Dario Argento Panico

The footage of a young Dario Argento in Dario Argento Panico provides an amusing contrast to the old maestro he is now (he is 83). The acclaimed but notorious Italian director of such gory fever dreams as Suspiria and The Stendhal Syndrome definitely had a lean and hungry look in his ‘70s-‘80s prime, a tense and intense face (slap a mustache on him back then and you had Poe) topped by history’s goofiest mullet. Now he has filled out, wrinkled and grayed, and looks like the grandfather he is, but his eyes remain haunted. (The same is true of present-day Werner Herzog.) Argento’s fans may be disappointed with his output in the last decade or so, but he’s still recognizably the same man who turned murder into beauty in Suspiria. He still has some wild magickal darkness in his aura.

Panico is more or less a standard talking-heads tribute to Argento, who is seen here checking into a fancy hotel to work on a new script, just like the old days. He sits for director Simone Scafidi (who also made a doc about Argento peer Lucio Fulci), as do some of Argento’s family, collaborators, friends, and fans. Not just any fans, of course — Scafidi lands international cult directors Guillermo del Toro, Nicholas Winding Refn, and Gaspar Noé, who directed Argento in 2021’s drama Vortex. It’s del Toro who tees up the best Argento quote of the evening: “Everything in Argento’s movies is trying to kill you.” Yes, indeed, especially if you’re a woman.

Yes, Argento routinely contrived epically horrific deaths for many female characters, and even “played” their murderer’s hands on more than one occasion. He himself claimed he wanted to get across how terrible the violence was. Well. The social part of him may have said and believed that, but the artist side of him didn’t care, it scratched some deep dark itch. Given that his daughter Asia points out how many times a girl or woman is front and center in his films, whose terror and vulnerability against a ghastly killer are always heightened and taken very seriously, I doubt Argento hates women. He talks about watching his photographer mother take pictures of the leading models and actresses of the day. Mom made female beauty pop; son makes it bleed. This, the movie shows us, is a man about whom his daughters and even his ex-wife speak fondly. Like many other artists, he obeys Flaubert’s advice to “be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

The documentary mostly deals with Argento’s peak and greatest hits. It finds time to mention his atypical Five Days of Milan, but passes over late-period Argento like Giallo and Dracula (Argento and I are probably the only ones who liked that one) in respectful silence. There have been a number of other film profiles of Argento; the first major one was probably Dario Argento’s World of Horror from 1985. This one takes its title from the emotion Argento wants to throttle out of the viewer — not just fear or horror but panic, a feeling of powerlessness in a malign universe. Argento wanted to evoke apocalyptic anxiety, and in his best work he did. 

The artist documentary to beat, of course, is Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, though perhaps Zwigoff had the advantage of having unforgettably squirmy material to work with. Simone Scafidi doesn’t unearth any unsavory bits about Argento’s past; this is essentially a puff piece. The anecdotes are informative (though some producer says something I didn’t really get about Argento and Se7en), the analysis often on-target when it comes from ascended fanboy del Toro. (I enjoy hearing him talk movies almost as much as I enjoy his movies.) We can’t escape, though, the inconvenient feeling that the filmmaker Panico celebrates stopped being that filmmaker long ago. Argento could make his late-inning masterpiece. Anything’s possible. I’m certainly rooting for him.

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