TENEBRAE Explained: Dario Argento’s Last Great Horror Film

However, the subsequent Suspiria (1977) and its sequel, Inferno (1980), only confirmed the Italian director’s departure from the stylistics of Italian thrillers in favor of supernatural horror. But working on the latter film drained its creator so much that he abandoned completing the Three Mothers trilogy (the third part, Mother of Tears, was eventually made only in 2007), instead choosing the safe ground of the genre he had mastered to perfection. However, nothing is safe in Tenebrae (1982), a film so brutal that it landed on the infamous British “video nasties” list (earlier, the film’s poster had been censored, with the gash on a woman’s neck replaced by a red ribbon), while in the United States, it was released in a heavily cut version. To this day, it remains one of the most controversial titles in Argento’s filmography.

Argento found inspiration for the script while staying in America when he became the target of increasingly persistent and threatening phone calls from a fan. This event prompted the director to write a story about an American crime novelist, Peter Neal, whose arrival in Rome to promote his new book, Tenebrae, becomes the catalyst for a psychopath to commit a series of murders inspired by the novel. At first glance, the plot seems to borrow key elements from the pioneering giallo The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), directed by Mario Bava, in which an American tourist, a fan of crime novels, witnesses a murder while on vacation. As if to confirm this connection, Argento cast John Saxon—who appeared in Bava’s film—in one of the roles. Saxon (who passed away in 2020, like another Tenebrae star, Argento’s longtime partner Daria Nicolodi) plays the protagonist’s agent. However, we soon realize that the similarities are superficial, and while the Suspiria creator is interested in the relationship between fiction and reality, it is not dictated by Neal’s book, whose plot we barely even learn.

What do we find out about it? According to one critic—who also happens to be a close acquaintance of Neal—the book is sexist, and its author apparently despises women. Looking at the killer’s razor-slashed victims, someone might indeed suspect that the writer’s imagination is maniacal, given that he conceived such horrors. Thus, Tenebrae can hardly be seen as anything other than Argento’s commentary on his own body of work, which bears a striking resemblance to Neal’s. Accusations of misogyny followed Argento from the very beginning of his career, though it is hard to find a film genre more inherently hostile toward women than giallo. Sadism is almost built into the nature of this type of thriller; both men and women fall victim to it, but it is the “fairer sex” (where “fair” is the key word) that endures greater agony and the brutality so eagerly celebrated by Italian filmmakers. Argento was not the first—one only needs to recall Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964), where a masked killer targets a group of models, turning the crime story into a nihilistic spectacle—but it was the Deep Red director who seemed to make giallo even more violent and graphic.

In his films, violence is fetishized, murders are often shown from the killer’s perspective, and when we see the killer’s hands, they are almost always Argento’s own. Considering that women in his films are not only victims but often turn out to be perpetrators as well (and still meet tragic ends), one could argue that Argento’s cinematic cruelty toward the opposite sex is anything but accidental. The director’s return to giallo became an opportunity to ask himself why horror filmmakers are drawn to brutality and take a sadistic pleasure in depicting death in the bloodiest fashion. Perhaps the answer is nowhere—or at least it has no connection to the author’s character. Looking at Peter Neal, a likable, well-mannered 50-year-old (even when riding a bike in a tracksuit), it’s hard to imagine that his mind creates visions capable of making one’s hair stand on end. He is easy to like and relate to—he is not a hero, he leaves the investigation to the police (until a certain point), and his reactions to crime scene photos or the maniac’s phone calls reveal his aversion to real violence.

