You Kill Me: The Shadows Of A Genius

Today marks thirty years since the Italian release of one of Dario Argento’s most acclaimed and popular films: Tenebrae. I have posted to this blog many times before about Dario Argento, from writing about his best films (Suspiria, The Stendhal Syndrome) to his not-so-best films (Trauma) to the massive role he has played in shaping my identity as a child in the mid ‘80s and as a teenager in the late ‘90s. In college, I wrote about Dario Argento’s films almost constantly, and not least of all because I felt his body of work was every bit as worthy of dissection and appreciation as that of any other great filmmaker. Yet while Hitchcock and Kubrick and Godard were all the rage during my film school years, Argento’s appreciation seemed limited to the horror aficionados—and even then, it was primarily limited to Suspiria.

This (slightly revised) piece was one of two essays that I wrote about Tenebrae during my first year of college. I was a nineteen year old movie snob, and the filmmakers whom I was most passionate about were all Italian and all relegated to the “horror film” ghetto by most of academia. Both of my Tenebrae essays were intended to introduce my professors to the film in the hopes that they might one day incorporate it into their curriculum, if not their movie collections. I have no idea if that would ever go on to be the case for my professors, but I hope that it could still be the case for some of you. 

Robert Jeffrey 2/26/01

MA101: History of the Media Arts Part II

                                    Dario Argento’s Tenebrae: Art as Exploitation

When it comes to contemporary exploitation cinema, most American viewers will immediately think of one genre: The Horror Movie. Different viewers might have different interpretations of how horror films exploit. Some would say they exploit women. Others would say that they exploit violence. Many would say that they exploit American youth, who over the past several decades have consistently expressed interest in the most controversial (and most underappreciated) of film genres.

Over the past several years, a number of the genre’s most prominent “exploitation films” have finally been recognized for their artistic merit. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is a permanent resident of The Museum of Modern Art. I Spit On Your Grave (1978) has been reevaluated by critics and sociologists. Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Halloween (1978) are now held in the same regard as Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest works. Over the past two years, the films of Italian horror legend Dario Argento have enjoyed similar rediscovery and reevaluation. Since the release of several of his films uncut (for the first time ever in America) on laserdisc in the Fall of 1998, he has finally begun to be appreciated as one of the finest filmmakers of our time, if not of all time.

Although long dubbed “the Italian Hitchcock”, Dario Argento’s body of work has often been regarded as “exploitation” as a result of  its graphic violence. Despite an ever growing legion of devoted fans around the globe, some horror aficionados don’t quite know how to interpret his work. The strict “gorehounds” rarely appreciate the multiple layers of psychology within the confines of his films. Yet many intellectual viewers are unable to get past Argento’s lack of interest in the widely accepted mechanics of “fine filmmaking”. In addition to expressing a disregard for actors, he offers that the actual “mystery” in his mystery films should not be the emphasis of the viewing experience. “We don’t solve mysteries in real life, why should we do it in films? Motivation doesn’t matter to me very much…I’m interested in seeing what goes on in people’s minds..the psychology” (McDonagh 245). Chris Gallant, editor of the book Art of Darkness: The Cinema of Dario Argento, offers that such a daringly different brand of filmmaking is exactly why people continue to explore, and attempt to understand, his filmography. “Perhaps more than anything else, what seems to invite analysis is the placement of this body of work on an overlap between European art cinema and a genre labeled ‘Exploitation’. These films disrupt what is so often perceived as an inflexible divide between the artistic and commercial, high and low art, forcing a surprisingly easy cohesion between the two” (Gallant 7).

 Dario Argento’s 1982 film Tenebrae is, upon initial viewing, a fairly straightforward mystery/thriller. Peter Neal (American television star Anthony Franciosa) is a hugely successful American writer of horror novels. When Peter Neal arrives in Rome to promote his latest book, Tenebrae, a series of murders are committed which seem to have been lifted from the pages of Neal’s latest work. With each murder, the killer sends a passage of the novel to Peter Neal, enticing the author to investigate himself. As Neal is drawn deeper into the mystery of uncovering the killer’s identity, the body count mounts, and Neal himself becomes the final target of the maniac’s killing spree. Tenebrae is effective as a mystery, as a thriller, and as a horror movie. But it is the psychological subtext which invites repeat viewings and continued analysis. This is what sets it apart from the (seemingly) similar thrillers that lack its symbolism and nihilistic wit.

A large part of Dario Argento’s appeal to fans is often used by his detractors to criticize him: the hyper-stylization inherent in his filmmaking. Within the Argento canon, Tenebrae could almost be described as one of Argento’s realistic efforts, although “gritty crime drama” it is not. One of the most controversial and thoroughly Hitchcockian aspects of Argento’s genius is his ability to portray graphic violence with the glamour and sensuality that most directors would apply to a romantic scene. The most striking and disquieting example of this in Tenebrae is the film’s most graphically violent scene, in which a woman’s upper arm is chopped off by an axe. The scene is not portrayed with the realistic attempts of a contemporary horror movie. Nor does it boast the outrageousness of Herschell Gordon Lewis drive-in fare, or the exploitive violence of gruesome slasher films. Instead, the depiction is far more terrifying in its spectacle: the camera pans to follow the character, blood literally painting the bleach white wall beside her as she slowly and fruitlessly backs away from her killer. The overtly seductive audience appeal in Argento’s murder sequences, particularly this one, make the acts of violence all the more disturbing. The portrayal is so fluid, and so effectively woven into the canvas of the viewing experience, that the audience is not inclined to look away. The audience may potentially find itself riveted by the hypnotic depiction of violent death in Argento’s world, a stark contrast to the more realistic depictions of violence that audiences are generally more accustomed to. Argento’s deviant delight in toying with his audience’s psyche injects each viewing experience with a thread of black humor, present to varying extents in every one of his films.

