A History of Italian Cinema by Peter Bondanella & Federico Pacchioni

Author:Peter Bondanella & Federico Pacchioni [Bondanella, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

The Horror Films of Dario Argento: The “Trilogy of the Three Mothers”

The Gothic period of Italian horror produced some memorable works that became cult favorites all over the world. The Italian horror film seemed to have run out of steam until Dario Argento (1940–) turned from producing films in the thriller or giallo tradition (characterized by graphic violence, serial murderers, and psychoanalytical plots that almost always remained in the realm of everyday reality; see Chapter 12) to films that treated the supernatural or the occult—the horror genre proper. Because Argento’s gialli were so graphic in their depiction of violence (at least for audiences at the time), discussion of them often blurred this distinction. In fact, even though Argento is known primarily as a horror film director, he has actually made more thrillers. His most important horror films include a trilogy about witches that spans three decades: Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980), and The Mother of Tears, a.k.a. The Third Mother (La terza madre, 2007). Argento also became an important mentor and sometime producer to young horror directors, thus making significant contributions to the genre by producing a number of important horror films. Among these are Demons (Démoni, 1985) and Demons 2 (Démoni 2: L’incubo ritorna, 1986), by Mario Bava’s son Lamberto (1944–), and The Church (La chiesa, 1989) and The Sect (La setta, 1991), by Michele Soavi (1957–), who also shot an interesting documentary on his mentor, Dario Argento’s World of Horror (Il mondo dell’orrore di Dario Argento, 1985). Argento also produced (and co-wrote) The Wax Mask (M.D.C.: Maschera di cera, 1997), the directorial debut of the Italian special-effects maestro Sergio Stivaletti (1957–). Argento’s most ambitious and most important task as a producer was to support the making of the American horror film director George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (Zombi, a.k.a. Zombies, 1978), a seminal work that, along with Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), launched the worldwide craze for zombie-themed horror films. He and Romero also collaborated to produce Two Evil Eyes (Due occhi diabolici, 1990), a two-segment tribute to the tales of Edgar Allan Poe comprising Argento’s The Black Cat (Il gatto nero) and Romero’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.5 Recently Argento contributed two hour-long episodes—“Jenifer” (2005) and “Pelts” (2006)—to Masters of Horror, an American cable TV (Showtime) series showcasing horror film directors. Argento’s reputation remains quite high among such directors in Hollywood, including John Landis (who gave Argento a cameo role as a paramedic in Innocent Blood [1992], an amusing story of a French vampire preying on Italian American gangsters in Pittsburgh), Joe Dante, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and Quentin Tarantino. For many of Argento’s fans, Suspiria, the first part of the “trilogy of the Three Mothers,” represents his greatest horror film. The Three Mothers in question derive from the English Romantic writer Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis (1845), where they are companions for the ancient Roman goddess of childbirth, Levana: Mater Suspiriorum (the Mother of Sighs, the subject of Suspiria),

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