So Sweet, So Dead / Rivelazioni di un maniaco sessuale al capo della squadra mobile

A maniac is murdering the unfaithful wives of prominent citizens. He leaves incriminating photographs of the women and their lovers, but removes the men's faces to protect / conceal their identities.


Being naked playing dead - the maniac's first victim

Inspector Capuano (a dubbed Farley Granger) is assigned the case. While pathologist Professor Casali (Chris Avram) offers useful information as to the killer's modus operandi and motivation, Capuano finds his investigations otherwise stalled at every turn by his superiors' insistence that he focus on the usual suspects and take a softly-softly approach in dealing with the lovers and husbands of the victims.




Prof. Casali offers his expert opinion as to the killer's method and motive; note the mirror / distortion

As the killer's depredations continue a number of suspects come to the fore, including a morgue attendant with an unhealthy enthusiasm for his work (Luciano Rossi) and lawyer Paolo Santangeli (Silvano Tranquilli).


A parade of the usual suspects; Capuano knows he is looking in the wrong place with them


“No woman is going to marry a man who works at my job, you see. Sooner or later they find out about the corpses, and it's finished before I can get started. ”


“Poor Serena. She may have lacked discretion but she certainly didn't warrant her awful end.”


“Why should we react like you? He only kills unfaithful wives.”

Though losing its way somewhat as it enters its second act, as Capuano's investigation is temporarily sidelined in favour of that undertaken by Santangeli's teenage daughter Bettina, this 1972 giallo redeems itself somewhat with a memorable final act; unfortunately this also makes it difficult to review without spoiling it for the first-time viewer.

What can be said is that the film as a whole operates at the sleazier and trashier end of the giallo spectrum, with the majority of the female roles, including those of Susan Scott and Femi Benussi, pretty much of the thankless get-naked-then-die variety.

Whether the film is actually misogynistic as often claimed is however debatable. I would tend to argue that, like many of its type, it is really more misanthropic, declining to present anyone in a particularly flattering light.

True, this is unlikely to satisfy anyone who feels that the female is more moral than the male, or that by merely reporting on the existence of a sexual double standard but not overtly critiquing it the film-makers were contributing in their own small way to its continuance.

Here, we have to remember that the social / cultural norm in Italy circa 1972 would have been that a man in a prominent position should have both wife and a mistress, and that if he did not then there was quite possibly something wrong with or suspect about him. The reverse of this, meanwhile, was that the the man could not admit to being cuckolded by his wife being another man's mistress.

Though the most obvious example of this within the film is Susan Scott's husband, a failed suicide who succeeded only in crippling himself instead – a symbolic castration if ever there was one – it also seems worth considering whether the fact that the Capuano's marriage is without issue says something about the Inspector's masculine potency – or lack thereof – and / or if his apparent fidelity marks him out as someone too idealistic for his chosen career. Indeed, by extension, we might question whether he is thus being positioned as someone who has more in common with the moralistic avenger than he might care to acknowledge.












Tellingly both the maniac and the police use the same technologies of surveillance

Besides the killer's archetypal garb, a number of other motifs provide points of interest for students of the genre. At one point, for example, the wives / mistresses of some of the local notables discuss the case at their regular visit to the beauty salon, reminding one of the role played by the same location in The Black Belly of the Tarantula and indeed suggesting an alternate blackmail based version of the same “forbidden photos” type scenario. At another Capuano has one of the victims' funerals caught on camera in the hope that catching some detail that will break the case open. Unlike the ill-educated and naïve populace of the southern village in Don't Torture a Duckling, however, these northern urban sophisticates are too clever – or blasé – to reveal themselves in this way.

Roberto Bianchi Montero's direction is the kind of hit-and-miss thing that might be expected from a 60-something film-maker whose undistinguished career had seen him dabble in a succession of filone over the decades, his suspenseful and stylish handling of a murder on the train negated by the laughably inappropriate use of slow-motion in the murder on the beach.


The black-clad moral avenger


The film's titles foreground archetypal giallo imagery and technology – the black gloves, the knife, the telephone etc.

Giorgio Gaslini's score comprises two repeated cues, one playing over the main titles and emotional high points like the funeral aforementioned funeral sequence thereafter and the other accompanying the killer's appearances. While the latter cue uses something similar to the “make a jazz noise here” approach of many of Morricone's contributions to the genre, it arguably functions in a fundamentally different way otherwise, more a leitmotif and less a tension-raising device, precisely because the pervading sense of cynicism prevents us from really caring about the next beautiful woman about to die.

