Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!
I’ve long had a sort of love-hate relationship with Dario Argento and the giallo style in general for years. Argento’s films are all about the style and often light on substance. My knock against him has been, for years, that it feels like a lot of his films come from his visualization of a couple of outstanding scenes, and the rest of the movie is made to connect them. For as good a visual masterpiece as Suspiria is, it does seem like it started from the stabbing/hanging death and the barbed wire room and went from there. This is much less the case for Tenebrae (Tenebre in Italian, evidently), where there is an actual plot. That’s a low bar, but for gialli it’s a necessary one.
True to the style, Tenebrae is a horror movie in the guise of a mystery. Horror author Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) has come to Rome on his latest book tour, promoting a book called Tenebrae. Coming with him on the trip are his assistant Anne (Daria Nicolodi) and his agent Bullmer (John Saxon). He will eventually discover that his ex-fiancée Jane (Veronica Lario) has followed him to Rome as well. What Neal doesn’t know is that just before he arrived, a young shoplifter named Elsa (Ania Pieroni) has been brutally murdered.
Elsa’s murder would seem to be irrelevant except for a couple of important facts. First is that her body is discovered with her mouth stuffed with pages from Neal’s latest book. Second is the fac that Neal receives a letter in his hotel room from an anonymous source telling him that his books have inspired a killing spree. Neal is contacted by the police in the forms of Captain Germani (Giuliano Gemma) and Inspector Altieri (Carola Stagnaro).
What’s going to follow from this is exactly what you expect. The killer is going to attack more and more people, many of whom have at least a tangential relationship to Neal. Neal attempts to investigate the killings as best he can while still dealing with everything going on around him, and as the murders get closer and closer to him, his ability to handle his book tour becomes compromised.
So, we actually do have a plot with this one, which feels kind of interesting for this brand of Italian horror. It’s a standard murder mystery, though. The “good guys” get a few leads and a little information, but the body count continues to rise around them until the actual culprit can only be one of two or three people. We’ll get the big reveal with about 10 minutes left in the film and the reveal is a good one.
The real reason to watch a film like Tenebrae is for the visuals. There are some fun scenes here in terms of our homicidal maniac, but there doesn’t really feel like anything that stands out in a huge way. Oh, I suppose there are some decent set pieces, but nothing like the barbed wire room in Suspiria. The fact that our killer takes pictures of the murder scenes is at least interesting, and it makes for an odd and terrible connection to a film like Peeping Tom, and I can only think that at least some of these connections are intentional, especially because the pictures are at best a side point.
Actually, I’ll take back the comment about there not being any truly memorable scenes. While there are some great visual moments and most of the murders are very stylistic in nature, there is one that is surprisingly effective. One of the murders takes place in the open, in the middle of a city, in broad daylight. The character in question (I won’t spoil who) gets stabbed several times while people are walking by. It’s a great scene because it is so ballsy.
The truth is that it’s a rare giallo that I want to watch a second time. Tenebrae definitely has some pluses going for it, but I’m not sure that I want to watch it again. Once you know the identity of the killer, this isn’t a movie that stays interesting for a lot longer.
Why to watch Tenebrae: An Argento film with an actual plot.
Why not to watch: The plot is still pretty straightforward for a murder mystery.
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