Deep Red was the first film to make me feel that somebody was behind the camera, projecting it as a wandering and penetrating eye—a cinematography infected with its own sexual proclivities, its own crawling desire. I could feel the director Dario Argento getting off to his own craft—not in a pornographic way, but rather through the hard pleasure of pure artistry; I could feel the very sweat on his palms, the stale warmth of his breath, the trembling in his flesh, in bringing his vision to fruition.
And yet, despite the wild, ecstatic frisson he demonstrates throughout, Argento’s pleasure is never as base, as simple, as a mere hacking and slashing. Much like Huysmans’ Des Essienties, Argento himself requires dense scaffolding and lyrical complexity in order to realize the apotheosis of his fantastical, fanatical, perversity: you can see it through the complexity of the sequences, through the lyricality of the imagery, how his butchery is handled with a surgeon’s sangfroid.
The camera doesn’t just follow the action; it swoops, it glides, it cranes and it tracks with commensurate craftsmanship. It is the architect of Argento’s moribund fantasy as well as the direct extension of his Id. Through it we hear the unmistakable clack of the murderer’s shoes against tiling, the zip of gloves over his skin— sounds which carry an unnerving intimacy far beyond the tired slasher repertoire of P.O.V. shots—see a menagerie of objects that are undoubtedly the killers own. We even become the mirror with which the killer applies kohl—the voyeur-eye reflected back unto the audience. With these techniques Argento implicates us into the scene with a sense of closeness that denies us our innocence. We become parasadists.
As the clairvoyant in the opening sequence shudderingly forebodes, “I can feel . . . death . . . in this room. I feel the presence . . . of a twisted mind . . . sending me thoughts . . . perverted murderous thoughts,” so, too, we can feel Argento telegraphing his lurid desire towards us through the conduit of the screen—implying that, if the telepath is to function as the audience’s stand-in, then the director himself is the killer, whose torturous thoughts massacre the seer’s mind as much as the cleaver her flesh.
One starts to get the impression that the black leathered-hands of the killer are, in fact, the director’s very own. And, in the literal sense, they are. But in the metaphysical sense, it’s Argento himself who embodies a grand, totalizing Id—the capital-p Pervert utterly responsible for the death that gilds the film in a way that is much more than mere cause-and-effect.
It’s no wonder he named this film after the very thing his films are made up of, as there are really only three properties that fully comprise any given Argento film: light, shadow and blood (see his later film Tenebrae, where a geyser of blood erupting from the stump of a woman’s severed arm incarnadines a white wall as Argento’s camera-eye lingers lovingly on the horror—a not-so-subtle metaphor for his role as a giallo director); everything else is secondary, the canvas upon which he splatters.
His best films are therefore less tightly-written murder mysteries (though they very much are, with such films as The Bird With The Crystal Plumage being massively intelligent in terms of plotting and story mechanics), and more exercises in reining it in only to let go at the perfect moment, his highly calculated cinematography working with the chaos of his immaculately crafted murder set-pieces. Argento’s director’s restraint is balanced by his killer’s frenzy, each part playing off the other to climax into the perfectly-photographed slaying, the exquisitely-timed scare, as, like any good pervert, Argento knows exactly when to blow his load.
(obligatory mention of the Deep Red rap here)
— Donovan Reyes is a background character in a Lynch film, who’s savoring the bone-chilling sweetness of Virginia’s autumnal season. He’s the author of denouement (Anxiety Press, 2025) and the upcoming apocrypha, a collection of his short stories and verse. Legend has it that if you chant his name three times in the mirror, he’ll appear to bum a cigarette.