All told, So Sweet, So Dead is a dubiously entertaining giallo whose view of the world might be summed up as through urine-coloured lenses at a half-empty J&B glass.

Die Schlangengrube und das Pende / Castle of the Walking Dead

The obvious question that you might have is why discuss a German horror film in a blog whose masthead proclaims it to be “about the Italian giallo and director Dario Argento in particular". While I am unsure if I can provide a completely satisfactory justification, here are a few points.

First, a case might be made for the film's director, Harald Reinl, as perhaps one of the most important yet unaknowledged figures in Eurocult as a whole, who made important contributions to the western and krimi in particular and, through them, helped lay many of the foundations for the likes of Leone's spaghetti westerns and Argento's gialli.

Second, while Argento has often proclaimed himself more influenced by Lang than Hitchcock, Reinl made his indebtedness to his countryman explicit throughout his ouevre which includes two Dr Mabuse films and a two-part version of Die Nibelungen.

Third, Castle of the Walking Dead itself is heavily indebted to Italian gothics such as Bava's Black Sunday, Ferroni's Mill of the Stone Women and Margheriti's Castle of Blood.

In sum, then, we have a film-maker and a film that intersects with our area of interest in a number of ways.


A storyteller's naive, yet macabre representation of Regula's demise


Mont Elise examines a Bosch-inspired mural

In truth, however, the most important thing is that Die Schlangengrube und das Pende - i.e. the Pit and the Pendulum, though the faithfulness of the film as a Poe adaptation is signalled by the way the English version here describes the short story as a novel - is simply too good a film to ignore, its many virtues coming through even on the Aikman Archive's quite frankly horrible looking Castle of the Walking Dead DVD.

The film opens with an overt nod to Black Sunday as Christopher Lee's Count Regula has a spiked metal mask placed on his face and is sentenced to be quartered for his heinous crimes, too horrible to really describe (at least in this version). He does not seem unduly concerned, however, and instead proclaims that he will have his revenge on the Von Marienberg and Brabant families.

Thirty-five years later Lex Barker's square-jawed hero Roger Mont Elise arrives in town, seeking the whereabouts of Regula's castle and receiving a distinct lack of assistance from the locals in time-honoured gothic horror tradition.

Nevertheless, Roger and a bluff priest manage to determine the location of the castle and even get a coachman, however reluctantly, to take them there.

As the journey continues they take on board Lilian von Brabant (Karin Dor) and her maid Babette, whose own coach has broken down, before things take a distinct turn for the grotesque, with the trees of the mist-enshrouded forest being liberally festooned with human bodies and body parts.

Neither this nor the terrified coachman's demise is sufficient to faze Mont Elise, however, leading him, von Brabant and company directly into the awaiting Regula's trap. For – quelle surprise – Mont Elise is actually a von Marienberg and Brabant the 13th virgin the undead Regula needs to complete the ritual interrupted 35 years before...








A selection of images justifying The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism and Pit and the Pendulum AKAs for the film

While the film is a collection of cliché moments and the top-billed Lee largely confined to the opening and closing moments, the production design and visuals are truly astonishing even here, making one wonder what it must have been like on the big screen. Interested parties are advised to seek out the new German DVD for an approximation; those who already have the likes of Aikman Archive's version will know that it is a film that warrants a double-dip.

The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle

Lucius Clark has just learned that he is to be made a peer of the realm for services to Queen and Country. His joy is short lived, however, as a masked avenger visits and informs that his life will be made into a living hell until he divulges the whereabouts of some stolen diamonds.

With the avenger murdering one of Clark's servants – and branding a letter M into the dead man's forehead – Scotland Yard, in the form of Inspector Jeff Mitchell and his sidekick Watson (sic), are called in to investigate, their arrival coinciding with those of Lucius's journalist niece, Claridge (Karin Dor), and a rival reporter.

To further complicate things Claridge is about to turn 21, and thereby come into a sizeable inheritance. If Lucius cannot present her with the money then, according to her lawyer Tromby – a sinister figure who has plans of his own – the peerage will be forfeit.

Unfortunately for Lucius when he attempts to send one of his servants to sell some freshly cut gems – butler Anthony is actually a gem-cutter; albeit one whose obsessive desire to prevent his precious masterpieces leaving led to jail and disrepute – to his contacts at the Old Scavenger Inn, the strangler is waiting and decapitates the man, then sends his head back in a hatbox.

