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Tenebrae (film)
Encyclopedia
Tenebrae is a 1982 Italian
horror
thriller film written and directed by Dario Argento
. The film stars Anthony Franciosa
, John Saxon
, and Daria Nicolodi
. After having experimented with two exercises in pure supernatural
horror, Suspiria
(1977) and Inferno
(1980), Tenebrae represented Argento's return to the giallo
form, a sub-genre
he had helped popularize in the 1970s. The story concerns an American writer promoting his latest murder-mystery
novel in Rome
, only to get embroiled in the search for a serial-killer who has apparently been inspired to kill by the novel.
The film was released in Italy and throughout most of Europe without experiencing any reported censorship
problems, but was classified, prosecuted, and banned as a "video nasty
" in the United Kingdom. Its theatrical distribution in the United States was delayed until 1984, when it was released in a heavily censored version under the title Unsane. In its cut form, Tenebrae received a mostly negative critical reception, but the original, fully restored version later became widely available for reappraisal. It has been described by Maitland McDonagh as "the finest film that Argento has ever made."
). Immediately prior to Neal’s arrival in Rome, a beautiful young shoplifter (Ania Pieroni
) is brutally razor-slashed to death by an unseen killer. The murderer sends Neal a letter informing him that his books have inspired him to go on a killing spree. Neal immediately contacts the police, who put Detective Giermani (Giuliano Gemma
) in charge of the investigation, along with the detective’s female partner Inspector Altieri (Carola Stagnaro).
More killings occur. Tilde (Mirella D’Angelo), a beautiful lesbian journalist, is murdered at her home along with her lover. Later, Maria (Lara Wendel), the young daughter of Neal’s landlord, is bloodily hacked to death with an axe after stumbling into the killer's lair. Neal notices that TV interviewer Christiano Berti (John Steiner
) appears to have an unusually intense interest in the novelist's work. At night, Neal and his second assistant Gianni (Christiano Borromeo) watch Berti’s house for suspicious activity. Neal decides to separate from Gianni in order to get a better view. Alone, Gianni watches in horror as an axe-carrying assailant brutally hacks Berti to death. But he is unable to see the murderer’s face. Gianni finds Neal unconscious on the lawn, having been knocked out from behind.
Giermani's investigation reveals that Berti was unhealthily obsessed with Neal's novels, and now that he is dead it is believed that the killings will cease. However, Bullmer, who is having an affair with Jane, is stabbed to death while waiting for his lover in a public square. Gianni is haunted by the thought that he had seen, but did not recognize, something important at Berti’s house during the night of the interviewer's murder. He returns to the house and suddenly remembers what was so important— he had heard Berti confessing to his attacker, "I killed them all, I killed them all!" Before Gianni can share this important detail with anyone, he is attacked from the back seat of his car and strangled to death.
Jane sits at her kitchen table when a figure with an axe leaps through her window, hacking off one of her arms. She spews gallons of blood over the kitchen walls before falling to the floor, the killer continuing to hack at her until she is dead. Neal is her murderer. Upon learning the details of Berti's sadistic murder spree, Neal had suddenly been overwhelmed by a forgotten memory involving Neal's murder of a girl who had sexually humiliated him when he was a youth in Rhode Island
. The memory now constantly torments him and has inflamed his previously repressed lust for blood. Neal has become completely insane, and it was he who also killed Berti, Bullmer and Gianni.
When Inspector Altieri arrives at the house a few minutes after Jane's death, Neal kills her too. Later, Giermani and Anne arrive at the house in the pouring rain, and when Neal sees that he cannot escape, he slits his throat in front of them. Finding the telephone out of order, Giermani and Anne go outside to report the incident from his car radio. Giermani returns to the house and is suddenly murdered by Neal, who had faked his own death. Neal waits inside for Anne to return, but when she opens the door, she accidentally knocks over a metal sculpture that impales and kills the demented writer. The horror-stricken Anne stands in the rain and screams over and over again.
Although tenebrae/tenebre is a Latin
/Italian word meaning "darkness" or "shadows",
Argento instructed his cinematographer Luciano Tovoli
to film the movie with as much bright light as possible. Shot on location in Rome, much of the film takes place during daytime, or in harshly overlit interiors. Except for the finale and some night scenes, the entire movie is shot with clear, cold light permeating the surroundings. Argento’s stated rationale for this approach was an attempt to approximate the allegedly “realistic manner of lighting” used in television police shows. The director explained that he was adopting "...a modern style of photography, deliberately breaking with the legacy of German Expressionism
. Today's light is the light of neon, headlights, and omnipresent flashes...Caring about shadows seemed ridiculous to me and, more than that, reassuring." He also admitted that the lighting and camerawork used in Andrzej Żuławski's Possession
(1981) greatly influenced his decision to have Tovoli shoot Tenebrae with such stark lighting.
