13 FOR HALLOWEEN #1: Tenebrae

“When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains – however improbable – must be the truth.” This quote, from Conan Doyle’s ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, is central to the construction of Dario Argento’s fiendishly brilliant ‘Tenebrae’.

Having scored a big hit first time out with his debut ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ – and followed it up in fine style with ‘Cat o’ Nine Tails’ and ‘Four Flies on Grey Velvet’ – Argento pretty much defined the giallo with the magisterial masterclass in mind-fuckery ‘Deep Red’. That was in 1975, when the genre was peaking. Seven years later, the giallo was on the wane but that didn’t stop Argento delivering his second flat-out classic of the form.

‘Tenebrae’ follows American thriller writer Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) as he embarks on a publicity tour in Rome. The whirlwind round of interviews and TV appearances has been organised by his European agent, an expatriate fellow American by the name of Bullmer (John Saxon). Secretary Anne (Daria Nicolodi) and Bullmer’s protégé Gianni (Christian Borromeo) round out his entourage.

He’s barely arrived when detectives Germani (Giuliano Gemma) and Altieri (Carola Stagnaro) turn up in his hotel room wondering if he knows anything about Elsa Manni (Ania Pieroni) – a kleptomaniac first glimpsed swiping a paperback copy of Neal’s latest novel – who has recently been murdered by a black-gloved killer wielding a straight-razor. Neal, understandably since this is his first time in Rome, had never met the lady. Nor can he explain why the killer had stuffed torn out pages of his novel in her mouth.

Neal soon receives an anonymous letter in cut-out newsprint quoting a line from his book. Germani warns him to be vigilant and report any further threatening correspondence. Further killings occur, including a savage attack on loose-living same sex couple Marion (Mirella Banti) and Tilda (Mirella d’Angelo). Anne thinks she spots Neal’s possessive and mentally unstable ex-wife Jane (Veronica Laria) driving past the hotel. Gianni alternates between eagerly assisting Neal (his idol) in his own unofficial investigating and lusting after hotelier’s daughter Maria (Lara Wendel). Maria, meanwhile, endures a series of escalating misfortunes after an argument with her actual boyfriend and the ministrations of a psychotic dog end with her seeking refuge in the house of a murderer.

‘Tenebrae’ befuddles, bamboozles and wrong-foots the viewer from the outset. It boasts more red herrings than a Communist fishery. Even the title misleads. “Tenebrae” is Latin for “shadows” or “darkness” (as well as being the title of Peter Neal’s latest opus), yet much of the film is shot in a cold hard light that allows neither for shadows nor places to hide. Indeed, an image of something very briefly hidden and then shockingly revealed is crucial to the bravura denouement.

The protagonist is challenged as much as the audience, mainly by TV pundit Christiano Berti (John Steiner), a man whose antagony towards Neal’s fiction seems to border on the obsessive. But even before Berti gets in on the act, the first reporter who interviews Neal – someone he is acquainted with and considers sympathetic – suddenly challenges him: “ ‘Tenebrae’ is a sexist novel. Why do you despise women so much? Women as victims, ciphers. The male heroes with their hairy macho bullshit!” Absent the macho male heroes – most of Argento’s male leads, from the edgy Sam Dalmas in ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ to the outright nervous Marc Daly in ‘Deep Red’ are more petrified than pro-active – and the accusation is one that has often been made against Argento himself, particularly in light of this controversy-baiting statement of principles: “I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man. I certainly don`t have to justify myself to anyone about this. I don`t care what anyone thinks or reads into it. I have often had journalists walk out of interviews when I say what I feel about this subject.” And indeed Argento gives us a world-class selection of women-in-peril in ‘Tenebrae’ …

… as well as creating an air of sexual ambiguity by casting transsexual Eva Robins as a seductive and vengeful femme fatale in an enigmatic and fetishistic flashback whose import is not revealed in full until very late in the day.

Pay close attention to his/her red shoes. There’s a learned paper to be written on the parallels between Dario Argento and Powell & Pressburger. The touchstones are more apparent than you might think.

As with all gialli, style is everything; and ‘Tenebrae’ creates an architectural style that is dislocated, borderline surreal and utterly unique. Although it’s established from the opening scenes that the film takes place in Rome, Argento creates a Rome that is as far removed from the Eternal City of Fellini and myriad other filmmakers, a Rome that repudiates landmarks and tourist hives. A city of stark avenues, unexpected open spaces and sprawling post-modern buildings in which Argento creates some of his most memorable set-pieces, from Elsa’s flight from a rapacious vagrant only to find herself in greater danger the moment she think she’s found sanctuary to a three-minute build-up to a murder committed in plain sight that is worthy of Hitchcock. The stand-out, though, is the justly celebrated two-and-a-half minute Louma crane sequence in which the camera prowls the exterior of Marion and Tilda’s house, occasionally probing through the windows to track their movements. Scored to the thunderous and jarring music of Goblin, it’s a symphony of voyeurism and subjective excess. It exists purely for the technical achievement of pulling it off in the first place, it breaks all the rules of perspective and POV, and it’s absolutely gorgeously fucking brilliant.

The script slyly works in references to several of Argento’s previous works, including a fake death à la ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ and a conceptual homage to ‘Deep Red’ that I’d like to discuss at great length but won’t because I’d really hate to ruin the film for anyone reading this who has yet to have the experience of discovering ‘Tenebrae’ for themselves. All I’ll say is that where ‘Deep Red’ ends with a bloody but reflective shot, the implications of which are left to worm their way into the viewer’s subconscious, ‘Tenebrae’ gives us a traumatized survivor screaming and screaming and screaming even as the screen fades to black and Goblin tries to drown them out.

