Once reserved strictly for B-movie houses and heavily edited for midnight-to-dawn television, horror is situated front and centre in cultural discussion today, whether it be the Monday morning office dissection of The Walking Dead or the Australian government's direction of funding into niche Aussie horror that sells well to overseas markets (Wolf Creek, The Babadook).
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The grandfather of contemporary horror would have to be Italian director Dario Argento, prolific throughout the 70s and 80s, and whose work was the inspiration for the generation of filmmakers our contemporary directors and writers are influenced by today.
If you've seen Wes Craven's Scream, John Carpenter's Halloween films, anything by Tarantino or the Dawn of the Dead series, you'll recognise the shadow Argento's work casts over them.
Argento's earlier influential films are the subject of a season of screenings at the National Film and Sound Archive across the coming month, titled Dario Argento: Horror Maestro.
Born to an Italian film family in 1940, young Dario would have felt the creative influence from film producer father Salvatore Argento and photographer mother Elda. As a high school student in Rome in the 1960s, he was a film critic and even took a job as a columnist for the newspaper, Paese Sera.
Spaghetti Western fans would recognise Argento's early screenwriting, particularly his collaboration with a young Bernardo Bertolucci on the screenplay for the 1968 Sergio Leone film Once Upon a Time in the West.
The gothic horror genre known as 'Giallo' was already well under way before Argento himself sat in the director's chair. Giallo (yellow in Italian) was coined for the yellow-covered detective novels popular in 1930s Italy, and the name was appropriated for not only crime thrillers but also for the horror films popular in post-war Italian cinema, led by directors such as Mario Bava (Black Sunday 1960, Black Sabbath 1963, Bay of Blood 1971).
Argento made his directorial debut in 1970 with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L'Uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo, MA, screening Wednesday, September 20 at 7pm) about a woman possibly being stalked by a serial killer and the artist obsessed with her who becomes an amateur detective – a set of characters and circumstances that would help define his body of work.
Argento's flamboyant stylistic approach and his unflinching experimentation with depicting difficult scenes would immediately draw attention, though it was his fifth film that would make him internationally famous – American horror director John Carpenter (Halloween 1980) cites Argento's 1975 film Deep Red as the reason he became a director.
In the R-rated Deep Red (Profundo Rossi, 1975, screening Friday, September 29 at 8.30pm), inspiration for a generation of copycat slasher films, Brit actor David Hemmings plays as a musician, witness to a murder, who assists the investigations of a beautiful reporter (Daria Nicolodi) and himself becomes a target for the killer.
Deep Red would be Argento's first film with actress Daria Nicolodi, his muse and one-time partner, and mother to their daughter Asia Argento. Asia would become a frequent collaborator both behind and in front of the camera for her father's later works, and go on to become a successful director in her own right, although Australian audiences best know her as the ass-kicking companion to Vin Diesel in xXx, the 2002 debut of Diesel's Xander Cage character.
In 1977, Argento would mix the detective story with the supernatural in Suspiria (R, screening Friday, September 22 at 6pm with a brand new 4K print), with the plot following an American ballet-dancer (Jessica Harper) investigating the mysterious goings-on at the German academy where she is studying, only to uncover murders and the occult roots of the ancient institution.
Argento's Inferno (1980, R, screening Friday, September 22, 8pm) again turns a visiting student into an amateur detectives, this time in Rome and again with witchcraft thought to be the cause of a series of murders. Suspiria and Inferno formed the first two parts of a witchcraft-themed trilogy Argento would only complete much later with 2007's Mother of Tears (not screening as part of this season).
He has been referred to as "Italy's Hitchcock" for his fame as a director of the macabre, and like Hitchcock, Argento made frequent cameos in his own films – although usually unrecognisable as the gloved hands wringing a neck or firing a gun.
His hand would also extend to parental assistance with the works of a younger generation of horror maestros. Argento mentored George A Romero through the writing and production of his 1978 Dawn of the Dead, and wrote the screenplays for Demons and Demons 2 for director Lamberto Bava, son of Giallo director Mario Bava.
Argento's detective story Tenebrae (1982, R, Wednesday, September 27 at 7pm) was influenced by a real-life series of threatening correspondence from a crazed fan upset about Argento's obsession with murdering beautiful women (on screen), while his most internationally known film Phenomena (1985, R, screening Friday, September 29 at 6pm) stars American actress Jennifer Connelly as a young student at a Swiss boarding school with telepathic powers that allow her to control insects. Filmed the year before Connelly would become famous opposite David Bowie in Labyrinth, Connelly was apparently cast because she could hold her creepy-crawly co-stars in her hands without flinching.
The great Dario Argento has himself had a personal hand in this season coming up at NFSA, loaning the 35mm print of Opera (1987, R, screening Wednesday, October 4 at 7pm) from his own private collection. In Opera, Christina Marsillach's operatic understudy falls under the "curse of the Scottish play" when she gets elevated to the lead in a production of Verdi's Macbeth but witnesses the people around her falling victim to a killer who eventually abducts her.
Something of a homage to Phantom of the Opera, Argento was apparently strongly advised against depicting the Verdi opera in his film, lest his own film be cursed. It is anything but, standing out as one of Argento's greater works, and with Quentin Tarantino directly lifting the film's moving bullet shot for his film Kill Bill.
The Argento films also screen at Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art cinema as part of a greater season of Italian horror "Gothic, Giallo, Gore" from September 8 to October 1 (qagoma.qld.gov.au).
Dario Argento: Horror Maestro'season at Arc Cinema. Wednesday September 20 to Wednesday October 4 at National Film and Sound Archive. Tickets from nfsa.gov.au/events.
Cris Kennedy is manager of engagement at the National Film and Sound Archive.
