Rating: ★★★

Dario Argento is an Italian director who has gained a cult following for his horror films. Most of these fall into the Giallo Film – although later works branch away somewhat – and feature a series of directorially extravagant psycho-thrillers that make a virtue of stylishly shot sadistic deaths. The Argento cult rests on the series of horror films he made throughout the 1970s and 80s with the likes of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat O’Nine Tails (1971), Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), Deep Red (1976), Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980), Tenebrae (1982), Phenomena/Creepers (1985) and Opera (1987). After that period, Argento continued to make a series of uneven films with the likes of Two Evil Eyes (1990), Trauma (1993), The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), The Phantom of the Opera (1998), Sleepless (2001), The Card Player (2004), Mother of Tears: The Third Mother (2007), Giallo (2009), Dracula (2012) and Black Glasses (2022).

Dario Argento Panico was the second documentary about an Italian horror director made by Simone Scafidi, who had previously made Fulci for Fake (2019). Panico is a more straightforward documentary than Fulci for Fake. Its’ subject is still alive, for one, and Scafidi follows Argento as he goes on retreat to a hotel. By contrast, Lucio Fulci, the subject of Fulci for Fake, has been dead for some twenty years when Scafidi made that film and he was forced to create scenes using an actor playing Fulci. The title ‘panico’ incidentally refers to a line where Argento states that he wants to induce in an audience not a sense of fear but of panic.

The film shows Argento at around the age of 81-2. At the beginning of a film, we follow him as he goes into seclusion at a hotel to work on a script for a film – it is not clear if that film is his most recent one Black Glasses or not. He does appear somewhat cranky in his old age, complaining about the length of the car trip to get there and that the hotel is not as secluded and alone as he would like it.

Dario Argento Panico takes a chronological journey through Argento’s life and films. Argento tells us about growing up with a mother who was a fashion photographer, from whom he developed the love of posing beautiful women, and a father who was a well-connected film producer. Argento confesses to discovering his enjoyment of perverse love stories as a result of watching the Claude Rains Phantom of the Opera (1943). We see a copy of the first ever work he wrote in his brief career as a journalist – a ballet review (because nobody else on the paper wanted to cover ballet).

As we move onto his films, we get a mix of behind-the-scenes footage and sporadic clips from the films, interspersed with memories and observations from Argento and others. Argento tells how nobody was expecting his first film The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to be a hit until it suddenly earned two million in US release. Star Tony Musante had argued with him on set, regarding him as an ingénue, and then suddenly changed his mind. Argento then made his trilogy of animal-titled films because someone has suggested that films with animals in the title were successes. His wife at the time Maria Casale rather amusingly tells how she turned to Argento after watching Four Flies on Grey Velvet and noting the similarity between her and lead actress Mimsy Farmer and demanded to know what she had done wrong to be depicted like that.

We pass through his tv series Doors Into Darkness (1973), which made Argento into a recognisable figure because of his fronting and introducing the series (even though it only lasted four episodes). It is discussed how Argento’s non-horror film The Five Days (1973) flopped at the box-office, which cemented his certainty that horror was the genre he should stay with. We then move into the huge success of Suspiria and his collaboration with the late Daria Nicolodi – daughter Asia tells how Suspiria was birthed by the backgrounds of both Dario and Daria and how both parents claimed it was theirs. (This becomes one of the frustrations of Panico in that it often skips over scenes – one wishes it could have gone back and the interviewer pressed Asia to elaborate what she meant there).

The film does briefly touch upon what is generally perceived as Argento’s decline from the late-1980s onwards. Various reasons are mentioned – the changing nature of the Italian film industry, that most films are now made by the theatrical arm of Rai television meaning that works are censored for tv viewing – without fully getting to grips with the reasons (and certainly with no input on Argento’s part). These latter day efforts are skipped over in the discussion of Argento’s films more so than his earlier works are with the dread Dracula not being mentioned at all.

There is quite a bit of time spent on Argento’s private life. We meet his ex-wife Maria Casales, his sister and two daughters Fiore and Asia. A reasonable amount of time is spent on family dynamics. Asia opens about her father casting her in his films and talks at length about her feelings about such – she once accused him only giving birth to her so that he could have a lead actress – and how they fell out for several years because she didn’t star in The Card Player due to her commitments to directing her own film. She states that her best film with her father was The Stendahl Syndrome but even then felt trepidation about some of the extreme things she was being asked to do. Argento also talks briefly about having a double that impersonated him and a stalker.

The other interviewees are of interest. Nicolas Winding Refn seems effusive in his proclamation of Argento as an artist. The most literate is Guillermo Del Toro, who alludes to Argento’s films operating akin to magic – that state this is how things are without offering any real explanation – and of how Argento creates an insane and malevolent universe.

Earlier documentaries had been produced about Dario Argento with Dario Argento’s World of Horror (1985) and Dario Argento: An Eye for Horror (2001).

Trailer here