ABCs of Horror 3: "D" Is for Deep Red (1975)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

There are times when a film arrives in the midst of a creative renaissance, or perhaps more cynically a “fad” or craze for a specific genre, and so thoroughly nails the center of the proverbial bullseye that it effectively becomes the archetypal example of that genre for the rest of time. Dario Argento’s Deep Red certainly wasn’t the first classical Italian giallo film–the genre had been around for more than a decade after being kicked off by Mario Bava classics like 1963’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much or 1964’s Blood and Black Lace. Nor was it even Argento’s first foray into the style, as he opened his career with 1970’s influential The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. But despite it all, it’s Deep Red that immediately springs to mind as the most perfectly emblematic of the genre, even though it arrived in a time when it very well could have been lost in a sea of stylistic imitators. It is arguably the most giallo of all the gialli; the exemplar of a style that ruled Italian cinemas for the better part of two decades.

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Deep Red (aka Profondo Rosso) is effectively the exclamation point on Argento’s giallo era–his final, perfected take on the formula before he would (at least briefly) wave goodbye to the style and embark on a series of supernatural horror films beginning with Suspiria. It was also the director’s first collaboration with Italian prog rock band Goblin, whose music would ultimately become synonymous with his films. The frenetic presence of Goblin’s music can’t really be overstated here; the way the score dips out entirely and then suddenly returns like it’s mimicking the deranged killer. It’s a very Argento aesthetic indeed, to have Goblin playing a wild, funky track that sounds appropriate for a 1970s car chase, but in reality it’s paired with footage of a man stalking through an empty house. “Restraint” is a notably absent prerequisite.

As is the case with many archetypal gialli, the nominal protagonist of Deep Red is a male outsider who seemingly just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. English jazz pianist Marcus (David Hemmings) is living abroad in Italy and walking home from a night of drinking with a friend when he stumbles upon a murder in progress. As he watches helplessly from below, a woman in the apartment building above is killed against her glass windows by a glove-wearing figure wielding a meat cleaver, a killer who disappears before Marcus is able to intervene. Everything important to the case of Deep Red is then drawn from the jumbled memories of these fleeting moments: Just what did Marcus and his friend actually see that night? Is there a crucial detail we’re overlooking? What of the painting that seems to have gone missing in the victim’s apartment? What is the significance of the children’s lullaby/nursery rhyme that plays before several attacks? The film dispenses its clues slowly, interspersed with the occasional, brutally graphic slaying–there’s a reason it was titled The Hatchet Murders on its re-release in the U.S. in 1980.

Rest assured, no drop of red tempera paint goes unspilled in this one, as it is filled with fantastical, improbably gruesome deaths, displaying some of the same proto-slasher energy in this respect of a film like Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood. Argento almost seems to call his shot as it were, with some of the shots in an early scene featuring a psychic medium demonstrating a certain oral fixation through the camera lens–particularly a disturbing isolated image of her taking a sip of water and then dribbling it all out down her chin. It presages the actual, oral violence that later caps off what is arguably the film’s most iconic sequence, when the killer attacks a professor and repeatedly slams his mouth down on the corner of a desk, American History X style. Although what you very well may end up remembering most about said scene is not the violence, but the sudden appearance of a hideously unnatural mechanized doll that precedes it. If you’ve only ever seen this scene in clips, without context, trust me when I say that it makes not an iota of additional sense when you factor in the rest of Deep Red–it’s just weapons-grade weirdness for the sake of being off-putting.

And that’s really all there is to this giallo classic at heart, a drip-fed mystery punctuated by the staccato beat of Goblin’s music and the arterial spray of the instruments of pain in the killer’s black-gloved hands–killing scenes that were all performed by Argento himself, in fact. One gets the sense that the director was likely the only one who knew exactly what was going on in this groovy, discordant chaos, and thus the only one who could have worn the gloves. His hatchet strokes messily carved their way into cinematic history in Deep Red.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.

ABCs of Horror 3: “D” Is for Deep Red (1975)