Deep Red
Deep Red, also known as The Hatchet Murders, is a 1975 Italian giallo film directed by Dario Argento and co-written by Argento and Bernardino Zapponi. It stars David Hemmings as a musician who investigates a series of murders performed by a mysterious figure wearing black leather gloves. The cast also stars Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia, Macha Méril, and Clara Calamai. The film's score was composed and performed by Goblin, the first in a long-running collaboration with Argento.
The film was released during the height of the "giallo craze" of Italian popular cinema, and was a critical and commercial success. Retrospective reviews have been equally positive, and the film is considered one of the genre's definitive entries, as well as one of Argento's best works.
Plot
In 1956, during Christmas at a family home, an unseen figure stabs another to death. A bloody knife falls to the floor at the feet of a child.Twenty years later in Rome, Professor Giordani chairs a parapsychology conference featuring psychic medium Helga Ulmann. Helga is suddenly overwhelmed by the "twisted, perverted, murderous" thoughts of someone in the audience. Speaking later with Giordani, Helga says she believes she can identify this person, unaware that someone is listening from the shadows.
Later that night, a black-gloved figure invades Helga's apartment and kills her with a meat cleaver. English Jazz pianist Marcus Daly sees the murder from the window as he passes by and rushes to her apartment, finding her mutilated corpse. After the police arrive, Marcus thinks one of the apartment's paintings has disappeared, but he cannot pinpoint what exactly is missing.
The media identifies Marcus as the eyewitness and shows reporter Gianna Brezzi's photo of him. The next morning, Marcus visits the home of his heavy-drinking friend, Carlo, but only finds Carlo's eccentric mother Martha, who seems interested in Marcus. That night, the killer plays a recording of a child's song outside Marcus's door; he manages to lock the door before the person can enter, but he hears the gruff whisper, "I'll kill you sooner or later." Feeling guilty for endangering him by taking his photo, Gianna begins helping Marcus investigate.
Marcus tells Giordani, whom he met at Helga's funeral, about the encounter. Giordani, noting that Helga also mentioned hearing child's song during her vision, recalls a book of modern folklore describing a local haunted house where a child's song is sometimes heard. Marcus finds the folklore book at the library. He rips out a picture of the house and plans to learn more by visiting the book's author, Amanda Righetti. However, the killer, who has been watching Marcus, attacks Amanda and drowns her in scalding water before Marcus arrives.
Marcus uses the photo from the book to find the huge, abandoned house. Under sheetrock he uncovers a disturbing mural: a child holding a bloody knife over a dead body. After he leaves, a loose chunk of sheetrock falls away, revealing another figure in the drawing. Meanwhile, Giordani, who has been assisting Marcus's investigation, is murdered by the killer after being distracted by a large mechanized doll.
Continuing his search of the abandoned house, Marcus finds a walled-off room. In the middle of the dusty floor sits a desiccated corpse. Someone knocks Marcus unconscious as he backs away in horror. He awakens outside the house, which is burning. Gianna appears, explaining that she got his message about investigating the house and arrived in time to save him. Marcus and Gianna wait for the police in the house of the caretaker, whose daughter has drawn a picture identical to the hidden mural Marcus found in the house. She tells him she saw the picture in the archives of the local school.
Marcus and Gianna immediately go to the school and find the picture, which proves to be the childhood work of Marcus's friend Carlo. Gianna leaves to call the police and encounters Carlo, who stabs her. Pursued by Marcus and the police, Carlo runs into the dark street and is hit by a garbage truck, which snags his clothing and drags him until an oncoming car runs over his head. Gianna is hospitalized and survives the stabbing.
Marcus remembers that on the night of Helga's murder he met an utterly intoxicated Carlo coming from a different direction than the killing, meaning that Carlo couldn't have been the killer. Returning to Helga's apartment, Marcus has an epiphany: the supposed painting he saw on the night of the murder, and was subsequently unable to find, was really the killer's reflection in a mirror. As Marcus realizes he saw Martha, Carlo's mother, she appears behind him with a meat cleaver. Martha explains that after her husband said he would re-commit her to an insane asylum, she murdered him in front of the young Carlo. She walled off the room containing his body. Carlo, scarred psychologically, compulsively drew the scene as a youth and as an adult tried to repress the memory of the homicide with alcohol: he attacked Marcus and Gianna to protect his murderous mother from their investigation.
Martha attacks Marcus and wounds him with the cleaver. After Martha's necklace tangles in the bars of the building's elevator, Marcus sends the elevator down, decapitating her.
