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The words genius and auteur are oversubscribed. Like other words in our vocabulary such as diva and random, they are now routinely applied in woefully inappropriate contexts, usually by vacuous E4 presenters with two seconds to kill and a D in GCSE English Language.
The genius tag is often given to Dario Argento and it’s something that makes his life as a filmmaker all the harder because, influential and groundbreaking as he is, he is still a commercial producer of a commercial genre – Horror – designed to generate cash. He makes popcorn movies that, in my case, filtered high art through a pop culture prism and opened my imagination to new things, but their still also video store artifacts. Strange, slightly seedy offerings that fuse the trashy and low rent with the directors eye for more classical forms of expression. But he’s not a genius. His patchy catalogue attests to that.
All this might sound like I’m doing the filmmaker a disservice but I’m really not. Any film that Argento produces has to stand up against the near perfect terrors of Suspiria and also the directors mythic genius status. No wonder everyone is disappointed when he makes something less than perfect.
When Bird with the Crystal Plumage announced the direction of early 70s Italian B-cinema and precipitated the Giallo boom, he created a movie that blew the Hitchcock thriller format into a thousand psychedelic pieces and also cemented genre rules that would help define the style. The golden 70s and early 80s period saw Argento produce some of his greatest work, with films like Deep Red and Suspiria still holding audiences in their thrall to this day. So why does Argento get described in such hallowed terms when a filmmaker like Lucio Fulci is often portrayed as a disreputable hack?
After all, Fulci created some of horror cinemas most distinctive movies and also worked in a number of seemingly unconnected genres and the result are nearly always watchable – with the exception of some of his latter movies – and in some cases are extraordinary.
Maybe it’s the canvas that these pictures are painted on. Argento sets his films in swinging galleries, ballet schools and other high-brow locales. His beautiful victims are dancers and models. In Bird with the Crystal Plumage his protagonist is a man of letters. Argento deals in steaminess, voyeurism and artfully lensed murder; All in a lurid rainbow of colours against mindscrambling 70s interiors. Argento focuses on mood, light and visual story telling. His characters are merely fodder in a lot of cases. Argento uses actors as part of the whole picture, equal but no more important than the cameraman or the lighting engineers. Argento’s world is the closet horror movie watchers can get to seeing a great, disturbing work of art on canvas come alive.
Fulci meanwhile has no qualms about crafting gore drenched crowd pleasers designed to push buttons and wind up censors. His films are populated by characters that are generally more relatable even if the locales they find themselves in are less salubrious on average than the hapless victims of Argento’s cinematic sadism. I think it’s generally accepted that Fulci’s work has a few more layers of sleaze to penetrate.
So, Argento gets the props for his 70s catalogue – I know most cult movie lovers will be excited about the Blu-Ray edition of Bird with the Crystal Plumage – and a drubbing when new work comes out. The new films have to stand in the long shadow of his classics, making them hard to judge on their own merits. Like a murder suspect whose been hounded before the case by the tabloids, Argento’s new films can’t get a fair trial.
Like it or not, Dario Argento is the poster boy for Italian Horror, the acceptable face of an increasingly respectable sub-genre. His contribution to the Giallo is immeasurable and his influence of the horror stylings of the 1980s and beyond is without question, but I think its time to drop the deification of certain filmmakers and to let them create without the weight of expectation.
