Mirror Mirror

This week, David Hemmings's other great, mind-bending urban mystery after Blow Up—giallo classic Deep Red. Also, a werewolf movie and a creepy, creepy song . . . .

(Some spoilers below.)

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ Deep Red, dir. Dario Argento, 1975.

Memory Mansion. Houses—with their diversity of rooms and tones and possibilities—tend to make fertile metaphors for the human mind. Deep Red is all about the mind: about a memory just out of reach, an obsessed-over traumatic event, and the dark depths of a perverse psyche. In this context, its signature house—Villa Scott in Turin—makes just the right setting. It’s obscured—its location unknown at first and, when found, it looms behind overgrown trees. It holds secrets—both disturbing artwork covered up by a wall and a hidden room with a human corpse. In Deep Red the mind is a challenge—a withholding, shadowed, complex keeper of secrets—just like the house. 

Phenomena. Dario Argento made many films about magic and the supernatural, but Deep Red is not one of them. Its killer is a regular human operating in a normal world. Bizarrely, though, its opening minutes are all about psychic power—a psychic senses a maniac’s disturbed mind and is killed because of it. It’s an opening that seems to promise more psychic moments, but none ever arrive. There’s no more magic of any kind. The opening only feels less out of place if we approach psychic powers less as magic, more as a mental phenomenon. This is the world of Deep Red, a world that naturalizes the psychic alongside other mental experiences—lost and recovered memory, epiphany, traumatic memory, and obsession. Argento seems, really, to be shrugging at the psychic. This? It’s of a piece with the rest of it.