TSPDT

Key Production Country: Italy
Key Genres: Giallo, Psychological Thriller, Thriller, Horror, Mystery, Occult Horror, Whodunit, Crime
Key Collaborators: Franco Fraticelli (Editor), Daria Nicolodi (Leading Character Actress), Salvatore Argento (Producer), Ennio Morricone (Composer), Giuseppe Bassan (Production Designer), Claudio Argento (Producer), Claudio Simonetti (Composer), Franco Ferrini (Screenwriter), Romano Albani (Cinematographer), Luciano Tovoli (Cinematographer), Gabriele Lavia (Leading Character Actor), Fabio Pignatelli (Composer)

"The mechanics of fear, nothing else, are what concerns Argento, and the stories, which seem to make less and less sense as the films become more recent, are strictly of secondary concern in his frighteningly successful efforts to grind an audience into its seat... Argento has proved so good at this modern extension of the Val Lewton philosophy that one regrets the excess of bloodshed in his later films." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)

"As a director, Dario Argento very quickly established the status of a cult film phenomenon, whose works were praised and condemned in equal measure. Since 1970 he has directed 16 films, whose convoluted plotting, excessive visual style and unconventional gender twists have repeatedly upset established definitions of cinematic taste. Argento's films are all marked by an elaborate use of camera work, lighting and musical score. However, any artistic labels applied to these images are complicated by his insistence on using them as backdrops to scenes of sexual violence." - Xavier Mendik (Senses of Cinema, 2003)

"He entered Italian films as a screenwriter, collaborating on several action adventures, including the internationally popular Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). He turned director in the late 60s and over the years has established a reputation as Italy's stylish master of cheap blood and gore." - The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994

"Dario Argento has created a fiercely Italianate aesthetic, radically devoted to the cinema of sensation. His highly influential horror films and mystery thrillers are delirious plunges into the primal, into the darkest corners of human nature and desire. Featuring intensely voyeuristic POV camerawork, lurid close-ups and extended set-pieces leading up to extreme violence, his films earned Argento the nickname “the Italian Hitchcock”. Yet this connoisseur of the big-screen kill readily discarded Hollywood conventions, along with logic and coherence, in favour of aesthete pursuits." - Martyn Conterio (BFI, 2023)

"Taking his cue from Hitchcock, Argento often focuses on the stranger in a strange land who is drawn into - or even implicated - in murderous intrigue. And as in Hitchcock, or Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), Argento's camera casts filmmaker and viewer alike as predatory voyeurs...His films' operatic relish in highly eroticized slaughter and the mutilation of beautiful women, often via brazenly phallic weapons, has led to accusations of misogyny." - Jessica Winter (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)

"Horror-film director and cult favourite credited as influencing most latter-day 'splatter' films." - Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia, 1995

“To experience a film by the Italian horror maestro Dario Argento is to immerse yourself, willingly, in a bad dream. Illogic reigns, swollen colours and sounds swamp the screen and murder lurks round every corner; the heroes as powerless to intervene as they are to resist investigating.” - Matt Glasby (A-Z Great Film Directors, 2015)

"The process of writing and directing drives you to such extremes that it's natural to feel an affinity with insanity. I approach that madness as something dangerous and I'm afraid, but also I want to go to it, to see what's there, to embrace it. I don't know why but I'm drawn." - Dario Argento