Profondo Rosso: What Did I Just See?

For as long as I’ve been writing this thing (holy shit it’s been ten years), there are still gaps in my horror film education, and every now and then I try to fill those gaps as best as I can. A couple of weeks back I noted that even though I could tell A Classic Horror Story drew from a tradition of Italian horror, I hadn’t actually seen many examples of the style. So, with Italian horror on my mind, I decided to take a look at Profondo Rosso (Deep Red), directed by genre mainstay Dario Argento, whose Suspiria I covered here some time back.

Let me tell you, this film was a ride, for reasons both good and bad, equal parts fascinating, strange, tiresome, and frustrating.

The film opens on the silhouette of someone stabbing someone else to death, overlaid with a child singing, so you know we’re in for the weird shit. We cut from this to a talk being given by a psychic about her abilities, interrupted by her near-hysteric reaction that someone in the audience has killed and will kill again. We cut from that to the psychic in her apartment, finishing a phone call, only to be stabbed to death by a mysterious figure in black leather gloves.

Meanwhile, jazz pianist Marcus Daly and his friend Carlo are having a drunken, spirited discussion about their approaches to music as they stumble toward Marcus’ apartment building. where it just so happens the psychic is his upstairs neighbor. They get there just in time to see her get murdered and pushed out the window onto the pavement.

What follows is - well, loosely - Marcus, along with reporter Gianna Brezzi, trying to solve this strange murder, only to find every lead they chase ending in another murder. This film is best described as jarring. It’s not as visually riotous as Suspiria, but the soundtrack is heavily dominated by the kind of rock music you might associate more with 70s cop shows than horror films, all keyboards and percussion and guitar. Sometimes it undermines the tension of the scene, but then others it lends a real strangeness that gets under your skin. There’s just something so odd about chase-scene music applied to someone creeping through an apartment that your brain doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

This extends to the editing and direction as well. Transitions between scenes are abrupt, sometimes mid-conversation, and even the most straightforward scenes are punctuated with close-ups on otherwise innocuous things like running faucets, squawking birds, open doorways, and random strangers in the street, rapidly cutting back and forth in a way that gives those scenes a real sense of anxiety. If that’s not enough, the action is periodically interrupted by close-ups on baby dolls and lingering, almost fetishistic shots of the black leather gloves worn by the killer. No context is provided for these interludes, they just sort of happen. And sometimes it’s almost played for comedy, as in a phone exchange made difficult by a noisy cafe and uncomfortably close espresso machine.

A lot of this film is outside of cinematic convention, and I think that both helps and harms it. On the one hand, the relentless strangeness and tonal whiplash makes it an uneasy watch, simply because you have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next. It’s one of those films where it feels like all bets are off. But on the other, it’s extremely hard to follow (and there’s a reason for that, more on that in a bit) and individual scenes really seem to take place in a vacuum, causally disconnected from what came before or what comes after, It plays at times less like a single narrative and more like a series of loosely related vignettes. It was also made in 1975, and its takes on gender and sexual orientation are very much of that time period, which is to say they’re pretty gross by modern standards. The sexism isn’t great, but it’s more eye-rolling than anything else, but the homophobia is pretty unpleasant in depiction and how it plays into the narrative. Sensitivities to this sort of thing vary, and I’m usually pretty able to look past stuff based on cultural context, but this left a bad taste in my mouth.

All of that said, I’m not sure all of the film’s problems were its fault. The sexism and homophobia, sure, but the version I watched (one I’d…ahem….obtained…some time ago) was clearly a transfer from VHS (detectable in the tracking errors that popped up toward the end of the film), and so it was pretty murky and fuzzy, which didn’t help matters. Also, after doing a little research on IMDB, I was able to determine that it was a heavily edited version released in the U.S., with about 20 minutes of its run time excised. This apparently took out a lot of graphic violence (some of the cuts being obvious in the print I saw) along with a couple of subplots, and what appeared to be most of the actual interaction between Marcus and Gianna. Truth be told, the editing on the version I saw seemed like such a hack job that I can only imagine that at least some of the disorienting abruptness wasn’t intentional. Still, the film’s basic vision shines through, and it’s a deeply weird one. It doesn’t look like the unedited version is available on streaming services, and I’m not sure I liked it enough to purchase a Blu-Ray of it, but this one seems like it’s going to need some kind of revisit at some point.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

How I Would Have Done It: The Dead Center

(What I'd like to do in my How I Would Have Done It posts is examine a movie that I think didn't live up to its potential and, well, talk about how I would have done it if I'd been the writer or director. Mostly because just leaving it at "that was dumb" or "that sucked" is kind of unsatisfying, especially when there was something really good buried in there somewhere. I'll be discussing story elements in detail, so all kinds of spoilers await.)

