Cold Love: Dario Argento's Guide to Getting It On

Above: Making love by proxy in CAT O' NINE TAILS

Holding its own against the grisliest and most eye-catching of Argento’s graphic on-screen murders, CAT O' NINE TAILS (1971) also showcases a stunningly artificial sex scene which ranks among the most subversive and blackly comic depictions of human passion in cinema history. Seemingly influenced by meticulously staged magazine advertisement photography, the below stills do justice to the uncannily frozen quality of pristine shallowness that overlays the interaction…I don’t think I’ve ever seen hairstyles do so much acting before or since. In 'The Future' (i.e., any present whose technological developments are at the turning-point of decadently outpacing their usefulness to the very culture that created them), this is what all sex will be like...

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The Light Phantasmagoric: Dario Argento's "The Mother of Tears"

Argento’s newest, The Mother of Tears (2007), suffers a dearth of atmosphere compared to many of Argento’s earlier films (I would use 1977’s Suspiria—the first in a 30-year-long trilogy that Mother bookends—as the cut-off point for his earlier works). This fact might lead viewers to wonder if Argento is getting a tad generic in his old age. Luckily, the nebulous Italian Horror category (I won’t trip down the pitfall of calling it a proper genre though I would defend that the system produced films with a strong vein of recognizable similarities) is a uniquely odd bedrock foundation from which to atrophy into the generic while still maintaining interesting passages.

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