Anthony Franciosa plays Neal brilliantly, imbuing him with a typically American openness and kindness, beneath which lurks an awareness of evil. This becomes most evident in the scene where he first meets the killer—without knowing it yet. However, he senses it, shows interest, and perhaps even a certain kinship, as if Argento is suggesting that, on some level, the one who writes about crimes can recognize the one who brings twisted fantasies to life. However, anyone who thinks that the director is leading somewhere with this self-reflection, that he wants to apologize for his previous work or reveal his true self, would be mistaken. Perhaps that is the case, but he would be no different from the Argento we already know from his earlier films. Fans of his cinema will find in Tenebrae all the hallmarks of his previous gialli—the black-gloved killer through whose eyes we witness the murders, the sexual undertones of the crimes (even more pronounced this time due to, for the first time in Argento’s work, widespread on-screen nudity), a protagonist struggling with his perception and memory, sensing that he is missing a crucial piece of the puzzle, and the artificiality of the film’s world.

This last aspect is emphasized by the modernist backdrop of Rome, the dominance of bright colors—from clothing and architecture to the way Luciano Tovoli’s camera lights everything, eliminating shadows and darkness (could naming the film Tenebrae, meaning “darkness,” be more ironic?), and by making white the perfect canvas for the ever-increasing bloodshed. Argento’s attempt to move away from the baroque aesthetic of his previous films toward a more austere, even cold, formal approach suits the story well. The script, however, is not devoid of unrealistic situations—such as Neal leaving his suitcase in the middle of the airport to answer a phone call—and moments of tragically bad English dubbing, which paradoxically only enhance the artificiality of what we are watching. Perhaps the Deep Red creator provocatively signals his awareness of the accusations against him, making his film about the risk of crossing the line between safe fiction and dangerous reality, only to then double down with a series of elaborate murder sequences (primarily of women), finding true freedom in embracing his sadistic sensibilities. Tenebrae excels in this aspect—while the first murder is relatively tame, suggesting a restrained Argento, the next, a double homicide of a lesbian couple in a Jenga-like house, unleashes the beast within him.

Tovoli’s camera first glides along the building’s walls, peering into windows, observing the residents in a continuous take, all while the main musical theme, composed by Goblin members (credited individually as Pignatelli, Simonetti, Morante, due to rights issues), plays. Yet the music is actually diegetic—a brilliant interplay of fiction and reality—soon drowning out the first murder, when a young woman is slashed with a razor. The staging of this split-second attack is masterful—the killer first cuts a hole in the woman’s shirt, revealing her face, only for it to be drenched in blood moments later. The following murders grow increasingly savage, as the razor is replaced by an axe, yet Argento ensures each one is uniquely memorable. One person who certainly never forgot was Silvio Berlusconi, who in the 1990s, after becoming Italy’s prime minister, sought to cut the hyper-violent death scene of Veronica Lario—his future wife. A case of fiction affecting reality.

The finale of this cruel spectacle forces one to view the entire film as a declaration from a director who will not bow to the critics of his work just because he is fascinated by amorality and nihilism. Is there something more hidden beneath this fascination? The film provides an answer for its murderer in two scenes detached from the main narrative, the first of which—depicting a perverse encounter on a beach between several young men and a woman in red high heels—carries an unsettling power, reinforced by music reminiscent of a music box melody. As always, the key to the mystery lies in the past, but in this particular case, the explanation seems somewhat unnecessary. Without it, Argento’s provocation would be even stronger, though even as it stands, the ending verges on a joke aimed at those who genuinely believe that someone who imagines twisted things must be a dangerous deviant.

On one hand, Tenebrae transcends the boundaries of giallo, while on the other, it finds grounding in a form that, by the early 1980s, was already in decline. This is proven by Argento’s later films from that decade—Phenomena (1985) features a telepathic connection with insects, a mutated maniac, and a razor-wielding chimpanzee, while Opera (1987) pushes its supposedly realistic story and grand guignol convention to the brink of absurdity. Neither horror was helped by its rock soundtrack, which effectively diminished any sense of tension. The later works of the Italian master of macabre were mostly failures, with two exceptions. The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) is widely regarded as visually intriguing yet narratively disappointing, while Sleepless (2001), despite significant stylistic shortcomings, remains a well-told, classic giallo. For this reason, it is difficult not to see Tenebrae as the last great horror film in Argento’s career.