It could be argued that since 1970, when Dario Argento made his directorial debut with The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, no other director has been quite as influential as he has been in the use of telling a story first and foremost with the camera. The films of such directors as John Carpenter, Brian DePalma, David Fincher, and The Wachowski Brothers have all evidenced Argento’s influence, often using the benefits of bigger budgets to expand upon Argento’s innovations. In addition to a number of devices used to generate suspense and shock, Tenebrae boasts two very simple yet seminal techniques that have served to define Argento’s style. One is the film’s famous “louma crane sequence”. It begins with a shot of a woman looking outside of the window of her house. The camera pans up, gliding across the second story, peering into the windows of the house, before settling on the window of the woman’s lover. The camera begins to move in, before pulling back and panning up again. The camera moves over the roof, and then moves down, looking into the windows of the other side of the house. It finally settles on the ground floor, where the killer is breaking into the home. All of this is caught on film in one uninterrupted shot that lasts for more than two minutes. On paper, the sequence reads like a classic suspense setup. However, the rebellious Argento instead uses it as a means of taking the viewer’s mind in a completely different direction. Rather than attempt to generate suspense here, he chooses to throw a cinematic curveball, in which for no apparent reason the viewer explores the house in which the next killing is about to take place. The scene adds to the film’s stylishness, but furthermore it pulls the viewer into the film’s twisted landscape. A similar concept would be revisited—much more elaborately and with the benefit of CGI effects—in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999).

Another one of Argento’s innovations is put to use in the film’s final ten minutes. In this scene, the killer is in an apartment crouching near the body of the final victim when two characters walk in to discover both of them there. Argento shot a master shot of this encounter using a static camera. The three characters fill up the entire 1.85:1 frame, with sparing cuts to close ups, making the confines of the location seem even tighter than they already are. The frightening effect of this is heightened by the darkness of the room and the pouring rain outside, as this is one of the few set pieces in the film not set in broad daylight. Here, Argento creates tension amongst the three characters so tangible that it is almost unbearable. This claustrophobic encounter may well have been mimicked in the classic Hong Kong action film City on Fire (1987), which according to legend inspired similar scenes in the Quentin Tarantino films Reservoir Dogs (1992), True Romance (1993), and Pulp Fiction (1994).

Among the most striking (and famous) of Tenebrae’s many artistic merits is the film’s fluorescent, washed out visual scheme, courtesy of legendary Italian director of photography Luciano Tovoli. Dario Argento had previously collaborated with Tovoli in 1977 for his most famous film, Suspiria. In that film, Tovoli utilized an outdated Technicolor film process to achieve a kaleidoscopic array of vivid colors that added tremendously to the film’s terrifyingly dreamlike surrealism (McDonagh 144). In Tenebrae, Argento wanted something more much more realistic. Argento was attracted to “American television series like Columbo and Charlie’s Angels...people spit on this kind of police show, but personally I find in them a very precise aesthetic..[with a style] which is deranged by way of its directness” (McDonagh 171). In Italian, “tenebrae” is translated as “darkness” or “shadow” (McDonagh 163). As such, the use of harsh lighting and a washed out cinematographic process to add to the film’s super-brightness serves as an inventive juxtaposition. Argento has often pointed out that this aesthetic underlines the title being a reference to spiritual, rather than literal, darkness (World of Horror). But it also illustrates a consistent defiance of convention, something which marks so many of Argento’s so-called “horror” films.

Equally interesting is the fact that Dario Argento chose not to display any of Rome’s defining landmarks in the film. Maitland McDonagh, author of Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, noted that Tenebrae “takes place in a Rome that has no past: there are no shots of the Colosseum, the Trevi fountain, classical statuary, Renaissance paintings or churches..[the film] takes place in a city of dazzling white concrete. It’s all cool, stark, and slightly remote” (McDonagh 166). Argento’s choice of harsh lighting and ambiguous architecture serves to complement the lesser known fact that the film is set several years in the future—though the viewer is never made aware of this. “Tenebre occurs in a world inhabited by fewer people, with the results that the remainder are wealthier and less crowded. Something has happened to make it that way, but no one remembers, or wants to remember” (McDonagh 166). With this knowledge, the viewer can recognize the common theme that runs throughout the film: underneath a sunny façade, everyone hides dark secrets that can come back to haunt them.

Dario Argento has never been apt to employ traditional scare tactics. His debut, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, drew immediate comparison to Alfred Hitchcock because it demonstrated Argento’s ability to generate classical suspense that the Master himself would be proud of. His subsequent works are arguably even more Hitchcockian, though this has less to do with their style than with their approach to Hitchcock’s favorite instrument of terror: the human mind.  This is most apparent in Tenebrae, where the secrets hidden and the guilt  lived with serve to bring about the downfall of the film’s characters. Wrote Maitland McDonough, “in the gloom one can hide what one wants to reject, what one doesn’t dare show. But we are ill at ease in the harsh glare. We have everything right in front of us” (McDonagh 171). Thus the “darkness” of the title is not found in the exteriors of the film’s locations, but rather in the interiors of the killer’s soul. “Tenebre is about a very modern kind of horror; not monsters, not witches, but the horror of a twisted mind” (McDonagh 244).

Using the knowledge gained by the revelation of the killer’s identity in the final minutes of the film, the viewer can abandon “the whodunit experience” and go back to more closely observe the twisted mind of the film’s killer. To explore the psychology of Tenebrae, one must know the identity of the film’s killer, but to spoil the ending of this film for the uninitiated would be a disservice to any true fan of cinema. Tenebrae boasts one of the most brilliant identity revelations in film history, on par with the shocking finale of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Yet what makes Tenebrae stand out is that the killer’s identity works so beautifully into the canvas of the film’s psychology—it’s as if the whole movie were leading the viewer to an understanding of a deranged mind before we know whose mind it is. To guess the identity of the killer, one need not put the pieces of a puzzle together, as in conventional murder mysteries. Rather, the viewer must attempt to fully understand the psychology of the killer in order to predict a conclusion that is genuinely shocking yet perfectly rational.

