominated the mainstream. It served all kinds of marginalised communities and taste formations and, until 2006, it did this without resorting to in-show advertising. This was important if you were really into videotapes.

Our weekly schooling in cult cinema kicked off with an introduction delivered by the station’s resident cult film specialist, Des Mangan. Mangan’s introductions to the weekly films routinely performed the rhetoric of cult cinema taste formations: they celebrated these films precisely because they were not to everyone’s taste. They were also very funny. Take for instance his pre-presentation warning for the German film Killer Condom (dir. Martin Walz, 1996):

This isn’t a Disney movie … if it was, the condoms would always be breaking into song … if the title offends, then the movie certainly will – so don’t watch it. Then you won’t have anything to write to me and complain about. For everyone else who likes a movie about rampaging rubbers, serial killing slip-ons, durex deviants, lifestyle life-takers, sit back and enjoy: Killer Condom.

These celebrations of oppositional taste had a predictably fortifying effect on my teenage sense of self. Gathering around the television to watch a detective named Luigi Mackeroni unravel a mystery based around carnivorous contraception was a way of rallying against the conservative values of the mainstream.

But this is not how I came to Deep Red. Although my schooling in cult cinema had prepared me somewhat, my first encounter with the film that is the subject of this book happened on a summer afternoon around six years later, while I sat cross-legged on the floor of a crumbling inner city terrace house. Flipping through my metal-guitarist housemate’s collection of horror movies, I had come across a stolen rental video copy, the front cover emblazoned with an illustration of a nasty-looking doll with raised eyebrows and a crack in its head. The words ‘uncut version’ were printed in the bottom left corner. The back cover attributed the film to ‘Dario (Suspiria) Argento’, a name for which I had some hazy recognition from the days of my SBS cult film schooling. The object itself had a kind of aura: the stickers upon stickers on its cover chronicled the tape’s decline through the many price-points of the video store system. I imagined that its last spot in the store would have been somewhere near the back in the section housing hundreds of horror titles you feel you’ve already seen, on the shelf near the porno videos.

I put the tape into the machine. David Hemmings plays the film’s protagonist, Marc Daly: an English pianist living in Rome, who, after witnessing the murder of his neighbour at the hands of an unidentified killer, takes it upon himself to uncover their identity. The victim is a renowned medium named Helga Ulmann (Macha Méril), whose psychic faculties tune her into the twisted thoughts of a murderer lurking somewhere in the audience of her talk at a parapsychology conference. Helga’s insight into the killer’s identity marks her as the plot’s first victim, but because her neighbour Marc witnesses her murder, a string of people must then die to keep the secret safe.

I would like to be able to say that, confronted for the first time with Argento’s distinctive style and great technical skill, I was instantly swept off my feet - but love doesn’t always work that way. The version of Deep Red that I saw that day was not uncut, nor was it the truncated export cut that had been approved by the director. Its sloppily executed ‘pan & scan’ transfer had lopped so much off the sides of every frame, that I probably only saw half the film; interfering with whatever remained were the ghosts of one thousand viewers before me, pulling at the edges of the already severely compromised image. Despite all this, the film was mysteriously compelling. Between the clunky edits were moments of sublime theatricality that recalled the Italian horror films I had seen on TV as a kid: heavy red curtains parted to reveal the deliberately symmetrical staging of the conference; malevolent tracking shots glided down a hallway lined entirely with nightmarish paintings of tortured faces, and, at one stage, the menacing mechanical doll which graced the video’s cover hurtled across a room, cackling maniacally. But unlike the gothic and supernatural Italian horror I was most familiar with, Deep Red was set in contemporary Rome and there were no witches or zombies or real ghosts. Afterwards, I couldn’t shake the relentless arpeggios in the film’s main theme out of my head: like the prick of a thorn felt over and over, they seemed to embody the tension at play in every aspect of the film.

The plot’s first victim: Helga Ulmann

It was my first experience of an Italian giallo film, and although my expectations were upturned again and again, Deep Red seemed driven by some internal logic which, although inscrutable, held everything together. The thing that had struck me most in this first viewing, however, was the fact that the film offered no convincing sense of resolution. In its final moments, Marc does discover the killer’s identity, but it is too late: four people have died, his lover and investigative partner has been critically injured and the killer is already standing behind him, ready to kill him too. And although he manages to escape her murderous wrath, when the credits roll and he looks into his own reflection in the pool of her blood, all he can do is cover his face with his hand. This was what haunted me: the fact that, in a world that looked so much like my own, solving the mystery that lay at the heart of the film offered no restoration of order. Like the murderous thoughts that infiltrate Helga’s consciousness, Deep Red had a curious resonance that seemed to ‘linger about the room like cobwebs’, as Helga says, even once the film had ended.

Sometime in the early 1990s, Deep Red made its way to the SBS cult