Gateway Cinephiles

3-Minute Intro: Deep Red (Profondo Rosso)

Screened: October 16, 2008
Format: DVD - Blue Underground (2007)
HorrorFest 2008

Dario Argento’s brutal 1975 thriller, Deep Red, also known as The Hatchet Murders, is a film balanced on the threshold between the acclaimed director’s work in the lurid Italian genre known as giallo and his more surreal, supernatural films. Often considered the finest giallo ever made, and allegedly Argento’s favorite among all the works in his filmography, Deep Red features a bloody excess in its violence that few films dare to exhibit. After achieving significant fame in Italy with his “animal trilogy” of more traditional giallo films–The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o’Nine Tails, and Four Flies on Grey Velvet–Argento crafted Deep Red as a gruesome serial killer tale, replete with his trademark sequences of shocking death.

For his lead perfromer, Agento deferred from his usual fondness for unknowns and genre fixtures and selected 1960s English cinema icon David Hemmings. Introduced to the stage as a boy soprano, Hemmings worked in opera and the British theater, before he was eventually discovered by Michelangelo Antonioni. The famed Italian auteur cast Hemmings opposite Vanessa Redgrave in his art film / murder mystery masterwork, Blowup. Hemmings went on to star in a succession of prestigious 1960s British features such as Camelot, Charge of the Light Bridge, and Alfred the Great, while also dabbling in cult films such as Barberella and a pop music career. Deep Red captures Hemmings at the trailing edge of his career before the camera, prior to his transformation into a prolific director of American television in the 1980s, on action series such as The A-Team, Magnum P.I., and Airwolf.

In keeping with Agento’s signature style, Deep Red favors elaborate, often surreal production design and unconventional camera work. The plot, such as it is, is secondary to the director’s fussiness over scenes of elaborate murder and his thematic obsession with memory and secret knowledge. Deep Red highlights Argento’s preference for visceral violence to which his audience could relate. Rather than gunshots, his characters suffer bludgeonings, slashings, burns, falls, and similar grisly dooms. The film also contains numerous literary and artistic allusions, which Argento constructs with an emerging eye for bold lighting design and unusual camera placement.