The reason that Tenebrae could be placed into the exploitation subgenre has less to do with the film itself than with its distribution—particularly in America. Although the film premiered in Italy in October of 1982 (Gallant 280), it was not until 1984 that it finally made it to American audiences (McDonagh 165). When it finally opened in limited release, its American distributor, Bedford Entertainment/Film Gallery Inc., had cut the film by more than ten minutes. Violence was censored. Vital exposition was trimmed from the American release along with half of the louma crane shot and even the heel-in-mouth shot. Hoping to cash in on the slasher film craze of the day (rather late in the game, considering how much it had waned since its 1981 heyday), the film was strangely retitled Unsane and promoted as a gory horror movie (McDonagh 165). In 1987, this version of Tenebre was released on home video. Until 1998, American fans not lucky enough to import a Japanese laserdisc had to settle for this bastardized version of the film (Gallant 297).

Aside from its trashy American release, Tenebrae could still easily be mistaken for an exploitation film. It is extremely violent. It does not always adhere to the conventions of mystery/thrillers. And, like most Italian films, it was acted and filmed in English but ALL of its dialogue was dubbed in post-production—and not always by the actors appearing onscreen. Yet despite all of these seemingly defining factors, in the end, it is not Dario Argento who is making “exploitation movies”. Rather, it is the distributors of his films who take his art and sell it as exploitation. Thus far, only a handful of Argento films have played to American audiences in unadulterated form. Most were severely reedited, censored, and even “dumbed down”, bringing the violence to the front and center. Audiences also play a role in branding Argento’s oeuvre as “exploitation”, as proven by the fact that many of his fans seem to appreciate the violence of Tenebrae more than they do its layers of psychology. Worse yet, the very film connoisseurs that should relish such genius are often unable to look past the film’s vital but graphic bloodshed. Thus, as is perhaps the case with all of Dario Argento’s films, you could say that one ultimately takes away from Tenebrae what one brings to it. But with an open mind, and a dark sense of humor, one is unable not to appreciate power of one of the most complex and expertly crafted thrillers ever made.

Works Cited

Dario Argento’s World of Horror. Dir: Michele Soavi, 1985.

Synapse Entertainment DVD, USA. 1999

Gallant, Chris, ed. Art of Darkness: The Cinema of Dario Argento.

England: Fabpress Publishing, 2000.

McDonagh, Maitland. Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento. New York: Citadel Publishing, 1991.

Tenebrae. Dir: Dario Argento, 1982.

Anchor Bay Entertainment DVD, USA. 1999

Satanic Panic: Did SUSPIRIA Shape The 80s?

Today marks thirty-five years since Dario Argento's Suspiria was released in the United States. It remains his most internationally lucrative and critically acclaimed film, despite or because of being a thematic and stylistic departure from the 'giallo' films that have made Dario Argento a filmmaking legend. I have written before about the role that Suspiria played in my life at the end of high school. This piece marks the last time that I wrote about it in college.

This was originally my final assignment for a class at Emerson College that explored portrayals of the occult throughout cinematic history. The class was taught by Peg Aloi, the writer and film critic and my favorite professor. It was the summer of 2005, and I was working on an occult horror screenplay. In the midst of doing lots of research for my own project, I took the class to expand knowledge for my work and to introduce what I was finding to Professor Aloi and my fellow students. Dario Argento’s Suspiria, one of my favorite movies of all time, was part of the curriculum. But one particularly fascinating piece of television history that I uncovered that summer was a 1989 broadcast of The Oprah Winfrey Show that the class watched on the last day. It was about a horrific tragedy: the brutal murder of Mark Kilroy, a young man on spring break in Mexico. The coverage in 1989, however, suggested his death was the work of a global network of devil worshippers. In 2005, and particularly to a room full of Emerson College students, the tone of the broadcast took on an amusing quality despite the humorless subject matter. The part that seemed amusing was the “Satanic Panic” that swept the nation in the 80s, and how dated it was two decades later. But I remember when those fears were too embedded in mainstream society to evoke laughs. Childhood memories of that disturbing cultural phenomenon were at the root of both my screenplay and this essay.

Robert E. Jeffrey

MA405: Final Paper

                                    Suspiria: Paving the Way for Hysteria

When Suspiria was unleashed upon American audiences by 20^th Century Fox in 1977, few could have predicted the success enjoyed by its distributors or by famed Italian horror director Dario Argento. At this point in time, Argento’s American success was distinctly limited: he had had two U.S. successes in his 1970 debut thriller The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and 1975’s Profondo Rosso, released in the U.S. as The Deep Red Hatchet Murders. Both films were blockbusters in his native Italy. Additionally he had two other hit European thrillers and a successful Italian anthology show, all of which contributed to his budding European reputation as “the Italian Hitchcock”. The release of 1977’s Suspiria marked a major turning point in Argento’s career, and the change in direction proved enormously profitable. Suspiria was a massive success in Europe, and became the first of a string of big hits for Dario Argento in Japan—preceding a 1978 re-release of his Profondo Rosso under the title Suspiria 2! (Jones, "An Eye For Horror")

Following the huge success of Twentieth Century Fox's The Omen in 1976, the internationally lucrative Suspiria must have seemed like a sure bet for a the studio to continue capitalizing on American moviegoers’ fear of a Satanic influence over our everyday lives. Indeed, Suspiria would go on to become Dario Argento’s most widely released, heavily publicized, critically acclaimed, and commercially successful film in the United States. The first film in a planned trilogy, Fox was so pleased with Suspiria’s grosses that they co-financed the lavish sequel. Filmed in 1979 and released in a few international territories in 1980, Dario Argento’s Inferno would be put on the backburner at Fox amidst a change of studio heads in 1980, making a limited theatrical appearance in the mid-1980s before quietly sliding onto video shelves under Fox’s “Key Video” label. (Jones)

           If the more densely scripted Inferno had been given a proper U.S. theatrical release by Fox in 1980, it could very well have echoed the success of Suspiria, in addition to enlightening viewers to the actual meaning of the themes and content of Suspiria. Inferno reveals that the mythology of its predecessor actually had little to do with Christianity's image of 'the Devil'. But the misconceptions inevitably taken from Suspiria’s limited narrative have come to define how most viewers will interpret it: as an artfully crafted horror movie about “witchcraft-as-Satanism”.  Part of the success of Suspiria was in hinting at the existence of Satanic cults embedded in the least conspicuous pockets of society, a fear that had heightened considerably since the release of Roman Polanski's Rosemary’s Baby in 1968. In the that followed Suspiria, that fear would heighten in the United States, manifesting itself in a new yet frighteningly familiar way in the American cultural landscape. 