The only clue to his identity is that he is missing a finger, but this is not much help when just about everyone except the nine-fingered Lucius habitually wears gloves...




The M allows the seemingly Lang-obsessed Reinl the opportunity to pay hommage to his master, Fritz Lang; Reinl also directed a couple of Dr Mabuse films and a two-part version of Der Nibelungen.

Directed by frequent series contributor Harald Reinl from Bryan Edgar rather than Edgar Wallace source material, this 1963 krimi is slightly disadvantaged by the general absence of familiar genre faces – only Reinl's then-wife Dor is really immediately recognisable – but nevertheless otherwise delivers the goods with that reassuring combination of convoluted mystery, quirky characterisation; askew view of London, England; stalwart Scotland Yard investigator; damsel in distress; femme fatale; plentiful red herrings; an old dark house replete with secret passages and hidden chambers, and so on.






Black glove action

Though there is an emphasis on black gloves throughout, their function is a narrative rather than fetish one – whodunnit; who is the nine-fingered man? This in turn indicates a key difference between the typical krimi and giallo, with psychoanalytic approaches fundamentally less appropriate here, where to decapitate is just a convenient murder method, with the strangler also happily using a gun, a knife and even a diamond cutter where convenient, and a cigar – a box of which are used by Lucius in his attempt to transfer the stones – really just a cigar.

This is not, however, to discount that the preponderance of foundlings and illegitimate children and general concern with origins in Edgar Wallace's oeuvre as a whole could be unconsciously related to his own biographical circumstances, nor that in imitating his father's style Bryan Edgar Wallace also perhaps mimicked these subtexts.






The pragmatic Strangler really uses whatever is to hand, including some proto menacing with power tools

Oskar Sala's score is more experimental than those provided by regular krimi composers Martin Bottcher and Peter Thomas elsewhere, foregoing jazzy themes in favour of the weird tonalities of his mixture-trautonium, a synthesiser-type electronic instrument. As with Hitchcock's The Birds, on which Sala also worked around the same time, it is questionable how far one would want to listen to it in its own right but in the context of the film it certainly adds an extra unnerving edge to the proceedings.

The US DVD from Alpha is difficult to recommend, on account of a a washed out, pan and scan and probably cut presentation, evidently prepared for the American market by the reference to a “station wagon” rather than the more British / English term “estate car”.

Spasmo

While out walking Christian Bauman (Robert Hoffman) and his girlfriend Xenia notice a woman's body lying on the beach. Going to investigate, they find the woman, Barbara (Suzy Kendall), had merely passed out from the heat. Then, when their backs are turned she disappears, leaving behind a thermos flask with the word 'Tucania' on it.

Later that evening the couple spot a boat of this name and go on board. Christian finds Barbara again and, with Xenia going home with a (perhaps too convenient) headache, they get talking and wind up (again with remarkable ease) back at her place.








A multitude of broken doll imagery from the start of Spasmo; Hans Bellmer or Trevor Brown might like this film.

Before she will make love to him, Barbara wants Christian to shave. “I'm very suspicious of men with beards,” she explains. While he is doing so a gunman – who we had earlier seen being telephoned about Tucania – sneaks in through the bathroom window and threatens Christian with his silenced pistol. When the gunman is momentarily distracted, Christian manages to disarm him and, in the ensuring struggle, accidentally shoots him, dead.

Barbara suggests that they should flee. Just as they are about to drive off, Barbara's over-possessive friend Alex, from the boat, shows up, announcing that they have something important to talk about. Even more curiously, he seems to know that something is up:

“For God sake Christian what's wrong? You look like you just murdered someone.”
“What the hell do you mean.”
“Exactly what I said”

This makes Christian realise that he has left his distinctive – i.e. incriminating – medallion in Barbara's bathroom and dashes off to retrieve it, only to discover that the body has vanished...
What the hell is going on and what does it have to do with all these mutilated mannequins that are turning up all over the coast...




Some of the compositions re-iterate the theme of being in a world of representations and constructions.

To say much more would likely spoil your enjoyment of this deliberately convoluted and confusing 1974 giallo from Umberto Lenzi.

