The Red Circle

By Tom Nix

In the Year 2000, I enrolled in a Cult Films workshop at my college(Tangent: this is one of the only reasons Kent State University was awesome. It was taught by a guy whoowned about 3,000 DVDs and VHS tapes, and knew Crumb personally. KSU also offered a class where the entire syllabus was to watch a James Bond Movie every week, and then fill out a five question quiz about the geography of it. It was incredible). Aside from introducing me to Alejandro Jodorowsky and Pre-America John Woo, this class gave me my first taste of one of the most twisted and talented minds of 20th century cinema.

DEEP RED was a ways into Dario Argento’s career as a slasher film director. Despite the fact that John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN is widely recognized as kickstarting the slasher genre (and it did, in America – Herschell Gordon-Lewis’ slashterpieces were more viewed as exploitation/erotica garbage when they were released in the 60′s), Dario was over in Italy, almost a half decade previous, reinventing the genre that had barely been invented.

Beginning with the depravity. The kills in Deep Red are uniformly brutal. Beginning and ending with a woman’s head being severed, these kills, with all of the garishly red blood Argento loved to splatter everywhere, leave an indelible impression. They are simply sadistic in their execution. The fact that these murders are committed a) by Dario Argento’s hand that performs the act  and b)  to the sounds of a fusion jazz score provided by the seminal Italian prog band Goblin, makes for a very uneasy viewing experience. I mean, have you ever wanted to boogie while a woman gets her face scalded off in boiling water?

And then there’s the photography. Argento makes murder beautiful. No one else shoots the act of taking a human being’s life like him. This will be covered a little later in a future article detailing his masterstroke of cinema, but DEEP RED offers much to feast on visually. The use of the foreground, the wide open vistas of Italy, the incredible POV camera work, the way the knife raises and lowers exactly with the camera. These are displays of brutality never equaled in modern film. Now its more of a focus on the outcome, and the resulting bloody body.

Dario Argento makes the act itself an art. Awash in color and light. There will never be another director who can paint as perfect a picture with the blood of innocents.

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