In the ten years following the release of Suspiria, America’s interest in the occult in the 1970s turned into a fear of the occult in the 1980s. There could have been any number of reasons for this rapid turnaround. Many would credit the two-term run of conservative President Ronald Reagan and the emergence of “the religious Right”. Once could cite a collective parental/generational response, triggered by the bloodshed dominating movie theaters packed with teenagers or the popularity of heavy metal music, condemned by parents’ groups for its supposed references to blood, murder, and the Devil himself. I would argue that these factors merely strengthened the pull on the collective American psyche of fears already planted by paranoiac films of the 1970s--most especially Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen. Despite being a success, Dario Argento’s Suspiria was  never as widely viewed in America as the aforementioned three films. Nonetheless, I would argue that Suspiria, more than any other 70s occult horror film, set the standard of primal terror that would fuel what historians generally refer to as the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s.

Although the roots of the 'Satanic Panic' began with the dozens of reports of ritualized child molestations going on at daycare centers across the country, the origin of the brand of “panic” that I associate with Dario Argento’s vision was galvanized, if not born, in the small town of Northport, Long Island. There, in the summer of 1984, seventeen year old Ricky Kasso and his friend Jimmy Troiano were arrested for the horrific stabbing death of their classmate, Gary Lauwers. Although the crime was primarily related to use of the hard drug PCP, Ricky Kasso’s interest in the Devil, as manifested in “black metal” music, became a paramount issue in the case. Says then-and-current Newport police chief Bob Howard, “The press release alluded to the "Satanic cult”. A Satanic cult never existed. There was some misinformation that went out. But you can't stop the press. The press release that went out caused a frenzy which I've never seen or have seen since” (“Satan in the Suburbs”).

Perhaps the most horrific and defining cult murder of the Satanic Panic scare was the murder of Texas college student Mark Kilroy, and the discovery of his and twelve other dismembered corpses in a mass grave in Matamoros, Mexico. Kilroy was kidnapped on spring break in 1989 and brutally tortured and murdered by a drug lord cum "black magic" practitioner Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo and his followers/crime partners, all as a means of magically attaining protection and immunity from police and fellow drug traffickers. Although Constanzo's practice came from a family tradition of an extreme interpretation of the Palo Mayombe "voodoo" tradition, early reports, naturally, claimed Satanism (Newton).

    One of the most defining time capsules of this era was a historically relevant broadcast of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" on May 1, 1989, in which Winfrey interviews one guest in particular would become infamous among critics of the controversial "Satanic Ritual Abuse" syndrome. That “anti-Satanist” would be Patricia Pulling, best known as the founder of B.A.D.D., “Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons”, which she formed in response to the tragic suicide of her son, an event she blamed on the deadly occult influence of the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game. (Stackpole)

            On the broadcast, Pulling offered a list of “warning signs” for parents of children susceptible to becoming involved in Satanic acts.

In teenagers you look for obsessive behavior in some heavy metal music, not all. Obsessive behavior of kids that like gory slasher films: Poltergeist type films, Friday the 13^th. If they have an obsession with this, an obsession with evil, if you start to see the signs and symbols of things that you don't recognize..... if the child actually hates God....drawing pictures of death, dying, dismemberment mutilation....this is sick, and they need help. A lot of professionals are passing this off as a fad they will pass through. and many of them are not passing through. Many are dying, and killing other people. (“Oprah”)

            In a scathing attack on Pulling’s years as an “anti-Devil crusader”, Michael A. Stackpole thoroughly discredits Pulling’s ability to offer such advice.

[Patricia Pulling] has, willfully or negligently, manufactured reports concerning suicides and murders related to games and Satanism. She has promoted individuals who are, at the very least, in need of serious psychiatric help to deal with their emotional and psychological problems. She has repeatedly represented herself as an “expert witness” concerning games of which she knows little or nothing. Pat Pulling and her allies regularly conduct “cult crime seminars” at locations across the country. They are offered for police and teachers at between $100 and $300 a head, [and] the anti-Satanists profit greatly from giving the seminars. These are the seminars in which Pat Pulling distributes a questionnaire that, if used in accordance with the instructions, will prove virtually anyone to be a Satanist. These are the seminars at which “occult symbol” hand-outs are distributed, including things like “the Star of David” and at which any non-Christian religion is branded “Satanism.”

Many supposed victims of Satanic ritual abuse are widely believed to be likely candidates for childhood sexual abuse, occurring at a time when the human imagination is running so rampant that the abuse may have stored itself in the victims’ subconscious under the guise of being a Satanic rite (Holmes 3). This theory is prefaced in Suspiria by the character of Dr. Mandel (Udo Kier) when he addresses the disappearance of Sara (Stefania Cassini) and her hysterical beliefs in a witch cult hunting her down. 

“She had a nervous breakdown after her mother's death and she came to me for treatment. After she got better again, we remained friends. But lately she was upset about some notions put into her head by a friend of hers. They were kind of wild ideas. She had discovered that the Tanz Akademie was founded in 1895 by a certain Helena Markos, a Greek immigrant, and that the local people believed her to be a witch. That really got Sarah's imagination going. Madame Markos died in a fire. That's all there is as far as witchcraft is concerned. The school was taken over by her favorite pupil, the study of the occult was abandoned, and soon the place became the famous dance academy....As a believer in the material world and a psychologist to boot, I'm convinced that the current spread of belief in magic and the occult is part of mental illness. Bad luck isn't brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds.”