The key to appreciating it seems to be to recognise it is less “beyond Psycho” as one advertising line claimed as “beyond Vertigo” or “the forerunner to The Game,” as we gradually come to realise – or think we realise – the nature of the “family plot” against Christian who happens to be the major stockholder in his brother Fritz's plastics company; it will perhaps suffice to add that it is all about an inheritance. (As an aside, one wonders if the presence of Caroll Baker in Fincher's film signals his awareness of Lenzi's gialli more generally. Then again, given that Lenzi's self-congratulatory tone in his DVD interviews suggest he would never tire of mentioning this, it is perhaps better that we do not know.)


A blade (or two) in the dark

Understood in this context, as part of the game Lenzi and company are playing, Spasmo's plot contrivances and portentous dialogue emerge as positive strengths. (“You know what? You can keep your lovely beard and leave. It's really a very silly game.” “No in fact it's a beautiful game and I'm not going to leave, even if you kill me.”) One also feels, however, that it is unfortunate that the filmmakers tried to conceal things from us to the extent that they did and that the balance between shock and suspense is weighted too far towards the former, making it harder to really engage with Christian and his predicament (or, for that matter, that of the head of the conspiracy against him).




Stuffed Psycho-style birds are another recurring visual motif in Spasmo

Something similar pertains with regard to Lenzi's direction, where the incessant zooms and close-ups of potentially meaningful details – or, in the case of the dolls, retrospectively meaningful details – serves to overwhelm and tire the viewer when a more subtle and restrained mise-en-scene, allowing for a growing sense of unease / paranoia / horror, would ultimately have been more effective.

This said, the film does look exceptionally good, with nice use of subjective camera; convincing night work contrasted with brightly lit daytime scenes; and even the odd moment of visual poetry, as when Lenzi racks focus from abstracted red shapes against the background of the sea to reveal they are roses. (A moment crucially that is also actually integrated into the whole, in that the key detail within the ensuing sequence revolves around the gardener's scissors as blade / phallic symbol / trigger to memory.)








A rose by any other name; note that the gardening scissors are the same as the bloodied ones above

While not wanting to read too much in, it is this visual that also seems to encapsulates and reiterate the film's failings. What we have with the shift from “red” to “rose” is a situation where there is need for background / foreground contrast to make proper sense of things. But within the film as a whole there is too much that is undifferentiated and pitched at the same level, making it difficult to see the wood for the trees / differentiate signal from noise.

Part of what makes the film worthwhile is thus the impression that Lenzi was actually trying to do too much for a change, not just going through the motions. One suspects the problem is that, with a relative paucity of his stock-in-trade – violence and action – he was concerned whether the story would be enough to hold audience attention and over-compensated in trying to inject more style and visual impact in than was required. A comparison with Fulci's gialli might be instructive in this regard, as he shows an awareness of when to prioritise narrative over visuals and vice-versa and, more importantly, how to bring them together; one can only wonder at what he might have made of Spasmo had he gotten to direct it as originally planned.

The nature of the work obviously makes it difficult to evaluate the performances in conventional terms, as with the exception of Christian – with Hoffmann's role here bearing obvious comparison to the one he played in the La Bambola episode of Door into Darkness – everyone is already playing a role with greater or lesser degrees of conviction and competence and, in a sense, already performing as “the femme fatale”, “the gunman” and so on.

A key moment in this regard, and one which allows for a positive evaluation of Kendall's performances as Barbara, based on her false then true feelings for Christian, is the point when she tells him that she is “not a strong woman” then repeats this same line to herself and the audience after he has left; despite the difficulties we have in figuring our her character at this point, it works at the emotional level and suggests that she was not just a pretty face.

The one aspect of Spasmo that needs no qualification and can be recommended unreservedly its the Ennio Morricone score, in which gentle yet always uneasy listening themes predominate.

Some thoughts on the first two sequences of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

The impact of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage's gallery sequence is such that commentators often begin their discussion of the film at this point. I would argue, however, that the general excessiveness of the film – an excess which, as we will see, takes a different form from that of the director's later films – means that the two sequences which precede it do more than just introduce the two main characters, the killer and amateur detective Sam Dalmas.

