Louis Fletcher revisits Dario Argento’s Animal Trilogy at 50…

Now available on the horror streaming service Shudder, Dario Argento’s Dark Glasses is a welcome return from the man many thought to have retired. Marking the maestro’s return to the giallo, the genre he pioneered in the 1970s, such an effort inevitably invites comparison with his earlier works, not least the era-defining Animal Trilogy.

These films brought wild ambition, visceral violence and technical aplomb to this most Italian of exports, transforming a genre with few critical pretensions or commercial impact into a phenomenon of popularity and stylistic excess. Coinciding with Dark Glasses’ streaming release, now is the perfect time to rediscover the features that sparked a true cinematic revolution.

A quintessentially Italian genre with its roots in pulpy fiction, the giallo (literally ‘yellow’) has been around since the early 1960s, when the great Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1964) together established its key conventions. These include a fish-out-of-water protagonist, black-gloved killer, baroque violence and a bevy of glamourous victims ripe for the offing. However, it was not until Argento’s arrival on the scene that the sub-genre exploded into eccentric life.

In a career marked by technical innovation and peppered with genre-defining works, his most impactful film remains his first behind the camera. Released half a century ago, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) marked the first instalment in the so-called Animal Trilogy, a set completed by The Cat O’Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (both 1971), and which justly earned their director the moniker: ‘The Italian Hitchcock’.

Few debuts have been greeted so enthusiastically by the public, struck out so boldly from established conventions or been so singly important to the development of a genre. If the giallo had been little more than a stylised form of murder-mystery up to this point, the new wave ushered in by The Bird with the Crystal Plumage focused on the former element to an almost fetishistic degree.

First seen here is the operatic violence which would become an Argento trademark – with each death elevated to high art set-piece. Beginning as he means to go on, the attempted murder at the outset sees the hero trapped within the immense glass foyer of an art gallery, an unwilling voyeur transfixed by the attack taking place therein, crystalising the viewer’s own predicament throughout the film’s many scenes of violence.

The second murder wastes no time in delineating another preoccupation of this most Italian of genres, with the explicitly sexualised dispatch epitomising the genre’s dual obsession with the erotic and the deadly – a bold challenge to the more conservative sensibilities of earlier Italian cinema. As daring in its execution as its subject matter, this segment makes liberal use of the victim’s POV, a striking switch in depth of field and a bravura shot utilising a gyroscopic camera.

Indeed, the film is never less than technically audacious, even if some effects were accomplished by somewhat luddite means, with one reportedly achieved by literally throwing the camera out of a window.

Argento’s follow-up, the long-underrated The Cat O’ Nine Tails, is generally pegged as the most ‘Hollywood’ of the director’s works, thanks in no small part to the presence of Academy Award winner Karl Malden and man-of-the-moment James Franciscus.

Intended to duplicate the success of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage – at least as far as the film’s financiers were concerned – it has long been held in low esteem by its director. Despite this, it cannot be said that the film lacks any of the maestro’s Romanesque style.

With a colourful plot set around a shady genetics laboratory, the film indulges in plenty more POV camera work, death dealt by train and elevator cable, as well as the singular delight of a photographer dispatched with their own reel of incriminating celluloid. In another striking touch, the narrative is haunted by the killer’s seemingly omnipotent eye, frequently seen in extreme close-up –once more aligning viewership with the act of violence.

The Cat O’ Nine Tails is also the wittiest and warmest of the trilogy, largely due to the endearing chemistry between Malden and Franciscus at its core. The domestic moments between the former’s blind Aldo and his infant ward are an interesting contrast to those of lovers Sam and Julia in Bird, while the meet-cute and subsequent courtship between Franciscus’ Giordani and Catherine Spaak’s Anna introduce a new element to the trilogy: a romantic sub-plot.

In contrast, Four Flies on Grey Velvet is arguably the least accessible of the triumvirate, with Argento giving his imagination free rein after the personal disappointment of Cat. Gleefully outré – and in places utterly unhinged – the film’s universe is also the director’s least sanguine.

Serving up a fairly unheroic protagonist, ambivalent Grand Guignol finale and the darkest motivation for its requisite ‘maniac’, the film’s nightmare images are all painted with the director’s characteristic visual flair. Never averse to showing off, Argento’s use of extreme slow-motion at the film’s close is a masterstroke, as hypnotic as it is haunting, the jarring effect heightened by the dreamlike choral track that plays over the scene of vehicular carnage.

If Flies fully embraces the mantra of style over substance, it does so consciously and to powerful effect. The scene in the park, where the director melds two different time frames to demonstrate the character’s disorientation, trades logical narrative progression for mood and dramatic tension. In doing so, Argento foreshadows the more Impressionistic approach that the genre would take from here on out.

Similarly, these three films also opened the door to the bizarre and occasionally fanciful plotting that would become something of a giallo trademark, à la Cat’s fatalistic genetics research, Flies death-imprinted eyeballs and Bird’s histrionic pop-psychology.

Beginning in 1970, The Animal Trilogy infused the Italian pulp thriller with a heady cocktail of visual spectacle, primal thrills and twisted reality, revitalising the genre and perfecting the model that so many filmmakers would follow thereafter.

Favouring mood and spectacle over a strict adherence to narrative logic, these off-kilter explorations of violence and sensuality comprise the quintessential giallo experience. As such, they serve as the perfect primer for anyone looking to explore this most colourful of horror genres.

SEE ALSO: Read our review of Dario Argento’s Dark Glasses here

Louis Fletcher is a freelance writer with an interest in horror and genre cinema.

Filed Under: Articles and Opinions, Featured, Louis Fletcher, Movies Tagged With: Dario Argento, Dark Glasses, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat O’Nine Tails

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