Dario Argento

Dario Argento was born on September 7, 1940 in the Italian capital. His father, Salvatore, worked as a film producer, while his mother, the Brazilian Elda Luxardo, had been a well-known model. Passionate about cinema from a very young age, Dario soon began to publish film reviews in various publications.

Instead of studying at the university, he decided to take a permanent job with the newspaper “Paese Sera”. He was closely related to famous film personalities such as Alberto Sordi , who hired him to co-write with him and the legendary Sergio Amidei ( Roma, Ciudad Abierta ) the screenplay for El gran amante , a comedy directed by the renowned actor. Argento himself agreed to appear briefly on screen, in the role of a priest.

During the second half of the 1960s, Argento thrives as a screenwriter. With the collaboration of the great filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci , among others, he writes the screenplay for Hasta que llegó su hora , one of Sergio Leone ‘s great westerns .

But Argento was looking forward to directing his own cinema. “I was always interested in cinema, I grew up with it, it was a dream, a marvel. It was during my childhood when I began to feel a desire, an irrepressible fury for it,” recalls the filmmaker. “At first I tried to get closer through writing, film criticism, but that did not fulfill me. So I started writing scripts for small films until one day Bertolucci and Sergio Leone crossed my path. Thanks to them I carved out a reputation and I was able to start working on a larger scale. What happened was that I was still not satisfied and I realized that I had to try something else: and that was the direction.”

He debuted as a director in 1970 with The Glass Feather Bird , based on his own screenplay adapted from the novel “The Screaming Mimi” by Frederick Brown. It had a suggestive score by Ennio Morricone . Already attached to the giallo, invented in 1964 by Mario Bava with Six Women for the Assassin , he followed in the footsteps of an American writer investigating the savage murders of three girls in Rome. The rhythm is surprising for a debut feature and some sequences like the final chase through the city. Due to time constraints, Argento decided to use his own hands to represent those of the assassin on the screen. Since then he often brings them out again in murder sequences in his films.

Contrary to initial forecasts, The Bird with the Crystal Feathers was very well received in Italy, and spread to many countries, including the United States. “Nobody expected it, not even me. Not even my father, who was the producer of the film,” explains Argento. His next two films, The Cat with Nine Tails and 4 Flies on Gray Velvet , follow the same line and form the so-called “Animals Trilogy” with the previous one.

In 1972, Dario Argento divorced his wife, Marisa Casale, with whom he had a daughter, Fiore, who has appeared as an actress in one of her father’s films. Subsequently, Argento was married to the actress Daria Nicolodi , although he never married her. They both had another daughter, the actress and filmmaker Asia Argento .

Dark Red , where a pianist and a journalist persecute the psychopath of the day, establishes the filmmaker in the international market, and comes to inspire other authors, such as the Americans John Carpenter – who has recognized him on several occasions – and Brian De Palma . More violent than its predecessors, many fans consider it the director’s masterpiece, and he has even cited it as his favorite. It gave rise to numerous imitations.

“Terror is like a snake, always changing its skin,” Dario Argento went so far as to say, who slightly changed register with Suspiria , a supernatural horror film for which he also composed the soundtrack. Jessica Harper played a young American dancer who goes to study at a sinister German academy. The cast included the then young Spanish singer Miguel Bosé , in a brief role as an aspiring dancer. Argento wrote her script together with the aforementioned Daria Nicolodi, which was based on an experience of her mother, a resident during her childhood of a boarding school run by an occult sect. Suspiriabegins the trilogy “The three mothers”, alluding to many other ancestral witches that appear in them. The other titles that make it up are Inferno , from 1980, and The Mother of Evil , shot much later, in 2007, due to financing problems.

After returning to his origins with Tenebre , where an American writer ( Anthony Franciosa ) is harassed by a psychopath, he shoots Phenomena in Switzerland , around a young woman with the ability to communicate telepathically with insects, who enters a boarding school in a area where a disturbed savagely murders women. His compatriot and old acquaintance Sergio Leone recommended Jennifer Connelly for the leading role , as he had been very happy with her work in Once Upon a Time in America , while his fan and friend John Carpenter encouraged him to cast Donald Pleasance ( La halloween night), who plays an entomologist recruited by the police to solve the case. Daria Nicolodi does a convincing job as surprise center teacher Frau Brückner, while the filmmaker’s eldest daughter, Fiore Argento , plays the first victim to die on screen, precisely at the hands of Argento himself.

In the 1980s, Dario Argento was so famous as a master of the genre that he allowed himself to endorse other filmmakers, such as Lamberto Bava , son of Mario Bava, whom he endorsed as a co-writer and producer on Demons and its sequel, Demons 2 . The other great disciple of his was Michele Soavi , supported by Argento in The Devil’s Spawn and The Sect .

The beginning of Dario Argento’s decline was marked by the film Terror en la opera , from 1987, with Cristina Marsillach as an aspiring Bel Canto singer harassed by a fan. The filming was marked by fights with his girlfriend, Nicolodi, from whom he temporarily separated, by the death of the director’s father, and by continuous disagreements with the actress who initially had more weight in the film, Vanessa Redgrave ., who ended up leaving the set before finishing his work. Since she did not find any substitute, Argento made the decision –at least curious– to suppress her role, and shoot new sequences with the other characters. The result did not convince either the critics or the Italian fans. “Working on that film left me devastated. When it finished production I decided to go away for a while. The film had just been released, I left everything behind and went to India in search of some spirituality. I completely forgot about the film” , recalls the director.

Then Dario Argento no longer raises his head. He teams up with another horror expert, New Yorker George A. Romero , in Devil’s Eyes , made up of two segments, one from each filmmaker, but didn’t have much acceptance when it opened. In Trauma (1993) she directed Asia Argento, who, despite being her daughter, stripped naked for the first time in front of the cameras, taking advantage of the fact that she had just turned 18. Both returned to work together on The Art of Killing , of little interest, like their adaptations of literary horror classics, The Phantom of the Opera (1998) and Dracula 3D , produced by the Spanish Enrique Cerezo . Neither the player, Giallo and his collaboration in the Masters of Horror series have sparked enthusiasm, although he shot a curious TV movie, Obsession with Blood , which pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock , mixing the plots of Strangers on a Train and Rear Window .