In the first sequence, which plays over the film's credits, the killer prepares for the murder of 'his' next victim, who is also seen being stalked and photographed, neatly signifying the camera as assaultive weapon. The sequence introduces Argento's characteristic emphasis on textures through the shine of the black gloves and raincoat, photographs and knives; a shine that also, by happy coincidence, further foregrounds the director's introduction of a heightened fetish element to the giallo film killer's accoutrements in relation to Freud's famous formulation of fetishism in relation to the “Glanz auf der Nase” or “shine on the nose”. Nevertheless, although agreeing with Needham's assertion that the film sees what was primarily a fashionable disguise in Blood and Black Lace transform into something more replete with fetishistic meanings here, one also feels that his analysis perhaps neglects to consider the longer history of black gloves and raincoats in films such as M, where they are not particularly fetishised, and Death Laid an Egg, where they are.


Le mani sulla citta - the black gloves as normal attire in Fritz Lang's M and within the krimi tradition


The black glove and blade fetish combination in Death Laid an Egg (1967) prefiguring The Bird with the Crystal Plumage by three years.

In other regards, however, this sequence is less successful. Whilst the unclear chronology, superimposition of the camera frame, freeze-frames and snapshots of the victim in black-and-white certainly serve to alert audiences to the fact that they are watching an explicit re-presentation of the world; to Argento's strategies; and the idea(l) of becoming alert, active participants, their diegetic meaning remains unclear. Why should the killer chose these particular victims and be compelled to document things in this manner, even going to the lengths of typing away whilst wearing the gloves.

While we could invoke a psychoanalytical rationale, such as the killer's attempting to master their original traumatic event through ritual and repetition, the remainder of the film does not really seem to support this. Though the killer's fourth victim / the film's second is photographed before her murder, the fifth / third is not. One possibility here is that the last victim is murdered by the killer's protector-accomplice, but this is not made explicit. Likewise, no reference is made to the killer's documenting their crimes in the analysts summing up of the case at the end of the film.


Photography or cinematography?


The shine of the photograph and the gloves; the killer touching the surface of the image


The fetishisation of the murder weapon

The obvious questions that then emerge is why they are there and why the sequence does not just show the killer's preparations, then the murder. (Indeed, the minimal representation of the murder here, the screen momentarily going black whilst a single scream rings out, also testifies that Argento's rarely recognised facility for restraint, most evident in his more recent films, was present from the outset.) One answer is that by foregrounding the constructedness of the image in this way Argento was better able to allude to one of his key influences, Antonioni, and specifically Blow-Up.

As such, these images seem to open themselves up to analysis in terms of the Barthesian framework of excess meaning proposed by McDonagh. They are excessive signifiers, or signifiers of excess, that only really make sense in relation to their own systems of meaning. Crucially in this case, this sense is also fundamentally external to the film itself, intertextual rather than intratextual.

This, in turn, is something that distinguishes the intermittent and less controlled excesses of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which McDonagh downplays, from the more consistent and disciplined excesses of Deep Red, as Argento's most thorough-going working through of the problematic established by Blow-Up, which she emphasises.

In Deep Red the excesses are more multi-layered and thereby better able to meet the requirements of both “readerly” / popular cinema and “writerly” / art cinema approaches, providing a combination of textual, subtextual and intertextual meanings and reference points. Thus, to give one example, the bizarre puppet with which the killer torments and distracts one of her victims functions at the readerly or more surface level to amplify the shock moment and at the writerly or deeper as something associated with – for instance – a characteristic Surrealist motif and, by extension, notions of “convulsive beauty”.

Here, however, what we seem to have is a would-be “writerly” fragment that likely comes across as too self-conscious and mannered to really work in art cinema terms and as too confusing and nonsensical in those of popular cinema. (Though, as Sobchack's deconstruction of the term confusion to emphasise the co-mingling and co-presence of the senses shows, sometimes it is not necessarily a bad thing; the point here is that we seem to have a confusion that hinders rather than helps our understanding and appreciation of the film.)

What has rarely been recognised, however, is thus the importance of certain key sequences in The Bird's much-maligned follow-up, The Cat o' Nine Tails in offering a more successful initial interrogation of Blow-Up's (rhetoric of the) image. Part of the reason for this, one suspects, is that this is also achieved at the cost of being integrated more into film itself, with a concomitant diminution of the apparent scope for the critic to interpret. Put another way, Cat o' Nine Tails is a more classical and readerly film than The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (or, for that matter, the little-seen Four Flies on Grey Velvet).