Cast
Background
Deep Red represented Argento's return to the horror genre after an attempted breakaway with the historical dramedy The Five Days. It was his last giallo film before Tenebre, which was produced years after the genre's heyday.The film was also his first collaboration with actress Daria Nicolodi, with whom he would begin a relationship during this film, and progressive rock band Goblin, who composed and performed the film score. Argento would collaborate with Nicolodi five more times, and Goblin or its frontman Claudio Simonetti ten more times. Nicolodi would also co-write the screenplay for Suspiria.
Production
The film was shot mainly on-location in Turin in sixteen weeks. Additional scenes were shot in Rome and Perugia. Argento chose Turin because at the time there were more practising Satanists there than in any other European city, excluding Lyon. He had previously shot parts of The Cat o' Nine Tails in the city. Filming locations included Piazza C.L.N., Santa Costanza Church and Teatro Carignano. Argento would later revisit Carignano 25 years later in Sleepless. The "House of the Screaming Child" was Villa Scott, a historical villa owned at the time by a convent of nuns and operated as a boarding school.Argento's original working title for the film was La Tigre dei Denti a Sciabola, matching the "animal" motif of his previous gialli.
Co-writer Bernardino Zapponi said the inspiration for the murder scenes came from him and Argento thinking of painful injuries to which the audience could relate, as the pain of being stabbed or shot is outside the experience of most viewers. Their original screenplay ran approximately 500 pages, but after it was deemed unfilmable, Argento shortened it to 321. The use of a psychic medium originated from an early draft of Four Flies on Grey Velvet.
The close-up shots of the killer's hands, clad in black leather gloves, were performed by director Dario Argento himself. Argento was convinced that having all the killing scenes performed by himself would be quicker and easier than teaching the moves to an actor, who would require endless re-takes to perform everything to the director's satisfaction. The film's special effects, which include several mechanically operated heads and body parts, were created and executed by Carlo Rambaldi.
As was common in Italian filmmaking at the time, Deep Red was shot without sync sound, and all dialogue was dubbed in post-production. The screenplay was written in both Italian and English, all actors except for Clara Calamai spoke in English. The Italian dub cast included Isa Bellini, Wanda Tettoni, and Corrado Gaipa. The English dub cast included Cyril Cusack, Ted Rusoff, Carolyn De Fonseca, Geoffrey Copleston, Michael Forest, and Edward Mannix. David Hemmings dubbed himself.
Release
Deep Red was released in Milan and Rome in Italy on 7 March 1975.In the United States, the film first premiered in New York City on 9 June 1976 and saw a wide theatrical release
on 11 June 1976 by the defunct US independent film distributor Howard Mahler Films. The film was once again re-released
and re-titled in the US on 18 January 1980, as The Hatchet Murders, and again in 1982 as The Phantom of Terror. Unlike Argento's previous features, the film did not have a wide cinema release in the UK. The 1982 video release on Fletcher Video was uncertificated. The first formal submission to the BBFC for classification was made by Redemption Films for their VHS release in 1993. It was passed 18 with 11s of cuts, and reframing on 03/12/1993.
Critical reception
The film holds a 93% approval rating on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 29 reviews with an average rating of 8.1/10. The site's consensus reads: "The kinetic camerawork and brutal over-the-top gore that made Dario Argento famous is on full display, but the addition of a compelling, complex story makes Deep Red a masterpiece." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 89 out of 100 based on 7 critic reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". One negative review upon the film's original American release came from Vincent Canby in The New York Times, who referred to the film as a "bucket of ax-murder-movie cliches" and called Dario Argento "a director of incomparable incompetence."From retrospective reviews, Kim Newman wrote in the Monthly Film Bulletin that Deep Red was a transitional work for Argento between his earlier whodunit plots and the more supernatural themed films. Newman concluded that Deep Red is "nothing if not an elaborate mechanism, with the camera crawling among objets trouvés" and "what sets Argento apart from imitators like Lucio Fulci is his combination of genuine pain and self-mocking humour" Total Film gave the film four stars out of five, noting that Argento's films "can be an acquired taste; it's necessary to attune yourself with the horror director's style in order to get the most from his movies." The review stated that the film "presents some striking visual compositions that raise it above the level of the usual subgenre offerings." and that the film was "A great introduction to Dario Argento's evolving style of horror". The A.V. Club wrote, "Operating under the principle that a moving camera is always better than a static one – and not above throwing in a terrifying evil doll – Deep Red showcases the technical bravado and loopy shock tactics that made Argento famous." AllMovie compared the film to other in Argento's work, noting that the film script was "significantly stronger and the actors much better" AllMovie noted that "Each of the murders is perfectly choreographed with particular praise going to Glauco Mauri's killing" and that "The final reel wraps the film up in a thrilling manner and features two extremely graphic deaths that leave the viewer stunned as the credits roll"
Quentin Tarantino described being "rattled" by the movie as a teenager, and picked it as one of his favorite horror movies.