Profondo Rosso - European Horror and the Giallo

This is my reaction to "Profondo Rosso", a European Horror film that belongs more specifically to the sub-genre of the Giallo. In case you're unfamiliar with the Giallo style of movies, here's a little background on it:

http://www.kinoeye.org/02/11/needham11.php

The "Gialli" are an Italian style of horror movie, centering principally on a detective-solving-a-murder plot and often containing very gory scenes. The name comes from the Italian word for "yellow" and refers to the color of the covers of Italian horror serials published in the 1920s and '30s.

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Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso or Deep Red is a classic example of European Horror, and in particular the sub-genre of the Giallo. According to Maitland McDonagh’s "Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento", Deep Red is definitely a Giallo in that it is a “psychological/detective thriller whose overt concerns are the mechanics of crime and punishment; however this film’s particular style leans closer to the “serie noir”, in which the two stories (the first being the initial murder which sets the events of the film in motion, and the second being the unraveling of the case itself) are fused together (McDonagh 5). The movie opens with a murder scene: we see someone get stabbed, and the feet of a nearby witness, who is obviously a child. The next big event is the fate of a German clairvoyant; after she psychically identifies the presence of a murderer in the audience of her press conference, she is followed back to her apartment and brutally murdered, presumably by the same person who committed the murder in the opening scene.

The rest of the story follows one Marc Daly, a pianist, who witnesses the crime while hanging out in a downstairs courtyard with his friend Carlo. After picking up on something that the police don’t notice, he teams up with Gianna, a female journalist he meets at the crime scene, and the unlikely pair spend the remainder of the movie trying to solve the mystery of the perpetrator’s identity. Marc cleverly notices that a certain song (a child singing, or a children’s record maybe) is always playing when these murders are committed. His friend the Professor (also a friend of the dead psychic Helga) makes the ingenious connection that the song must have played a crucial role in the murderer’s childhood, and has had a lasting psychological impact on him or her. We find out at the end of the film that the killer is Carlo’s mother. Notably, we discover that the song which heralded the murders was actually a children’s record; Carlo had put it on immediately beforehand, and it played throughout his experience of witnessing the death of his father at the hands of his mother. McDonagh makes note of the extensive use of music in Deep Red, yet he doesn’t really touch on this aspect of it (McDonagh 9-10). From this reading, we are meant to understand that music plays an integral part in the Giallo, which it definitely does in this case. He mentions the importance of diegetic music in the film, especially the jazz which both Marc and Carlo play, but doesn’t discuss this particular plot device (which is actually really important and kind of central to the story).

Ultimately, I did enjoy the film, although I thought it was a little slow-moving in parts. The scene in which Marc is chipping away the plaster which covers the drawing on the wall seemed to take FOREVER, and the fact that it dragged on didn’t really seem to increase the suspense. My favorite aspect was the mystery of the killer: several red herrings are thrown in, such as the fact that the killer wears thick black eyeliner (but so do almost all the main characters), and also that we are led to believe that Amanda Righetti (who has written a book about the event shown in the opening scene) is the child who witnessed (committed?) the murder years ago, now grown up. Of course, we find out she’s not the killer once she’s murdered, but the ruse is entertaining anyway. I also think (and we discussed this in class) that the goriness of the murders and the fakeness of the red blood detract from the scariness or the horror of the story. This gory, bloody mess is also a characteristic of the Giallo (as evidenced by the films of not only Argento but also of his mentor Mario Bava (McDonagh 6)), but because the horror in this film is so explicit I found much of it to be ineffective (or at least, it smacked strongly of B-movieness).

Overall I think this movie is a good choice to show as a model for the Giallo; it was interesting and seemed to conform to all the characteristics of the genre. From the reading we get the impression that it is probably one of the better films within this class of horror and I’m glad I got the chance to see this movie rather than one of Argento’s other works such as Tenebre or Suspiria .