‘I can feel death in this room…’
Giallo is a cinematic style developed in Italy in the 60s and 70s. Introduced by Mario Bava and then popularised by Dario Argento, Giallo is characterised by black gloved killers, a murder mystery and a high body count. Argento himself produced the genre’s seminal masterpiece Suspiria in 1977, but two years previously he made something just as bizarre as that film, if not quite as effective. Welcome to Deep Red…
When a young woman is brutally murdered, pianist and amateur sleuth Marcus Daly (David Hemmings) becomes obsessed with trying to solve the case. This is essentially an Agatha Christie style whodunit but with much more violence and bizarre symbolism.
Whereas Argento mastered the use of bold colour palettes and melodramatic acting with Suspiria, Deep Red is much more difficult to grasp tonally. It doesn’t help that Goblin’s score, whilst undoubtedly musically proficient, is a bit all over the place too. The fact that, as with all Giallo films, all the dialogue is dubbed after the fact only adds to the sense of dream-like reality. The problem here is that the characters are too thin and the actors too wooden to really make us care about the plot. Visually, Deep Red is astonishing, with many of its images still resonating throughout the horror genre now (see the use of creepy children’s drawings and the repeated scary doll motif for proof). By the time the Scooby Doo denouement rolls around I had mostly stopped caring who the killer was and found myself instead basking in the admittedly wonderful death sequences.
Deep Red has gone down as a classic of the Giallo genre, but it certainly isn’t Argento’s masterpiece. Nothing will ever top Suspiria on that score.