I haven’t done one of these in quite awhile, and though I have a number of films tagged as potential candidates for this kind of revisit, I think The Dead Center really moved me to do another one because it got so close to being really really good, and the areas that I think held it back were so clearly defined to me that I basically wrote up the notes for this post at the same time I wrote up my original look at the film. It has a lot to recommend it - believable, relatable characters, a sense of dread that doesn’t rely on flashy or expensive effects that would threaten to distance us from the story, and confident, understated cinematography and scoring. In a lot of ways it exemplifies a lot of what I see as virtues in low-budget indie horror. But what this means is that the places where I feel it falls down stick out even more.

I even discussed these shortcomings to a certain degree in the original post, but I don’t like spoiling movies when I write about them, at least when I think they’re really good and I hope that people are going to check them out. If I think they suck, I’m much more likely just to get into it, but I had to be pretty oblique about a couple of things in particular, and so here I can get into more specifics. Because here it really does come down to some very specific choices that I think would improve the movie considerably, without really changing things all that drastically. Needless to say, I’m going to spoil some important stuff, and if you’re at all interested in the movie, I’d recommend watching it before clicking through, also because I’m going to be talking about the movie assuming a basic familiarity with the plot.

A Classic Horror Story: Avoiding The Obvious “Generic Title” Joke

Self-reflexivity in horror movies, in my opinion, usually doesn’t land well. If you’re trying to scare people, reminding them that this is all just a movie is going to more often than not foster the kind of distance that discourages engagement with the film. If you’re going to go that route, you probably need to make sure you play it as straight and serious (or balls-to-the-wall weird) as you can to get people to forget that fact. The Cabin In The Woods gets lumped in with horror movies, but it’s so distanced and so self-reflexive that I think it’s better described as a movie about horror movies, and it’s constantly reminding the audience that it’s smarter than the material, and by extension the audience is smarter than the material, so it’s not really scary. It’s an examination of genre, not an example or expression of it.

So when you title your film A Classic Horror Story, this is exactly the sort of thing that comes to mind for me. It’s one of those films that I think is better appreciated as a cinematic exercise than really experienced or engaged with, and on top of that, it’s kind of a mixed bag. I see what it’s trying to do, but it doesn’t quite get there.

It opens strong, on the interior of some kind of farmhouse. There’s a young woman, smeared with blood and shackled to an equally bloodstained table. Hooded figures enter, one carrying a huge mallet. Cut to someone staring through a hole in the wall as the hammer comes down off-screen. Whatever’s going on here, it isn’t good.

Cut to the title, and an RV driving down a country road in southern Italy. There are five people inside, and it seems that they’re strangers who are carpooling out into the country for various reasons. There’s Fabrizio, the host and driver. He’s a film student who’s making a travel vlog, so he interviews everyone else along for the ride. There’s Mark, an obnoxious Englishman, and Sofia, his Russian girlfriend. There’s Elisa, who has some kind of initially unspecified health condition and an overbearing mother who pesters her about an upcoming medical procedure over the phone, and then there’s Riccardo, a doctor who seems to be in the middle of a failing marriage. Elisa’s on vacation, Mark and Sofia are headed to a wedding, and Riccardo is evasive. There’s some light getting-to-know-you stuff, the day turns to night, and Mark insists on taking the wheel because they’re not getting where he needs to go fast enough for his liking, and because he’s had a couple of beers. Sure enough, Mark nods off at the wheel and nearly hits an animal in the middle of the road. Fabrizio grabs the wheel and swerves at the last minute, sending the RV careening into a tree. Smash to black.

When they wake up the next morning, they’re nowhere near the road. They’re in a field, and Mark’s leg was badly broken in the crash. Riccardo splints it up, but Mark is going to need a hospital. So they head for a nearby building. What looks like, well, some kind of farmhouse.

Closer investigation reveals some suitably red flags - yes, it’s the farmhouse from the opening, festooned with animal heads and both paintings and photographs of people in creepy masks. There’s some kind of shrine out back, decorated with freshly severed pig’s heads, and Fabrizio identifies it as a shrine to a local legend about three knightly brothers from “another realm” who saved a village’s population from famine…at a terrible, eternal price. So our five protagonists are out in the woods, past the reception range of any cellphone towers, and night is starting to fall.