MASTERS OF HORROR: Jenifer and Pelts

Continuing the Dario Argento love from yesterday’s entry, I thought I’d take a look at the two episodes he directed for ‘Masters of Horror’.

‘Jenifer’ – a title I find strangely unfinished in its only-one-“n” spelling – was the fourth episode of season one. Adapted from a Bruce Jones short story by Steven Weber, who also plays the lead role, the basic set-up is that world-weary cop Frank Spivey (Weber) shoots a cleaver-wielding and crazy-looking guy who is about to despatch a facially disfigured young woman – the Jenifer (Carrie Anne Fleming) of the title. He has a hard time adjusting to the aftermath of his first fatal shooting and quarrels with his well-meaning wife and his moody teenage son. Distraught that Jenifer has been taken to a psychiatric institution, he insists on moving her into the family home, a decision that precipitates his family’s acrimonious departure.

As well as being disfigured, Jenifer is incapable of speech. At best, she whimpers or lets loose a throaty growl. She expresses herself emotionally with the pitiful nuzzling and licking of a pet; and physically with the sexual urges of a nymphomaniac who’s been mainlining oysters, ginseng and Spanish fly. A mutually dependent relationship develops between Frank and Jenifer, but when he discovers the true extent of her animalism, he installs her in a rickety cabin in the woods in the misguided hope that no further unpleasantness will ensue.

Did I say “unpleasantness”? The make-up department make a repulsively good job of turning Fleming (a woman who doesn’t even reside in the same hemisphere as the ugly stick – do a Google image search if you need proof) into a grotesque she-beast … albeit a grotesque she-beast with the body of a centrefold. Argento plays up the psycho-sexual elements to the hilt, as well as emphasizing the “beast in man” (or in this case woman) subtext with maximum visceral impact. Before the halfway mark, there’s a set-your-teeth-on-edge sex scene that takes its pointers from the crude old adage about not looking at the hearth when you’re poking the fire, followed by a bit of woman-on-feline violence that gives a whole new meaning to “cat food”.

The second half of ‘Jenifer’, with Frank off the force, sans family and relocated to the aforementioned cabin, sets up a potential dynamic when our increasingly troubled hero meets sympathetic local shop owner Rose (Cynthia Garris), only to resolve with an ironic circularity. While the means by which Argento and Weber arrive at the payoff might confound expectations, the twist itself is as easy to see coming as an ocean liner on a duckpond, establishing ‘Jenifer’ as an x-rated episode of ‘Tales of the Unexpected’, but no less perversely entertaining for all that.

‘Pelts’ – episode six of season two – seems, in its first quarter of an hour, to be setting up two stories: that of Jeb Jameson (John Saxon) inculcating his son Larry (Michael Suchanek) into the ancient and ignoble art of laying traps for small unsuspecting furry animals whose pelts are a saleable commodity; and that of Jake Feldman (Meat Loaf), an ill-tempered furrier who bullies the ethnic workers in his sweatshop and lusts after exotic dancer Shanna (Ellen Ewusie), the star attraction at a strip-joint he frequents.

Then Argento curtails the Jeb/Larry subplot in notably gory fashion and shifts the focus to Jake. If ‘Jenifer’ is an x-rated ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ episode, then ‘Pelts’ is an x-rated M.R. James tale. As James made the artefacts which his unerringly academic protagonists came into contact with the receptacles of some nameless and inexplicable evil, so ‘Pelts’ gives us raccoon fur as a purveyor of something unnatural, unholy and more or less unexplained (there’s a scene which hints at the provenance of the ground the raccoons inhabit, but for the most part Argento is content to leave it to the audience’s imagination; this is one of the smartest things a horror writer or director can do), the difference being that M.R. James would never have had one of his mild-mannered intellectuals angling for a lap-dance from a curvaceous stripper.

Essentially, ‘Pelts’ unfolds as an hour-long PETA commercial where the idea of having famous actresses declare that they’d rather go naked than wear fur is taken to a whole different level. It doesn’t work its way sneakily towards the spelled-out-in-flashing-neon denouement of ‘Jenifer’, although there is a sneaky bit of foreshadowing early on. There is also a lot more in the way of dark humour in ‘Pelts’. In fact, it’s one of the few Argento titles I can think of which trades on graveyard humour. I’d be hard pressed to say which is the better of these two episodes.

Taken together, though, these two hours of television add up to the best thing Argento has put his name to in the last decade. Both play wryly on his earlier work: ‘Jenifer’ features a recurring child-like musical cue that recalls the nursery rhyme in ‘Deep Red’, plus the ‘Stendahl Syndrome’-like riverside death of an antagonist; while ‘Pelts’ evokes ‘Opera’ in a shot of an eye nervously squaring up to a peephole and a jarringly weird moment where the camera seems to burrow into a bug-infested bit of grassland, homages both ‘Cat o’ Nine Tails’ and ‘Deep Red’ in an extended elevator/pool of blood set-piece, throws in a cackling old hag who comes across as a hillbilly second cousin to the Three Mothers, and suggests ‘Suspiria’ in the décor of Shanna’s garish apartment.

The acting performances are generally very good, with Meat Loaf giving an early indication of his reality TV stand-off with Gary Busey in ‘Pelts’ and Fleming, in ‘Jenifer’, playing the half-tragic-half-monstrous anti-heroine in a bravura turn that ranges from vulnerable to predatory by way of coquettish and aggressively erotic – and all without uttering a single coherent word. It’s a powerhouse bit of acting that makes me wonder why Fleming isn’t headlining movies right now.

I’ve seen barely any ‘Masters of Horror’ episodes outside of these two – John Carpenter’s ‘Cigarette Burns’ and Takeshi Miike’s gruelling ‘Imprint’ being the honourable exceptions – but on the available evidence, I doubt there’s much else from either season that reaches these heights.