For one of Tenebraes main setpieces, the murder of the lesbian couple, Argento and Tovoli employed the use of a Louma crane
to film a several minutes-long tracking shot
that acted as an introduction to the sequence. The tracking shot, due to its extreme length, was fraught with potential problems and proved to be the most difficult and complex part of the entire production to complete. Patrick McAllister, writing as 'Ironwolfe' on Gerry Carpenter's Scifilm website described it as
Although an Italian production, the film was shot with most of the cast members speaking their dialogue in English in order to increase its chances for successful exportation to the United States. For domestic consumption, the film was dubbed into Italian. In the Italian language version, the killer's voice heard reading aloud from Neal's book in the opening sequence was supplied by Argento himself. In the English language version, Franciosa, Gemma, Saxon and Steiner all provided their own voices, while Nicolodi's voice was reportedly dubbed by actress Theresa Russell
.
problems with his previous film, Inferno. In the United States, however, the film fared far less well. It remained unseen until 1984, when Bedford Entertainment briefly released a heavily edited version under the title Unsane. It was approximately ten minutes shorter than the European release version and was missing nearly all of the film’s violence, which effectively rendered the numerous horror sequences incomprehensible. In addition, certain scenes that established the characters and their relationships were excised, making the film's narrative difficult to follow. Predictably, this version of Tenebrae received nearly unanimously negative reviews.
In the United Kingdom, the film was shorn of five seconds of "sexualized violence" by the British Board of Film Classification
prior to its theatrical release. It later became one of the thirty-nine so-called "Video Nasties
" that were successfully prosecuted and banned from sale in UK video stores under the Video Recordings Act 1984
. This ban lasted until 1999, when Tenebrae was legally rereleased on videotape, with an additional one second of footage removed from the film (this version was also missing the previously censored five seconds). In 2003, the BBFC reclassified the film and passed it without any cuts.
The film has since been released basically uncut minus approximately 20 seconds of extraneous material on DVD
in the US, allowing the film to be properly evaluated for the first time.
Ed Gonzalez, of Slant Magazine
, said that "Tenebre is a riveting defense of auteur theory, ripe with self-reflexive discourse and various moral conflicts. It's both a riveting horror film and an architect's worst nightmare." Keith Phipps, of The Onion
's A.V. Club, noted "...Argento makes some points about the intersection of art, reality, and personality, but the director's stunning trademark setpieces, presented here in a fully restored version, provide the real reason to watch." Almar Haflidason, in a review for BBC
.co.uk, opined, "Sadistically beautiful and viciously exciting, welcome to true terror with Dario Argento's shockingly relentless Tenebrae." Tim Lucas
, in Video Watchdog
, said, "Though it is in some ways as artificial and deliberate as a De Palma
thriller, Tenebrae contains more likeable characters, believable relationships, and more emphasis on the erotic than can be found in any other Argento film." Justin Felix of DVD Talk
said, "Tenebre is an effective murder mystery with a number of visual and audio flourishes that exemplify why Dario Argento is well-admired in cult circles." Gordon Sullivan of DVD Verdict
wrote, "Tenebre is a straight-up giallo in the old-school tradition. It may have been filmed in 1982, but it comes straight out of the '70s tradition. We've got all the usual suspects, including a writer for a main character, lots of killer-cam point of view, some crazily over the top kills, and approximately seventy-two twists before all is revealed... For fans of Argento's earlier giallo, this is a must-see."
Not all of the recent critical reaction to Tenebrae has been positive. Gary Johnson, editor of Images, complained that "Not much of Tenebre makes much sense. The plot becomes little more than an excuse for Argento to stage the murder sequences. And these are some of the bloodiest murders of Argento's career." In 2004, Tim Lucas reevaluated the film and found that some of his earlier enthusiasm had dimmed considerably, noting that, "Tenebre is beginning to suffer from the cheap 16 mm-like softness of Luciano Tovoli's cinematography, its sometimes over-storyboarded violence (the first two murders in particular look stilted), the many bewildering lapses in logic...and the overdone performances of many of its female actors..."
in Tenebrae. In interviews conducted during the film’s production, the usually somewhat reticent Argento offered his own views as to the thematic content of the film. As Maitland McDonagh noted in Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, “…Argento has never been more articulate and/or analytical than he was on the subject of Tenebrae.”