            Although “mental illness” might be an overstated response to the cultural interest in the occult during the 1970s, Dr. Mandel hits on a very potent point about the time period: people were looking for something to scapegoat. Associating ill fate with the Devil was recognized as “medieval thinking” throughout the progressively modernized 20^th century, but in the wake of Rosemary’s Baby and, even more so, The Exorcist, belief in the existence of Satan and, more tellingly, his role on Earth,  was becoming increasingly popular in the mainstream American culture. This was particularly evident throughout the 1980s as evidenced by books and TV specials on the subject and a revolving cast of authors and frequent TV/radio guests making frequent media appearances during the so-called Satanic Panic.  The common fear of witchcraft in the 1980s was prophetically illustrated in Suspiria by the character of Professor Milius (Rudolf Schundler) when he describes to the protagonist, Suzy (Jessica Harper), what he learned from writing his defining book, Paranoia and Magic.

[Witches]   are malefic. Negative and destructive. Their knowledge of the art of the occult brings them tremendous powers. They can change the course of events, and people's lives. But only to do harm. Their goal is to accumulate great personal wealth, but that can only be achieved by injury to others. They can cause suffering, sickness, and even the death of those that, for whatever reason, have offended them. A woman becomes queen of her coven if her magic is 100 times more powerful than the rest of the coven, which is like a serpent. Its strength rests with its leader, which is likes it head. A coven deprived of its leader is like a headless cobra: harmless. Skepticism is the natural reaction of people today, but magic is ever present. Magic is everywhere, and all over the world, it's a recognized fact, always.

Patricia Pulling could not have said it any better herself. Indeed, this defining exchange is the most blatant misrepresentation of witchcraft-as-Satanism in the entire film. But a more careful deconstruction of this classic scene—specifically, with the aid of Argento’s view of the Suzy character—offers a very different interpretation. “[Suzy] does not know she is a white witch, but she has a great strength that drives back everything. Indeed, when she meets the professor it is the moment in which she begins to realize. She can fight because of her strength” (Locane, “Dark Dreams”). Of course, it would be virtually impossible to decipher this from what seems a straightforward condemnation of witchcraft in any form. 

Prior to 1977, serious Satanic horror in America was generally packaged for TV (Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby, The Devil's Daughter), EuroHorror imports (The Antichrist, The Devil's Nightmare, To the Devil....a Daughter), hardcore porn (The Devil in Miss Jones, Through the Looking Glass), and, most commonly, prime drive-in meat (Race the Devil, The Brotherhood of Satan). Satanic horror films that came in the wake of Rosemary's Baby typically aimed to be frightening in a campy, cathartic, "fun time at the movies" manner, employing tried-and-true horror techniques. Dario Argento's Suspiria demonstrates a more diverse array of genre influences: the warped world of German Expressionism, the gothic chills of silent American horror, and the subtly insidious anti-witch scares of Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz and Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (“Suspiria 25”, Jones 83).  Ultimately, I would argue that the very effectiveness of Suspiria is why it serves as an inevitable precursor to the Satanic Panic. The film exists on a primal level, affects on a primal level, and stays with the viewer on a primal level. When looking back on Suspiria, one consciously remembers the striking barrage of jarring sound and vivid color even more than the prevalent element of witchcraft. As such, one could be frightened by ideas presented in the film years later, with no specific recollection as to where such fears originate from. 

Michael Brandon, star of Argento’s 1973 thriller Four Flies on Grey Velvet, shared with UK viewers of the Channel 4 documentary Dario Argento: An Eye For Horror a very specific insight into Argento’s creative process as a screenwriter. “Dario told me he has dreams, or nightmares, and that's how the story comes into being. He would write down the nightmare. And it would become the script.” (“Eye for Horror”) In Suspiria, the nightmare world explored by Suzy Banyon may very well have echoed Argento’s own investigations into the world of magic in preparation for Suspiria. During this time, he and wife/co-writer Daria Nicolodi traveled throughout the “Magic Triangle”, a (supposedly) supernaturally active point where France, Germany, and Switzerland meet (“Suspiria: 25^th Anniversary”), and met with many Pagans as well as alleged worshippers of the Devil (Jones 72). Says the couple’s daughter, international star Asia Argento, “he needs somebody, a feminine character, to represent his curiosity--of life, and danger, and all those things”. ("Eye For Horror")

           Dario Argento grew up and achieved success in the most Catholicized nation in the world. Could he have been, perhaps subconsciously, combatting his own innermost fears about the world of witchcraft, a world that at once utterly fascinated and completely terrified him? Pop-rock extraordinaire Keith Emerson, who composed the score to Inferno, has offered that “Dario was probably more scared of the films that he made than his audience was. I've seen the guy just shaking watching his own film” (“Eye for Horror”). American horror legend John Carpenter, a friend and colleague of Dario’s, points out “the story he tells over and over again” as the foundation of Argento’s fear of the unknown. “There was a hallway at the back of his house, and when he had to go to sleep at night, for whatever reason, when he would walk there, he would imagine these things behind the doorways in this hallway. By the time he got to his room he was in complete terror” (“Eye for Horror”). Another genre titan, George A. Romero, puts in his own take on how these fears are passed on to audiences around the globe, infecting the world with manifested realities of Argento's private nightmares. “I think when Dario gets an idea he is basically trying to communicate either a kind of horror or an allegory about certain human behavior. He's  like Van Gogh, someone who says this is the way I want it to be, and this is the world. Take from it what you will” (“Eye for Horror”). As the Satanic Panic stormed through the American 80s, it was clear that the country had taken Argento’s view of the world very literally indeed.

WORKS CITED

Holmes, Dr. Leonard. “What the Hell is Satanic Ritual Abuse”. About.com

Acc. 6/26/05

 http://mentalhealth.about.com/cs/abuse/a/satan.htm

Jones, Alan. Profondo Argento.

FabPress, London. 2004

Locane, Francesco. “Dario Talks to Dark Dreams”. Darkdreams.org

Acc. 6/29/05

http://www.darkdreams.org/interviews/interview8.html

Newton, Michael. “Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo”. CrimeLibrary.com

Acc. 6/23/05

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/weird/constanzo/1.html

Stackpole, Michael A.  “The Pulling Report”.

Acc. 6/23/05.

 http://www.rpg.net/sites/252/quellen/stackpole/pulling_report.html#DW

DVD Sources

Dario Argento: An Eye for Horror. Dir: Leon Ferguson, 2000.

