Tenebre

Peter Neal, an American mystery writer, arrives in Rome to promote his new novel. Someone in the city is copying the murders in his book. What surfaces at the end is the cold joke the film plays on its own genre: the killer is the writer, driven by a sexual humiliation in his past. Dario Argento wrote it after what happened to him in Los Angeles in 1980. An obsessed fan phoned him repeatedly with death threats, saying his films had ruined his life. During the same stay Argento witnessed pointless violence in the city; the idea of killing for nothing came from there. Cinematographer Luciano Tovoli used bright light instead of shadow, producing a cold, stark, semi-futuristic look that deliberately broke from the German Expressionist tradition. The most cited passage is a two-and-a-half minute Louma crane shot travelling around the walls of a house. At the time it was a technical first for Italian cinema. The score came from former Goblin members Claudio Simonetti, Fabio Pignatelli and Massimo Morante, synth-heavy and built on rock and disco. It was cut for violence in Italy and banned in the UK as a video nasty from 1984 to 1999. A heavily edited 1984 American release under the title Unsane was savaged by critics. Today it is counted among Argento's best. Who it is for: viewers who like giallo and the visual manner of eighties Italian cinema. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by the volume of violence against women. On that count this is one of the most argued-over examples in its genre.