It is these characters’ chronic inability to find the missing pieces of a puzzle (the puzzle being the solution of a murder or series of murders) that generally provides much of the films’ narrative thrust. Most obviously is the blind Franco Arno (Karl Malden
) in The Cat o' Nine Tails
(1971), who must use his heightened aural sense in combination with visual clues supplied to him by his niece to solve a mystery. In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
(1970), Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante
) witnesses a murder attempt but admits to the police that something seems to be “missing”; as the film’s surprise ending makes clear, he didn’t “miss” anything at all, he simply misinterpreted what happened in front of his eyes. In Deep Red
(1975), Marcus (David Hemmings
) has a similar problem in both seeing and not seeing the murderer at the scene of the crime, and doesn’t realize his mistake until its almost too late. (In discussing this recurring theme, Douglas E. Winter noted that Argento creates “a world of danger and deception, where seeing is not believing…”)
Flanagan observes that in Tenebrae, Argento offers two separate characters who suffer from impaired vision. Gianni (Christian Borromeo) is an eyewitness to an axe-murder, but the trauma of seeing the killing causes him to disregard a vital clue. Returning to the scene of the crime, he suddenly remembers everything, and is promptly murdered before being able to tell a soul. Homicide detective Giermani reveals that he is a big fan of the novels of Agatha Christie
, Mickey Spillane
, Rex Stout
, and Ed McBain, but admits that he has never been able to guess the identity of the killer in any of the books. He is similarly unable to solve the real mystery until the last corpses are piled at his feet—he cannot see Peter Neal for what he really is.
Neal, who ultimately responds to an ongoing series of murders by becoming a killer himself, emphatically introduces the theme of impaired vision when he admits to Giermani: “I've tried to figure it out, but I just have this hunch that something is missing, a tiny piece of the jigsaw. Somebody who should be dead is alive, or somebody who should be alive is already dead.” Of course, Neal himself is the “missing piece”, and in the end he will fake his suicide and become the “somebody who should be dead.”
McDonagh notes that Tenebrae expands a theme already introduced in Argento’s earlier giallo films. "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o' Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet
(1972), and Deep Red are full of sex, of course: transvestitism and sexual role playing are in all four films central factors and none lacks for imagery dealing in diverse sexual behavior. But Tenebrae’s overall sensuality sets it apart from Argento’s other gialli.” She says that the film’s sexual content and abundant nudity make it “the first of Argento’s films to have an overtly erotic aspect,” and further notes that “Tenebrae is fraught with free-floating anxiety that is specifically sexual in nature.”
Flanagan and McDonagh – and, indeed, most critics – have noted that two sexually charged flashbacks
are key to understanding Tenebrae. These distinct but strongly related memory fragments are introduced repeatedly throughout the course of the film, usually immediately following a murder sequence. Although these flashbacks are never fully explained, the first of these memories reveals a beautiful young woman’s sexual humiliation (basically, an oral rape) of a teenaged boy (presumably Peter Neal) on a pale-white beach, followed (in the second flashback) by the vicious revenge-murder of the woman some time later. The young woman (played by transgender
actress Eva Robin's
) is mostly topless during this first sequence, and she humiliates the young man by jamming the heel of one of her Freudian
shiny red shoes into his mouth while he is held down by a group of gleeful boys. McDonagh notes that all of the fetishistic
imagery of these flashbacks, combined with the sadistic details of the murder sequences in the main narrative, “set the parameters of Tenebrae’s fetishistic and fetishicized visual vocabulary, couched in terms both ritualistic and orgiastically out of control…Peter Neal indulges in sins of the flesh and Tenebrae revels in them, inviting the spectator to join in; in fact, it dares the viewer not to do so.”
McDonagh notes that Argento also emphasizes a similar doubling between Neal and Giermani. "Giermani...is made to reflect Neal even as Neal appropriates his role as investigator...the detective/writer and the writer/detective each belittles his other half, as though by being demeaned this inverted reflection could be made to go away." McDonagh also observes that, in what is arguably the film's most potent shock, Neal at one point really does make Giermani "go away", virtually replacing him on screen "in a shot that is as schematically logical as it is logically outrageous."
