The Cinematheque

“Argento’s first full-fledged masterpiece.”

Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

After a brief hiatus from giallo fare, Dario Argento returned to—and some would say, damn-near perfected!—the stalk-and-slash thriller with Deep Red, his blood-bathed reworking of Antonioni’s modernist milestone Blow-Up. David Hemmings (also of Antonioni’s 1966 meta-mystery) stars as Marcus Daly, a British jazz pianist in Rome who one night witnesses the brutal axe-murder of a woman in her home. Rushing to the macabre scene, Marcus spots something unusual amid the apartment’s décor—a painting, he later recalls, now eerily missing. Convinced it holds the key to the killer’s identity, Marcus follows a bizarre string of breadcrumbs—a children’s song, a macabre folktale, a book entitled House of the Screaming Child—all while being pursued by the hatchet-wielding psychopath. The newly rechristened prog-rock band Goblin, in their first collaboration with Argento, clinched the gig when Pink Floyd passed. Argento’s own hands stand in for the killer’s.