Image Entertainment DVD, USA. 2001

Inferno. Dir: Dario Argento, 1980.

Anchor Bay Entertainment DVD, USA. 2000

Satan in the Suburbs. Dir: Scott Hillier, 2000.

WMI Media DVD, USA. 2004

Suspiria. Dir: Dario Argento, 1977.

Anchor Bay Entertainment DVD, USA. 2001

Suspiria: 25^th Anniversary. Dir: Gary Hertz, 2001.

Anchor Bay Entertainment DVD, USA. 2001

How I Love "Your Grave"

Most of my favorite movies are centered around a female protagonist with whom I identify on some personal level, and  I Spit On Your Grave is no exception. It is only underlined by the fact that the heroine is a writer who seeks her inspiration from being alone in the woods of New England. I can’t remember when exactly I first heard of I Spit On Your Grave (aka Day of the Woman), but I remember where I first saw the iconic video cover: at the dearly departed Gold Star Video Store in Rowley, Massachusetts. The striking image and arresting tagline left me fascinated from childhood onward. 

My unabashed love of this much-maligned film stems from the sixth grade. That's when a close friend of mine, a surrogate older sister to whom I am indebted for much of my film education, heaped praise upon the film. She and several of her female co-workers at a New England hair salon had a fondness  for I Spit On Your Grave that was in stark contrast to Roger Ebert's legendary hatred of the film, and this always amused me. For years I would press her for details on the film, until I was old enough to see it. After all, the tape at Gold Star was stamped with an 'X' rating. I finally saw it when I was seventeen. My Mom called me while she was out grocery shopping, and I asked her if she’d swing by the video store and pick it up for me, which she did. It only added further proof that she exists in the category of “Coolest Mom Ever”.  

I was terrified to watch it because I had a fear that it could feel like a snuff film, or a rape fantasy, or a trip to Hell that might leave me permanently scarred. I was permanently affected by the film, but not in a traumatic way. Despite being a peaceful person by nature, I fucking loved watching the heroine, Jennifer, seduce-and-slaughter a quartet of soulless misogynists.

Right away, I began showing the film to women in my life, starting with an art teacher in high school who (thankfully!) loved it. That same year I used it as the basis for an oral report in my American law class. I had planned to write about women who kill the men who rape them, but unable to draw upon proper resources at the time. So it ended up being a presentation on rape statistics and what my classmates should do if they were ever to be victimized. I fondly recall my female teacher privately commending me for my audacity, as all of my classmates at St. John’s Prep were male. 

Aside from inciting a visceral “KILL THEM ALL!” reaction in the audience, I Spit On Your Grave offers an unsubtle warning against the dangers of gender division. Jennifer is not human to the four rapists in the film because she is not a man, and they in turn feel no remorse about raping or killing her or any woman. They view all females as "the other". Their perspective is a sadistically extreme version of how young males are taught to interact with young females in the schoolyard.  I Spit On Your Grave demonstrates the violent extremes of what can happen when we implicitly or explicitly teach one gender to look at the other gender as different creatures entirely. I was born a homosexual male, but I have always viewed males and females as very nearly identical. I am fundamentally and relentlessly opposed to gender labels, and I suspect that Meir Zarchi might feel the same way. Some may describe the bloody revenge that Jennifer takes on her attackers as somehow masculine, suggesting she has abandoned her femaleness. But I would say she is fully embracing her Goddess within....and bettering all of humanity in the process.

I Spit On Your Grave provided the material for the final paper of an ethics class I took in my second year of college. I never got a letter grade, but I gathered that the professor hated it when my grade for the semester turned out to be lower than I expected. I'm not sure if it was because the professor so intensely disagreed with my perspective or because the professor felt it was poorly written. I'm not surprised either way: it's honestly just a love letter to Meir Zarchi for crafting one of my all-time favorite films and to Camille Keaton for bringing it to life like no other actor ever could have. 

Robert Jeffrey

12/17/01

Ethics in Literature: Final Paper

Meir Zarchi’s 1977 masterpiece I Spit On Your Grave is a film of stark violence and uncompromising brutality. It is also a relentlessly intrusive movie, one which boldly forces the audience to rethink its feelings about law and justice and morality, and to question the battle between human instincts and intellectual sensibility. It does not ask questions, it provokes them. It is for this reason that the film has been seeped in controversy since its release. Yet it is also for this reason that a quarter of a century later it is still analyzed and scrutinized. The moral dilemma at the heart of the film is relevant in any era, and never before or since has the dilemma been portrayed so simply and explicitly. It does not explore an isolated situation, but rather a universal way of thinking and rethinking, and as such, it will always be ripe content for ethical debate.

            Jennifer is an intelligent, successful, single New York author who leaves the chaos of Manhattan to find solace in the country. She rents a lakeside house in a small, rustic town (never specified as Connecticut or upstate New York) so she can write her first novel. One day, while sunning herself in a canoe, her boat is lassoed by several local men in a passing motorboat. The men drag her boat to shore, and corner her in an isolated spot in the woods where they meet up with two other men. The men rape her, and then disappear. In a state of shock, Jennifer walks through the woods, attempting to find her home. In the woods, the men are waiting for her, and again overpower and rape her. When she finally returns to her home, the men are already there, and for the third and last time she is beaten and gang raped. The men leave, and one of them is sent back into the house to slit the throat of an already virtually lifeless woman. The man who is sent back cannot commit this final act, and so he smears Jennifer’s blood on the knife and leaves, claiming to have killed her.

            After the hours-long experience of being tortured, Jennifer spends days isolated and silent. When she finally leaves her secluded property, it is to go to a local Church; there, she kneels before an altar and asks for forgiveness for the acts she is about to commit. She then proceeds to take revenge against the men who have destroyed her. She calls upon Matthew, the man who was sent to kill her, and she seduces and then hangs him. She lures Johnny, the “leader” of the quartet, back to her house, where she castrates him and locks him into a room to bleed to death. When Stanley and Andy, the remaining rapists, head towards Jennifer’s house on their boat, Jennifer is waiting for them. In a final sequence set entirely on water, she mutilates one man with an axe, leaving him to drown. When only one rapist is left, crying for his life as he treads water, she turns the boat motor onto his chest. She speeds away on her boat, an ambiguous expression on her face, at which point the movie abruptly begins to roll credits.

