Don’t Lose Your Head! Dario Argento for Halloween
Screening Dates
  • October 26, 2018 8:30
  • October 27, 2018 4:30
  • October 29, 2018 6:30

“A smart, cosmopolitan, thoroughly modern whodunit comprised of geometric visuals and pulsating sexual violence.”

Jamie Graham, Total Film

A box-office smash in Italy and abroad, the terrifically terrifying directorial debut of Dario Argento ignited a ​’70s craze for giallo cinema—an Italian breed of high-style, high-body-count murder mysteries first attributed to splatter guru Mario Bava—while laying the groundwork for a new breed of horror films in the US: the slasher! A loose (and uncredited) adaptation of Fredric Brown’s novel The Screaming Mimi, the Rome-set thriller tracks the investigation of a Yankee writer and would-be sleuth who becomes obsessed with—and yep, embroiled in—a spree of grisly murders after witnessing a hooded figure stab a woman in an art gallery. The dizzying POV camerawork (by legendary Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro) implicates the viewer as both killer and victim, taking a page from modern-horror textbooks Psycho and Peeping Tom. The black-gloved, knife-wielding assailant would become a mainstay of the subgenre. Ennio Morricone composed the haunting score.