This film is not really a character study - you’ve got five people carpooling out into the southern Italian countryside, and none of them are much more than a single defining trait. They’re basically your typical motley crew of characters trapped together in the woods and rubbing each other the wrong way - the conflict starts pretty much immediately, not helped by Mark being an obnoxious prick, and it becomes clear quickly that the creepy farmhouse-turned-church is still very much in use.  If all of this sounds like stuff we’ve all seen before, well, let me just refer you to the film’s title. One thing I will give it is that it seems to be drawing primarily from a uniquely Italian horror tradition, from the kind of films made by directors like Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and Ruggero Deodato. My experience with Italian horror is very, very limited, but I’ve read enough synopses to see the connections. It’s not shot as a period piece, it’s very contemporary, but still feels connected with the tradition on which it’s drawing. There’s a lot of emphasis on vengeful spirits, cannibalism, quasi-medieval torture and graphic violence consistent with their work, though this film doesn’t linger so much in that last regard - most of it is presented either briefly, off-camera, or from a distance with a couple of suitably gruesome exceptions, and it isn’t a film afraid to highlight the suffering that the victims of this violence are going through.

This lends it some visceral (ha-ha) moments, but “travelers menaced by creepy backwoods folk” is hardly the most original conceit, and there aren’t too many big surprises for the majority of the film.. It’s well-shot, using fog-shrouded woods, shadowy interiors and stark, dramatic lighting to good effect, and though the protagonists are all archetypes, they don’t quite descent into caricature. There are some interesting, better-than-expected moments, some striking imagery and creative composition, but the best moments tend to exist in isolation from each other. The action plays out in pretty desultory ways - first they’re over here, and now they’re over there, with not a lot of narrative flow, so it doesn’t really build up tension or momentum for most of its runtime. The whole doesn’t really cohere until fairly late, which hurts it some - there are narrative reasons for this, but it doesn’t help engagement much. Even if it makes sense, if it means my attention’s going to flag, that’s a problem. The third act remedies a lot of this, while at the same time shifting tonally in a pretty big way, but…

…this is where it gets difficult to talk about this movie, because there ARE narrative reasons for its shortcomings, and there are some interesting things to say about the third act, but this is a film best gone into as blind as possible, so I’ll put the rest of this write-up under a spoiler block.

Last Shift: Appearances Can Be Deceiving

Looks can be deceiving, never judge a book by its cover, etc. Trite, yes, but also true. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve passed up a film because the thumbnail art or blurb seemed too cliched or too obvious. And I’m probably missing out on some good sleeper hits because of that, but I run across enough mediocre, disappointing movies writing this thing as it is, if I can avoid another one I’m going to. It’s a gamble, so I sometimes rely on the opinions of a few people I know, and if they like something, whatever its initial impression, I’ll give it a chance.

I’ve flipped past Last Shift any number of times - generic Saw-ish artwork, a pentagram featured heavily, something about an “unspeakable evil.” Pretty generic as these things go. But it’s also one of those films that keep coming up when people whose opinion I trust talk about good, solid horror films, so I gave it a shot, and damned if it isn’t just that. It’s creepy and intense, very well paced, and a lot of why it works is the way it plays with appearances.

Officer Jessica Loren is a rookie police officer in Sanford, Florida. She’s following in her father’s footsteps, much to her mother’s dismay, and the film opens with her mother pleading to her over the phone not to go into work that night. Her father died in the line of duty, so you can understand why her mother is worried for her. But Jessica’s intent on living up to her father’s legacy, even if that means drawing the short straw and getting the unenviable detail of being the lone officer on the last overnight shift at Sanford’s old police station, in the process of being shuttered in favor of a bigger, fancier building across town. It’s just going to be her, an empty building, and an evidence room that now houses only evidence classified as biohazardous. A disposal team will be by sometime between 4 and 7am, she just needs to sit tight to let them in and to make sure the building stays secure. And at first, it’s just boredom, boredom, a vagrant who manages to break in, and more boredom.

Then the strange noises start. Things moving on their own. Doors opening and closing. And calls from a young woman who claims she’s being held captive. 

Except all 911 calls have already been routed to the new station.

This film does a lot of things right, and the first is the setting. The film takes place entirely inside an actual abandoned police station, and it helps a great deal, as location shooting often does. First, it feels like an actual police station instead of someone’s approximation. In a lot of ways, it’s just another disused office building, blandly institutional, with the occasional detail like holding cells and interrogation rooms, and the space is believable - it has an actual geography, it’s clear it isn’t a series of sets. Likewise, it feels authentically abandoned, emptied out but for some forgotten office furniture, a single phone, litter dotting rooms and hallways. There’s a very particular spookiness that you get in office buildings in the middle of the night - it’s a place that is normally full and busy, and now it’s empty and quiet, so any sound or thing out of place becomes very unsettling. It doesn’t take much to freak you out when you’re supposed to be alone in the building, and the first act especially gets a lot of mileage out of those little things that suggest that maybe Jessica isn’t alone after all. The tension starts from the opening minutes as Jessica encounters the duty sergeant that she’s relieving, an empty hallway and silence interrupted by a string of profanities. It’s something that serves the opening of the film well - stretches of silence interrupted by sudden, unexpected sounds. It’s minimal, but it keeps you on edge.