            Once the audience has moved past its initial shock and any prejudices towards the crucially graphic depiction of violence in the film, they can begin to question the issues that linger in their mind. Should Jennifer have taken such brutal revenge? Does the excruciating rape that the audience was witness to justify her actions? Will her executions prevent similar crime? Were the men deserving of death, or merely victims of their own upbringing? And in the end, did it bring her satisfaction to equate their crimes with crimes of her own? For the purpose of this assignment, it is necessary to disregard the potential effect that the film itself could have on a philosopher’s opinions, and to base their assessment of the situation on the grounds of summary alone and how it would filter through their own theories.

Immanuel Kant believed that "persons" were the most capable creatures in the universe. His definition of a “person” was not simply restricted to humans-in fact, he was considering the possibility of aliens-for it referred to a creature’s mental ability as opposed to his physical composition. A person is a creature capable of reason, and who can use this reason to strive for The Good Will. The Good Will is evident in a person’s action that suggests a will to be good, a desire to be good, and an embracement of possible consequences if such consequences are necessary to achieve good. Kant felt that The Good Will was the only “limitless good”. Everything else that could be deemed ‘good’ has limitation, for such so-called virtues as courage and perseverance can be used to further negative intent.

Kant felt that intention was the sole determining factor in assessing the goodness of an action. The consequences of an action cannot ever be controlled and thus it is the intent that must be used to judge if it is a moral act. The intention, he said, must be based on reason, not inclination or training or fear or expectation of consequences. If the intention is not out of choice, then the action is not good. He also believed that for an action to be good it had to be universal; if it could not be applied to any given scenario, then it was not good. Kant believed that the matching of will and reason was true freedom, for if a person reached this stage of moral development then they were capable of eliminating any conscious desires or subconscious motives and genuinely choosing to do good. To Kant, this was the high end of morality. The middle ground, 'amorality', was when someone was incapable of reason, and thus could not be accounted for their actions, making them not a person but an animal. Someone who is 'immoral' has a choice to be a person, and chooses to be a non-person as a result of being aware of what is right and what is wrong and consciously choosing not to do what is right.

Immanuel Kant would consider Jennifer a non-person. In fact, she could serve as the definition of his theory of immorality. She is most certainly not an animal. Before her assault, she is a highly intelligent and independent author. And while some might cite the inevitable mental deterioration from such a trauma, Jennifer’s actions certainly appeared to be conscious and well thought out. She began her revenge several days after the assaults, and each action was premeditated: she did not simply lash out at her attackers, but rather lured them in before taking revenge. Furthermore, the pivotal scene before the altar is crucial to her actions, for it proves that she was most definitely aware of her wrongdoing and asked God to excuse it. She knew that what she was doing was wrong, and she chose to go through with it anyway.

           Of course, her deliberate avoidance of acting good is not the only element of her behavior that would earn Kant’s condemnation. Her intentions would certainly appear to be based on her own personal desires to seek vengeance against these men. The act is motivated by what the act will do for her, and thus it cannot be good. Although one might argue that her behavior was out of an intent to protect other women from suffering the same fate, Kant would argue that such a motivation could not be accounted for. Even if Jennifer were to state, or even believe, that this was her reason, Kant would not buy it. He would likely point to Jennifer’s subconscious motivations, no doubt believing there would be no way a woman in her state could differentiate between her personal desire for revenge and her interest in benefiting her gender as a whole.

Even if she was genuinely attempting to aid women, Kant would disapprove anyway. He believed that humans could never be objectified as a means to an end, and this is exactly what Jennifer would be doing if her interest is female well being. Furthermore, he would feel that Jennifer could not universalize the maxim of her actions; if she can kill four men who have done her wrong, should everyone do the same thing when it suits them? Kant would attest that the only moral action in this situation would be for Jennifer to seek out the police. This way, she would be protecting women and resisting her own vengeful urges so as to uphold the belief that murder is wrong.

Jeremy Bentham is an icon of utilitarianism. His philosophical theory was somewhat simpler than that of Kant, and certainly much more clinical in its arrangement. He believed that an act would be moral if it is useful in producing pleasure and reducing pain. An immoral act would reduce pleasure and increase pain, and an amoral act would have neutral consequences. His most significant contribution to the Theory of Utility was the Hedonistic Calculus, a “mathematical” approach to determining an action's moral worth. The Hedonistic Calculus determines the morality of an action on a scale of –10 to 10 (maximum of immorality to maximum of morality) based on seven factors: intensity, duration, certainty vs. uncertainty, propinquity, purity, fecundity, and extent.

If Bentham were to asses Jennifer’s actions by means of the Hedonistic Calculus, his judgment would certainly be more comprehensive and less harsh than that of Kant, but ultimately he would come to a similar conclusion. The intensity of the rapists’ pain at the hands of Jennifer is certainly intense, but this does not necessarily equate the intensity of Jennifer’s pleasure. Having been raised to believe murder is wrong, it is unlikely that she is “enjoying” killing these men. As such, her pleasure is evident, in some degree, but certainly not intense. The duration of pleasure is a more dichotomous aspect of the scenario. If you look at the pleasure from a strictly vengeful perspective, her pleasure is short: simply put, the men do not take very long to die. If she is getting pleasure from knowing that their actions will not reoccur in the future, then the duration is lasting. Before killing the men, there is clearly a great deal of uncertainty on Jennifer’s mind. Is she capable of murder? Will she be able to live with herself? Similarly, the certainty of pleasure is weak. As stated before, it is not likely that the actual acts of murder will be pleasurable.