In Cat o' Nine Tails it is actually a Blow-Up style professional photographer who captures the vital detail that reveals an apparent accident to be a deliberate act of murder. Waiting at the train station to record the arrival of a starlet – a sequence that itself perhaps allowing for a reference to Antonioni's L'Avventura and La Notte alongside the paparazzi of Fellini's La Dolce vita – the photographer happens to catch the hand of the assassin pushing the would-be blackmailer in front of the oncoming train.


The moment of death is captured by the photographer


But after a brief look at the body he remembers why they are there: “Hey, we've forgotten about the starlet – come on.”




Though the death continues to affect him: “That's right – smile, smile. A man is dead!”

Reflecting his inability to truly see – i.e. to see within the framework of the filmmakers' emerging sense logic – he does not, however, notice this until prompted to interrogate the photograph more closely by one of the film's protagonists. It is Arno, the blind ex-newspaperman, the one who sees, who is a seer, that asks the pertinent question of whether the reproduction of the blackmailer's fall (itself another recurring theme in Argento's cinema, as Thoret emphasises) reproduced in the newspaper was perhaps “cropped,” emphasising / framing it at the expense of excluding / deframing the remainder.


The photograph as it appears in the newspaper


And the detail that, working within the framework of an unfortunate accident, no-one sees

The second sequence in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is less excessive – though not totally lacking in this regard – but also more successful. Following the cut to a black screen and scream, the first thing we see is an announcement of the mysterious murder of a young woman, the third in a month. As the camera moves out, we then get more of the detail, that this is an advertising hoarding for Paesa Sera (the newspaper on which Argento himself worked) and that the other headline is a train crash in England, with many dead. Neither event, however, particularly concerns Professor Carlo Dover as he buys a newspaper from the kiosk and scans though its pages – “ah, the same old rubbish” – nor his friend Sam Dalmas – “come on Carlo, or we'll be late.” This indifference will of course prove deeply ironic in the light of the events about to unfold.




From the specific to the general; note the gialli paperbacks on the edicola

The way the scene is constructed, opening on a detail and then moving out to give the wider context, rather than using the more classical approach of providing an establishing shot, then breaking the scene up into smaller details once spatial relationships have been identified, soon emerges as one of the characteristic features of the film. This also, of course, gives it a distinctly modernist edge that distinguishes it from the likes of Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace, if not Questi's lesser-known, more experimental Death Laid an Egg.

As the two men walk along, we learn that Sam is an American ex-patriot writer, who came to Italy in search of inspiration. It has not emerged, however, and he has instead found himself writing a manual on the preservation of rare birds for as a work for hire. Besides introducing the common giallo theme of the foreigner or outsider and representing the first in a long line of Argento's creative figures, Sam's existential situation, his desire to be doing something authentic and meaningful, seems to parallel that of Argento himself at this point in his career. While quickly establishing himself as an in-demand screenwriter and script doctor after Once Upon a Time in the West, Argento had also rapidly become frustrated at the way his work was often treated by directors, his ideas failing to emerge onto the screen in the manner as he had hoped. Indeed, in large part it was his sense that the directors proposed to helm The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, such as Terence Young and Duccio Tessari, would be unable to appreciate its novelties – more, to repeat, in form than content – that led to his decision to direct the film himself. Perhaps surprisingly, however, he has indicated that he did so without any real thoughts of pursuing a career as a director rather than writer.




Portrait of the artist as a young man

Carlo: “Don't you want a copy?” (of the book)
Sam: “Who needs it – I have this!” (the cheque)

What also seems curious here is co-producer Goffredo Lombardo's sense that he had made a mistake in agreeing to part-finance the film with Salvatore and Dario Argento's own company, SeDA Spettacoli. For while one could understand the film's rushes not “making sense” in classical cinema terms by virtue of the more modernist approach Argento was taking, the extensive storyboarding he has indicated he undertook in developing the film might suggest that Lombardo ought to have known what the new director was aiming for.

Narrative / Spectacle

In most film theory, based as it is on the example of Hollywood cinema, the assumption is that there is a narrative which is periodically interrupted by spectacle.

The question is whether this paradigm really fits Italian genre / filone cinema, where it often seems more the narrative that is interrupting the spectacle.

Perhaps it is a distinction that goes back to historical debates in the Italian industry over the labels of film and spettacoli - i.e. spectacle / show.

And perhaps Salvatore and Dario Argento naming their production company SeDA Spetaccoli and not SeDA Film or Cinema thereby tells us more than we might think and further indicates the tensions operating in his work under its auspices.