, Argento noted that the film was intended as near-science fiction
, taking place "about five or more years in the future...Tenebrae occurs in a world inhabited by fewer people with the result that the remainder are wealthier and less crowded. Something has happened to make it that way but no one remembers, or wants to remember...It isn't exactly my Blade Runner
, of course, but nevertheless a step into the world of tomorrow. If you watch the film with this perspective in mind, it will become very apparent."
Despite Argento's claim, Maitland McDonagh observed that this vaguely science-fictional concept "isn't apparent at all"
and, in fact, no critics noted the underlying futuristic theme in their reviews of the theatrical release of the film.
While rejecting this thematic concern as unrealized by Argento, McDonagh noticed that the result of the director’s experiment is a strange “architectural landscape” that becomes the “key element in differentiating Tenebrae from Argento’s earlier gialli.” Argento’s use of unusual architectural space and so-called visual “hyper-realism” results in an enormously fake looking environment. Seizing on the director's additional comment, “…I dreamed an imaginary city in which the most amazing things happen”, she notes that the film’s “fictive space couldn’t be less 'real'…Its imaginary geography is pieced together out of fragments of 'Rome'…that emphasize vast unpopulated boulevards, piazzas that look like nothing more than suburban American malls, hard-edged Bauhaus
apartment buildings, anonymous clubs, and parking garages.”
has observed that Tenebrae “is in most ways a typical giallo: visually extremely stylish, with imaginative, sometimes stunning cinematography...mysterious, gruesome murders, often in picturesque locations; at the end, the identity of the murderer is disclosed in a scene destined to terrify and surprise.” Those narrative and stylistic clichés had been introduced years before Argento had ever made his first thriller (most critics point to Mario Bava
’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much
(1963) as the original giallo). By the time he made Tenebrae, Argento had become the acknowledged master of the sub-genre, to the point where he felt confident enough to be openly self-referential
to his own past. Tim Lucas notes that Argento explicitly “quotes some of his earlier films with affection: the reckless driving humor from The Cat o' Nine Tails, the image of horror revealed behind the hero as he bends down from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.”
Bird’s climactic “murderous use of a large and unusual sculpture”, in which Tony Musante is trapped beneath a huge work of art with long spikes, is also recycled/referenced in the final moments of Tenebrae.
McDonagh argues that Argento’s influences for Tenebrae were far broader than just his own films or previous Italian thrillers. She notes that the film’s “surprisingly strong narrative” is suggestive of “the most paranoid excesses of film noir
.” McDonagh suggests that Fritz Lang
’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
(1956) (‘in which a man convicted of murder on false evidence…is in fact guilty of the murder”) and Roy William Neill
’s Black Angel
(1946) (“in which a man who tries to clear a murder suspect does so at the cost of learning that he himself is the killer”) both use such a similar plot twist to Tenebrae that Argento may very well have used them as partial models for his story.
’s A Blade in the Dark
(1983) were arguably directly inspired by Argento’s film.
Douglas E. Winter has opined that Tenebrae’s Louma crane sequence was stylistically influential and was specifically “replicated in Brian De Palma
’s The Untouchables
(1987).”
In Raising Cain
, De Palma’s “surprise reveal” of John Lithgow
standing behind a victim is often discussed as being an unacknowledged “steal” from Tenebrae.Robert Zemeckis
’s What Lies Beneath
(2000) also contains a very similar moment, although Zemeckis has denied having any familiarity at all with Italian thrillers.
Argento had used the Italian rock band
Goblin
to provide the musical scores to two of his previous films, Deep Red (1975) and Suspiria (1977). The group had disbanded in 1980, but three of the band's members—Claudio Simonetti
(Roland Jupiter-8
, Roland Vocoder
Plus, Minimoog
, Piano
, Electric piano
, Oberheim
DMX Digital Drum, Roland TR-808
, Roland MC4 Computer), Fabio Pignatelli
(Fender bass
normal and fretless
), and Massimo Morante
(Electric and Acoustic Guitar
)—reunited at Argento's request to work on Tenebrae. The resulting synth
-driven score was credited to "Simonetti-Pignatelli-Morante".
While not as well regarded as Goblin's earlier scores for Deep Red, Suspiria, or Dawn of the Dead (1978), Tim Lucas felt the soundtrack
is "...so fused to the fabric of the picture that Tenebrae might be termed...a giallo musicale; that is, a giallo in which the soundtrack transcends mere accompaniment to occupy the same plane as the action and characters."