Regardless of what Jennifer will experience, it will happen soon. Propinquity is the most assured act on the Calculus, because the murders will happen when she initiates them, and whatever feelings they bring about will begin simultaneously. If there is pleasure to be had in the experience of killing, it is certainly not pure. Jennifer is a human being, and someone who has lived a life that clearly did not indicate a murderous rampage in her future. As such she will likely experience mixed emotions in the wake of her actions. And in a more realistic sense, it is possible that her life afterwards will be one of great pain. She will end up being arrested and tried, or she will either escape and forever be running or simply ‘get away with murder’ and live with the secret of what she has done. There are no worthy accolades to follow such action. Similarly, the fecundity is weak in the assessment as well, for pleasure is not going to follow and her acts are completely isolated and will never happen again.

The extent of Jennifer’s actions are perhaps the most damning aspect of the argument against her. Midway through the film, it is revealed that the character of Johnny has a wife and two young children, and we see these children playing with their father shortly before he is murdered. This is one example of a family that will be devasted by the actions, for  he is a husband and father to people who love him regardless of his actions. We never see what backgrounds the other men come from, but it goes without saying that their deaths would likely bring about great pain among family and friends. Furthermore, Jennifer’s own circle of friends and family would experience pain if she should be punished or forced to flee as a result of the actions.

With all aspects having been weighed, Bentham would agree that Jennifer should avoid taking justice into her own hands and instead turn the men in to the police. This way they will be punished and Jennifer will have the satisfaction of knowing that other women will not be harmed, and neither Jennifer nor the rapists' families will be quite as seriously hurt. The children will be able to visit their rapist father, and Jennifer’s family could deal with her rape trauma as opposed to seeing their daughter locked up or on the run.

Before I divulge my own assessment of Jennifer’s actions, I suppose it’s important that I state my bias: I consider I Spit On Your Grave to be one of the finest films ever made. Considering the passionate arguments for and against the film, such a statement might illicit laughter or disgust, but the very reason that I feel this way is largely because of the moral questions that follow the film. It is a wholly uncompromising and disturbing experience, so much so that no one involved went on to do anything significant in film in the years following its scandalous release. It is not an easy film to watch, but it is an even harder film to think about, because it forces questions on the audience like no movie before or since. It is offensive to many people, but that is the goal of the filmmakers, and they have certainly succeeded in eliciting a response. Numerous essays have been written on the film, and feminist/professor Carol J. Clover dedicated the bulk of a whole chapter to an analysis of the film in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. I myself have written reviews and essays of the film in the past, and am always anxious to discuss my feelings on the film since it spawns new ones each time I view it. Having analyzed my feelings and weighed them against my personal philosophies, I think that I have come to a solid conclusion regarding my own opinion.

One of the most vital elements of my philosophical beliefs is that human beings are animals. This is certainly a well known fact, but it is one which people tend to disregard, most likely because humans tend to think of themselves as far more intelligent and sophisticated than other animals as a result of our ascendance up the food chain. We tend to intellectualize our actions to the point of deconstructing our very existence. We create belief systems and many of us hold up these beliefs in higher regard than our more abstract instincts we experience. I also believe in God, and God plays the most significant role in my philosophical theories. I believe that what we do not understand is understood by God, and that we must have faith in God to understand these things for us. I believe in doing what is “Godly”, and I believe in Madonna’s mantra that “where there is violence there is no God”.

With that having been said, my belief system gets a thorough shake up when asked to analyze the central premise of I Spit on Your Grave. On one hand, it seems that to dismiss the gang rapes and focus on Jennifer’s decision to take action is, in itself, a statement regarding society. Do we really consider revenge a worse crime than offense? Or are we so sure that the men’s action was wrong that we must address our own feelings and weigh them against our intellectual sensibility in order to form an opinion regarding Jennifer’s course of action?

I believe that most people would consider the second line more appropriate, though I might argue that the two sentences are quite similar. One part of me wonders why we should critique her actions at all. Anyone who has been raped has a clearer idea of the horror and trauma of the experience than some one who knows it merely as a word. And yet the depiction of gang rape, in its graphic nature and sheer relentlessness, is so potent that one feels as if they are the victim while watching the film. Some might argue that this is emotional manipulation, intended to make one sympathize with Jennifer’s action. I agree, only I do not consider this a negative argument. To the contrary, if we are not emotionally affected (or manipulated) then we are applying a completely aloof assessment to a very complex situation. What right does a person have to judge Jennifer’s actions when they are too afraid to allow their own emotions to be caught up in hers?

This, of course, brings me back to my emphasis on the connection between humans and animals. Animals, from what we as humans can see, make decisions based on emotion. They do not intellectualize their decisions or weigh alternatives. They act on impulse, because they know that this is the best means of survival. For example, if a female dog sees an animal attacking her puppies, or having killed them, she will fight the animal to the death. We as humans have this same protective instinct, but fear using it because it clashes with the society that we have created apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Jennifer is using this innate ability, and should not be punished for it.

I am not, however, trying to suggest that Jennifer is in any way “animalistic”. To the contrary, I feel that her actions were well thought out, and ultimately an act of self-sacrifice. As I mentioned earlier, her killing the men will likely bring about punishment by the law, and she is well aware of this. Yet she is willing to sacrifice years of her life in a jail cell because she feels so strongly that she must kill these men. She asked for the forgiveness of God, implying that if in His eyes she could be forgiven for her otherwise Godless acts, then she would be willing to accept responsibility and pay the consequences for an action which she felt so strongly about. In a warped way, this is exactly what Kant encouraged people to strive for. Her decision was completely selfless, for in the end it would only bring her pain. Yet she would do it, because she felt it was the right and natural response. And, I believe, because it would mean that her experience would not be relived by another woman. 

While watching the film, and living Jennifer’s story, I never have any doubt that what she is doing is right. I do not consider myself a believer in the “eye for an eye” mentality, and yet I never felt that Jennifer should refrain from her actions. It is not until after the film is over that I reassess my feelings, applying them to intellectual inquiry. However, this is where my own background as a “human elitist” is evident. If I were to trust my emotions I would not think twice about justifying Jennifer’s actions. And as some one who believes in the importance of emotions and instinct, I agree with and support Jennifer doing exactly what she did.