film

Film Review: Tenebrae

Now that I’m caught up with the most recent anime reviews, it’s time to get back to the horror with some Dario Argento, and him returning to a more… conventional Giallo with Tenebrae. There will be some spoilers for a 20+ year old movie

If you were to ask me “What would Dario Argento doing a Stephen King pastiche as a Giallo look like”, Tenebrae might be it. The movie is focused around a mystery-horror author, Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa), coming to Rome to promote his new book, only for a series of murders to occur that connect with some of his past work. Neal and the police each take different approaches to solve the case, while demons from Neal’s past start to rear their ugly head.

What Tenebrae doesn’t have, is an author getting caught up in horrific events through trying to overcome writers block, and it also doesn’t have Maine. But what it does have is writers and the connection between them and their work. What makes it a little odd is that Tenebrae is more willing to be condemnatory than other horror writers when it comes to this topic.

By way of explanation – in most works of horror fiction, when there’s a horror writer as a major character, and a critic or reporter or politician challenges them by saying “Does the bloody murder and misogyny within your work reflect a personal violent and misogynist streak?” the writer character refutes it, and goes on to be the person who solves the murders or stops them because of the insight provided by their experience as a writer (in a way we’re getting a little of that in the Alan Wake Where I Play). By comparison, in Tenebrae, the writer character refutes the challenge, and then the plot bears out that actually the work does reflect a violent and misogynist streak by the author – leading to them becoming a second killer.

What makes this particularly notable is that, well, it’s Argento. The work Neal is being criticized for, and leads to him becoming a second killer, after we learn Neal’s work is him channeling his own murderous impulses, is in Argento’s genre. To be clear, I don’t think is this some case of Argento being self-aware and outing himself as some sort of closeted killer. Rather, it feels like Argento has a degree of awareness of how far some of his peers will go (like Lucio Fulci – someone loses a limb in their murder sequence here, but there’s nothing near Fulci’s love for eye trauma), and while he isn’t taking a shot at them, it almost feels self-congratulatory for not going as far as Fulci in his own filmography (though ironically this film ended up on the Prosecuted Video Nasty list, while The Beyond ended up on the non-prosecuted list alongside Inferno).

Daria Nicoldini in Tenebrae

Otherwise, the cast is generally pretty good, Franciosa does a good job of building up the mystery as to his own murderous side. Also, John Saxon does a tremendous job of playing Neal’s sleazy scumbag agent, and Daria Nicolodi is great as Neal’s assistant.

I did enjoy the movie, but I think if you want a more traditional Giallo from Argento, I’d recommend going with Deep Red first.

Tenebrae is available from Amazon.com – buying anything through that link supports the site.

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