So that’s the next strength of this film - the pacing is spot-on, across the film and from moment-to-moment. It starts quietly spooky right off the bat and then steady, gradually escalates and increases the tension as the film goes on. There are a number of different things in play at first - odd noises, things moving by themselves, the mysterious caller, and as the film progresses and we learn more about what happened in this station maybe a year or so before, and with these revelations more and more gets added to the mix, taking things from subtle, minimal expressions of tension to something more explicit, raising the stakes. A lot of the escalation works because the filmmakers are extremely good at shot composition, camera angles and camera movement to build tension and pay it off. There are some moments that could be classified as jump scares, but they don’t hew to the conventional rhythms of jump scares so they’re surprisingly effective.

Like, as long as I’m talking about this in terms of rhythm, the thing that occurred to me while I was watching this was that the filmmakers were really good at playing around the beat - instead of hitting moments exactly where you’d expect them, they come up a little earlier, or a little later, or from a different angle than the audience has come to expect. This film is really good at dodging predictability in the moment-to-moment action, and it escalates things gradually over its runtime, so we start at low-key unsettling and end up with something relentless and nightmarish by the third act. It’s a constant tightening of the screws, gathering steam pretty much from the first scene, and thought it relies on fairly conventional horror film techniques, these techniques are employed inventively enough that you don’t really become complacent.

The cinematography makes really good use not just of camera angles and movement but also lighting - it’s an empty building in the middle of the night, so you’ve got fluorescent lighting in the hallways and then dark empty rooms in the doorways beyond, and the film does a lot with light and shadow, with the transition from light to shadow, what happens when you turn the lights on in dark rooms, and reveals in dark areas with stuttering, intermittent light sources. None of it is especially innovative but it’s executed really, really well - I almost want to say tastefully, but that’s not it - the filmmakers are really good about not using the same trick a whole bunch. They mix it up a lot, which helps maintain the tension because it’s tough to predict where the film’s going to go next in the moment-to-moment action. It’s not afraid to use different narrative techniques, employing flashbacks that sort of organically weave in and out of the story, getting the most of their single location.  The music is mostly tastefully minimal, with the very occasional sting here and there, but again, it works because it’s employed thoughtfully and not just slathered over every scene. 

Basically - and I think this is really important, and something that a lot of people who make horror films miss - this is a film that isn’t occupied with telling us when we should be scared, it just lets things play out and trusts that we’ll be paying sufficient attention to be scared by what we see, and it makes all the difference. The performances are serviceable, maybe a little on the stagy side in places, but not so much that it’s distracting, and the dialogue is kind of corny and affected in places, but again it’s rarely distracting. Though it’s clear this film didn’t have a very large budget, the filmmakers do a very good job for the most part at putting the money where it matters and coming up with striking imagery to really carry the important moments.

There are a couple of problems - there’s one bit of makeup work that doesn’t quite land as well as it could (though the camera’s not on it long enough to really make it a big problem) and there’s a big exposition dump at the beginning of the second act that feels really, really clumsy. To be fair, I’ve tried to think of ways it could have been handled better, and it’s tough to come up with a solution. Essentially we have to be clued in on a series of events that the protagonist already knows about (though the narrative sometimes wavers on things you’d think she would know but doesn’t) and I’m not sure if it’d land right if it were treated more obliquely. There’s going to have to be some suspension of disbelief around Jessica’s behavior - she doesn’t have a clearly described arc so much as she sort of wavers between behaving rationally and irrationally, though they do a good job of establishing reasons why she might not make the obvious choices, and supernatural fuckery puts paid to simple things like using phones or radios for communication or sometimes even making the rational choices.

None of this is remotely close to fatal to the movie though, because it has such strong momentum and verve that you just sort of get swept up in the nightmare. Some of the most effective moments in this film have to do with appearances, with what we see and how that will be suddenly reversed or subverted - you think you know what’s happening or about to happen, but you don’t, and that’s where a lot of the power of this film is, and I gotta say, that’s more than appropriate for a film I was willing to pass over because it looked like something more generic.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon