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By 1982, Dario Argento had moved beyond the constraints of the giallo genre he had helped popularize and started to explore the supernatural with Suspiria and Inferno. According to the documentary Yellow Fever: The Rise and Fall of the Giallo (which is on the Synapse blu ray of this film), the failure of Inferno led to Argento being kindly asked - or demanded - by his producer to return to the giallo with his next film.

Tenebrae is the result and while on the surface it appears to be a return to form, the truth is that it's perhaps one of the most multilayered and complicated films I've ever seen. And while I've always believed that Phenomena is Argento's strangest film - a girl who can talk to bugs befriends a monkey to battle a cannibal child in a foreign country - I have learned that Tenebrae just might be even stranger.

To start, Argento intended for the film to be almost science fiction, taking place five years after a cataclysmic event, in a world where there are less fewer people and as a result, cities are less crowded and the survivors are richer. Argento claims that if you watch this film with this in mind, it's very apparent. While he only hinted that the survivors wanted to forget some mystery event, in later interviews he claims that the film takes place in an imaginary city where the people left behind try to forget a nuclear war.

In truth, this could be an attempt to explain why Argento decided to show an Italy that he never had in his films before. Whereas he spent so much time showing the landmarks and crowded streets that make up The Eternal City, he would now move into a sleek futuristic look, a Rome that exists but that films had never shown its viewers before. This pushes this film away from past Argento giallo such as his animal trilogy and Deep Red, as well as the waves of imitators that he felt undermined and cheapened his work. There are no travelogue b-roll time wasters in this movie - the actual setting is there for a reason; stark, cold and alienating.

Argento had started that he "dreamed an imaginary city in which the most amazing things happen," so he turned to the EUR district of Rome, which was created for the 1942 World's Fair, and intended by Mussolini to celebrate two decades of fascism. Therefore, more than showing a Rome that most filmgoers have never seen, he is showing us a Rome that never was or will be; a world where so many have died, yet fascism never succumbed.

Instead of the neon color palette that he's established in Suspiria or the Bava-influenced blues and reds that lesser lights would use in their giallo, production designer Giuseppe Bassan and Argento invented a clean, cool look; the houses and apartments look sparse and bleached out. When the blood begins to flow - and it does, perhaps more than in any film he'd create before or since - the crimson makes that ending whiteness look even bleaker.

Tenebrae may mean darkness or shadows in Latin, but Argento pushed for the film to be as bright as possible, without the shadowplay that made up much of his past work. In fact, unlike other giallo, much of the plot takes place in the daytime and one murder even takes place in broad daylight.

Again, I feel that this movie is one made of frustration. As Argento tried to escape the giallo box that he himself had made, he found himself pulled back into it in an attempt to have a success at the box office. In this, he finds himself split in two, the division between art and commerce.

As a result, the film is packed with duality. There are two killers: one who we know everything about and is initially heroic; another who we learn almost nothing about other than they are an evil killer. Plus, nearly everyone in this film has a mirror character but soon objects like phone booths and incidents like car crashes begin happening in pairs.

Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa, Julie Darling) is set up from the beginning of the film as the traditional giallo hero: he is in a foreign place, deaths are happening all around him and he may be the inspiration or reason why they're happening. He has more than one double in this film, but for most of it, his doppelganger is Detective Giermani. The policeman is a writer himself and a fan of Neal's work, claiming the never can figure out who the killer is in his books. Their cat and mouse game seems to set up a final battle; that finale is quick and brutal.

This conversation between the two men sums up the linguistic battle they engage in throughout the film:

Peter Neal: I've been charged, I've tried building a plot the same way you have. I've tried to figure it out; but, I just have this hunch that something is missing, a tiny piece of the jigsaw. Somebody who should be dead is alive, or somebody who should be alive is already dead.

Detective Germani: Explain that.

Peter Neal: You know, there's a sentence in a Conan Doyle book, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

This last sentence is of great interest to me when it comes to giallo. Normally, these films are not based upon Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but instead use Edgar Wallace as a touchpoint. They are also filled with red herrings and nonsensical endings where the impossible and improbably often becomes the final answer to the mystery.

Even the movie's plot is split in half and mirrors itself. This next sentence gives away the narrative conceit of the film: the murders are solved in the first half, belonging to Christiano Berti (John Steiner, Shock), a TV critic who interviews Neal. The second murders are all Neal's, who uses an axe instead of a straight razor, and his crimes are personal crimes of passion that aren't filled with the sexual aggression of Berti's; they are quick and to the point. Much of giallo is about long, complicated and ornate murder, as well as trying to identify the killer. As the film goes on, with the main killer revealed and the murders becoming less flashy, it's as if Argento is commenting on the increasing brutality of the genre he helped midwife.

The movie itself starts with the book Tenebrae being burning in a fireplace with this voiceover: "The impulse had become irresistible. There was only one answer to the fury that tortured him. And so he committed his first act of murder. He had broken the most deep-rooted taboo and found not guilt, not anxiety or fear, but freedom. Any humiliation which stood in his way could be swept aside by the simple act of annihilation: Murder."

That's when we meet Neal, an American in Rome to promote his latest work of violent horror, Tenebrae. This bit of metafiction is but the first bit of a film that fuses the real and fictional worlds. Joined by Anne (Fulci's wife Daria Nicolodi) and agent Buller (John Saxon!), Neal begins his press tour.

Before he left, Neal's fiancée Jane vandalized his suitcase. And moments prior to him landing in Rome, a shoplifter (Ania Pieroni, the babysitter from The House by the Cemetery) who stole his book has been murdered by a straight razor, with pages from said book - again, Tenebrae - stuffed into her mouth. Neal has received an anonymous letter proclaiming that he did the murder to cleanse the world of perversion.

Throughout the film, we see flashbacks of a man being tormented, such as a woman chasing down a young man and forcing him to fellate her high heel while other men hold him down. Later, we see the stereotypical giallo black gloved POV sequence of her being stabbed to death.

Next, one of Neal's friends, Tilde and her lover Marion are stalked and killed. This sequence nearly breaks the film because nothing can truly see to follow it. In fact. Tenebrae's distributor begged Argento to cut the shot down because it was meaningless, but the director demanded that it remain. Using a Louma crane, the camera darts over and above the couple's home in a several-minutes-long tracking shot. Any other director would film these murders with quick cuts between the victim and listener in the other room or perhaps employ a split-screen. Not Argento, who continually sends his camera spiraling into the night sky, high above Rome, across a maze of scaffolding; a shot that took three days to capture and lasts but two and a half minutes. In one endless take, the camera goes from rooftop to window, making a fortress of a home seem simple to break into; it's as if Argento wanted to push the Steadicam open of Halloween to the most ridiculous of directorial masturbation. It's quite simply breathtaking.

Maria, the daughter of Neal's landlord, who is presented to us as a pure woman (much of giallo, to use Argento's own words in Yellow Fever: The Rise and Fall of the Giallo, is split between the good girl and the bad woman), is killed when she discovers the killer's lair. Neal mentions that Berti, the TV personality, seemed obsessed with him and his words echoed the letters from the killer. As Neal has now become the giallo hero, he must do his own investigation, taking his assistant Gianni (Christian Borromeo, Murder Rock) to spy on the man. They discover him burning photos that prove he is the killer.

As Gianni watches, Berti says, "I killed them all!" before an axe crashes into his skull. Whomever the second murderer is, the young man can't recall. He finds his boss, Neal, knocked out on the front yard and they escape.

That night, Neal and Anne make love, the first time this has ever happened between the two. And the next morning, Neal leaves his agent's office and discovers his fiancée Jane is secretly sleeping with one of his best friends.

Giermani asks Neal to visit Berti's apartment, where they find that the dead man was obsessed with the writer, but don't discover any of the burnt evidence. The idea that someone could become so obsessed with your work that they'd kill comes directly from Argento's life. In Los Angeles in the wake of Suspiria's surprising international success, an obsessed fan called Argento's room again and agai

Argento's best films appeal to the audience's love of the 'whodunit' genre. Even when you strip away all the other factors that often draw people to his work - whether it's the torrents of gore, the sumptuous use of photography, or merely the camp value of some of the performances - it's the overall plot that really grabs our attention, and rewards our patients with a blistering, head-scratching, climax. For me, there's simply nothing better than immersing yourself in a story that offers clues and characters that seemingly point to one thing, but, with the writer and director simultaneously offering the viewer enough twists and turns to throw us off the scent, and keep us guessing, right the way through to the end.

Argento's best film, in my opinion, is Deep Red, because it is there that Argento finds the perfect balance between detective fiction, Hitchcockian suspense, and the lurid, over-the-top gore of the Italian Giallo series. Tenebrae continues the formula developed in Deep Red - as well as other classic Argento, like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat O' Nine Tails - but also adds a strong element of self-referential, self-reflexivity. Argento had always thrived on alluding back to his earlier work... I mean, look at the references to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in Deep Red, or the continuation between Suspiria and Inferno. Here however, it's not enough for the director to give us a lengthy set-piece involving a crazed dog that seems to want to reference the death of the blind man in Suspiria, or the lingering shots of the killer's leather gloves, we instead have a director who is using the script to not only deconstruct his own image and persona, but also, to deconstruct the film it's self. So, Tenebrae is a thriller about a writer of thrillers who, whilst on a promotional tour in Italy for his new book (...also called Tenebrae), finds himself the focus of a deranged serial killer, who is offing his victims according to the grisly murders found in the very same author's work. This gives Argento the storyteller the excuse to comment on the notion of storytelling, and even in two scenes, answer his own critics through the opinion of his central character. Of course, the film doesn't necessarily have to be enjoyed as a self-reflexive experiment, with Argento also having a great deal of fun in devising these bizarre scenes and scenarios, whilst simultaneously orchestrating this grandiose, gore-filled Giallo with a bold approach to cinematography, montage and music.

Like Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Deep Red, the besieged author is forced to turn amateur sleuth in order to catch the killer before the killer gets to him. What makes Tenebrae a little more interesting however, is that aforementioned streak of self-reflection and a major twist on perspective that easily rivals the great revelation towards the end of Deep Red, with Argento once again playing with the notions of subjective memory, perspective, and the idea of sight and sightlessness. The detective story central to the plot is as enjoyable as those found in other Argento works of the same era, whilst there's some extraordinarily inventive murder scenes, brilliantly photographed within the broad-light of day to go against the usually dark or nocturnal settings associated with this genre. One of the film's most talked about death scene involves a lengthy crane shot from the killer's perspective that runs right the way across the roof of the house, stopping only momentarily to glance back and forth through the various windows, before slipping in through one of the skylights. There's also the great scene when the author and his young assistant keep watch on a possible suspect, only for that very same suspect to later turn up with an axe through the head.

However, for those watching the film to enjoy the subtle plotting and self-aware construction of the script, there's a number of amazing discussions scenes between the author and the requisite chief-of-police, who discuss the literary crime classics in relation to pulp horror, whilst also adding a further dimension to an already multi-faceted film. For example; there's a scene in which the author is questioned about his book's sexism and the idea of a character being a 'social deviant' (the in-film-journalist's description of one of the book's homosexual characters) are both criticisms thrown at Argento's work, whilst in a later scene, the detective tells the author that he guessed the killer's identity on page 30... a subtle allusion to the twists and turns scattered throughout Tenebrae it's self. Of course, at the end of the day, the film is all about the writhing narrative, the mystery element in relation to the killer and their motive, and the endlessly fascinating ways in which Argento dispatches his various victims. The style or Tenebrae is less over-the-top than some of his other films, particularly Suspiria and Deep Red, with the director here going for something that's rooted in a more obvious reality, which I suppose gives a more believable streak to the work of a director so rooted in visual and thematic abstraction.

The ending of the film is a satisfying one, with Argento literarily paining the walls red with blood, whilst offering a plausible and greatly rewarding climactic reveal that is sure to delight those familiar with his previous works. As an experiment in self-aware, self-reference, the film is more intelligent and certainly less smug than the blockbuster Scream films, whilst the whole film hinges around a famous quote from Conan Doyle - "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - which adds yet another layer to the film, allowing the audience to go back and re-interpret the hints, ciphers and elements of self-reflection, bubbling away beneath the surface of lurid gore.

Tenebre is a low quality foreign slasher type joke of a film, but has its entertainment value.

The story and the acting are quite simply a zero score out of whatever scale you want to use and the murder scenes are extremely poor. It's basically a showcase of beautiful bra-less women, silly music and various locations and camera shots. Lara Wendel's particularly nice as Maria and I found myself amused enough not to trash the film completely. Though the many reviews in actual praise of the film, absurd. Style no problem, thrilling mystery, gripping story and suspense, you've got to be kidding.

Interesting enough horror/thriller, with Argento's usual disregard for logic. Not as mind-numbingly dumb as his "Trauma" or "Bird With Absurd Illogic" (sorry, I meant "Bird With Crystal Plummage"), but the film has its share of absurdity.

First of all, the film's 4th corpse is totally ACCIDENTALLY lead into the (first) murderer's house by a dog who just happened to have attacked her - of all people, and chased her to the said house. It's already silly enough that a woman would just happen to be chased by a dog into a serial killer's home, but to have that woman know the writer whom the killer is imitating - that is just too ridiculous. Towards the end, I was starting to suspect that the writer is the (second) murderer, and I must say, while that is a (more-or-less) unique twist, it doesn't do the movie's logic any justice; to have an initial murderer and then have another person use the situation and murder as well - well, that's just too stupid. It's also far too coincidental that the writer had killed in his youth, and that he would come into a connection with a serial killer later in his life. What are the odds of that? But I wouldn't ask Argento that question. His appreciation of statistics and odds is probably just as low as his appreciation of logic. A thing I noticed in Argento's movies: the soundtrack, though original and interesting, in many scenes doesn't fit the action and sometimes doesn't even fit the genre.

Tenebre marks Argento's transition to mediocrity.

It features a neat premise, rather fresh back then, a few sly bits, decent main performances, and yet for the first time the Master seems incapable of working his old magic.

A sequence halfway through sums it up: a minor character's demise is depicted in an excruciatingly long set-piece, clocking at little less than ten minutes, with a chase, a couple of dog attacks and the coup de grace by an axe-wielding killer. It's strangely toothless stuff and, apart for the use of Argento's trademark "killer POV camera", lacking any particular visual flair.

Quite interesting on a meta level is a moment where the main character, a writer, awkwardly defends himself against allegations of misogyny caused by the treatment of female characters in his works - allegations repeatedly faced by Argento himself in his career.

5,5/10