The filmmaker Dario Argento called “one of the most interesting directors in the world”
Horror has always been one of cinema’s most popular genres, with some of the earliest films ever made telling scary stories and using innovative techniques to incite fear and excitement in the viewer. However, partly due to censorship, horror movies showed limited gore and violence until the 1960s, when the genre rapidly began to change.
With movies such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, violence on screen began to increase. Black Sunday was an important precursor to the Italian giallo subgenre, which Bava would soon contribute to with movies like The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace.
Giallo movies typically involved intense violence, eroticism and a murder mystery setup. While Bava was a pioneer of the genre, he was quickly joined by Dario Argento, perhaps the best-known giallo director. After working as a writer in the 1960s, contributing to movies such as Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in the West and Don Taylor’s The Five Man Army, Argento released his directorial debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, in 1970.
He followed the movie with The Cat o’ Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet, forming his ‘Animal Trilogy’. The films were all received well, becoming critical and commercial successes. However, Argento found widespread acclaim with 1977’s Suspiria, often recognised as Argento’s quintessential movie. Known for its striking colour palette full of neon hues, Suspiria is one of the decade’s greatest horrors, cementing Argento as a master of the genre.
Speaking to Rotten Tomatoes, Argento revealed his favourite filmmakers who profoundly influenced his approach to cinema. Naturally, Hitchcock received a mention, with the director stating: “Most of his films were a great influence on my old films”.
However, Argento also picked out a director not typically associated with horror – Ingmar Bergman. While the Swedish filmmaker did release one horror film, Hour of the Wolf, and certainly used folk horror themes in some of his other work, he is better known for his carefully crafted dramas.
Discussing the filmmaker, Argento said: “Ingmar Bergman, from the beginning, was one of the most interesting directors in the world for me”. Talking to Total Film in 2012, Argento selected The Seventh Seal as one of his favourites by Bergman, calling it “very strong” and “very disturbing”.
While Argento made brightly-coloured, blood-soaked horrors in contrast to Bergman’s muted dramas, the giallo master’s love for the director is apparent in their shared love for the human psyche. Bergman’s movies are defined by meditations on humanity and the individual soul, but so are Argento’s – he just uses an entirely different method of exploring these themes.
