Deep Red
HORROR-THON 2024 • SEEING RED
10/10
DIRECTOR: Dario Argento
STARRING: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia
RELEASED: 1975
RUNTIME: 2 hours, 7 minutes
WATCH ON: Shudder, AMC+, Tubi, Amazon, Pluto TV, Apple TV, Fandango at Home
SCARE LEVEL: High
CREEPY LULLABIES: Absolutely not.
A psychic onstage suddenly stops in the middle of her act. Someone in the audience is a murderer, and she can hear what they’re thinking. By the end of the night, she’s dead.
Marcus, an English jazz pianist living in Italy, is walking home when he sees the psychic being attacked in her apartment window. He runs upstairs and is too late. As he leaves, he can’t shake the sense that something in that apartment changed while he was in it.
He teams up with Gianna, a pushy, funny reporter, to figure out who did it. Every clue points back to an old crime, a childhood song, and a house nobody has lived in for years. And everyone who helps them ends up dead.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
I genuinely liked this one a lot. I wasn’t sure about it at first, but then the psychic’s murder plays out at the window, and from that scene, I was all in.
Once it finally gets going, I couldn’t look away. The camera moves through rooms like it’s hunting someone. The Goblin score, before they did Suspiria, is pounding and prog-rock-weird.
And the killer shocked me again, just like The Evil Eye did this year. Argento hides the answer in plain sight, and I fell for it.
The one minus: the creepy child. I have a strict no creepy children policy. There is a children’s lullaby that plays before every murder, and a mechanical doll comes out of nowhere. I’ll be hearing that song in my sleep.
FUN FACT FOR YOUR NEXT DINNER PARTY
The close-up shots of the killer’s hands wearing black leather gloves are of Dario Argento himself. He frequently served as the hand double for unidentified killers across his films, including The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.