| Popis: |
This article examines three of Dario Argento’s supernatural horror films (Suspiria, Phenomena, and Dark Glasses) and their use of fairy tale imagery and narratives, which distinguishes them from murder-mystery-oriented giallo films. In them, Argento locates his characters, rather than in urban environments, in rural spaces (forests, fields, mountains) where the supernatural elements of their stories blossom. Suspiria represents a primarily aesthetic exploration of parallels between fairy tales and contemporary horror, while Phenomena uses these two modes to examine the conflict between the rational and irrational, the natural and the supernatural. Dark Glasses initially appears to be one of his more traditional gialli, but it abandons these tropes with a simplified plot evoking the story of “Little Red Riding Hood”; this shift is accomplished by moving the action of the film out of Rome and into the dark forests of the countryside. Dark Glasses, I argue, therefore represents a self-conscious move to unite in a single film the two major strands of Argento’s filmography and to expose some fundamental elements of his general cinematic approach—namely, the unique capacity of stylized aesthetics and irrational elements to convey the experience of very real, human terror and evil. |