The Tenebrae soundtrack album
has been enduringly popular enough to have had multiple reissues in numerous countries since its original release in 1982 on the Italian Cinevox label. That version consisted of only eight tracks. In 1997, Cinevox issued a greatly expanded version on CD
, including eleven bonus track
s, with a running time of over an hour. In 2004, the expanded CD was released in the U.S. on the Armadillo Music label.
On the DVD review website, DVD Times, Michael Mackenzie argues that the film's actual title is Tenebre, since it is that title that was "used for the Italian prints and the cover of the US DVD." But a DVD Talk reviewer, Justin Felix, noted in his review of the DVD release that, "In its package art, Anchor Bay refers to this movie as Tenebre - although the movie itself is titled Tenebrae.
Cinema of Italy
The history of Italian cinema began just a few months after the Lumière brothers had patented their Cinematographe, when Pope Leo XIII was filmed for a few seconds in the act of blessing the camera.-Early years:...
horror
Horror film
Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...
thriller film written and directed by Dario Argento
Dario Argento
Dario Argento is an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter. He is best known for his work in the horror film genre, particularly in the subgenre known as giallo, and for his influence on modern horror and slasher movies....
. The film stars Anthony Franciosa
Anthony Franciosa
Anthony Franciosa was an American actor, usually billed as Tony Franciosa during the height of his career.-Early life:...
, John Saxon
John Saxon (actor)
John Saxon is an American actor who has worked on over 200 projects during the span of sixty years. Saxon is most known for his work in horror films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Black Christmas, both of which feature Saxon as a policeman in search of the killer...
, and Daria Nicolodi
Daria Nicolodi
Daria Nicolodi is an Italian actress and screenwriter.- Early life and career :Daria Nicolodi was born in Florence on June 19, 1950. Her father was a Florentine lawyer and her mother, Fulvia, was a scholar of ancient languages. Her maternal grandfather was composer Alfredo Casella...
. After having experimented with two exercises in pure supernatural
Supernatural
The supernatural or is that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature...
horror, Suspiria
Suspiria
Suspiria is a 1977 Italian horror film directed by Dario Argento and co-written by Argento and Daria Nicolodi. The film follows an American ballet student who transfers to a prestigious dance academy in Germany, only to discover that it is controlled by a coven of witches. The film's score was...
(1977) and Inferno
Inferno (1980 film)
Inferno is a 1980 Italian supernatural horror film written and directed by Dario Argento. The film stars Irene Miracle, Leigh McCloskey, Eleonora Giorgi, Daria Nicolodi, and Alida Valli. The cinematography was by Romano Albani, and Keith Emerson composed the film's thunderous musical score...
(1980), Tenebrae represented Argento's return to the giallo
Giallo
Giallo is an Italian 20th century genre of literature and film, which in Italian indicates crime fiction and mystery. In the English language it refers to a genre similar to the French fantastique genre and includes elements of horror fiction and eroticism...
form, a sub-genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
he had helped popularize in the 1970s. The story concerns an American writer promoting his latest murder-mystery
Crime fiction
Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...
novel in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
, only to get embroiled in the search for a serial-killer who has apparently been inspired to kill by the novel.
The film was released in Italy and throughout most of Europe without experiencing any reported censorship
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
problems, but was classified, prosecuted, and banned as a "video nasty
Video nasty
"Video nasty" was a colloquial term coined in the United Kingdom by 1982 which originally applied to a number of films distributed on video cassette that were criticized for their violent content by the press, commentators such as Mary Whitehouse and various religious organizations.While violence...
" in the United Kingdom. Its theatrical distribution in the United States was delayed until 1984, when it was released in a heavily censored version under the title Unsane. In its cut form, Tenebrae received a mostly negative critical reception, but the original, fully restored version later became widely available for reappraisal. It has been described by Maitland McDonagh as "the finest film that Argento has ever made."
Plot
Peter Neal (Franciosa) is an American writer of violent horror novels whose books are tremendously popular in Europe. In Italy to promote his latest work, entitled Tenebrae, he is accompanied by his literary agent Bullmer (Saxon) and his adoring assistant Anne (Nicolodi). He is unaware that he is also being followed by his embittered ex-wife Jane (Veronica LarioVeronica Lario
Veronica Lario is a former Italian actress, ex wife of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, although she has filed for legal separation, which is the first step towards divorce in Italian law.-Biography:Born in Bologna, Lario was an actress in low budget films...
). Immediately prior to Neal’s arrival in Rome, a beautiful young shoplifter (Ania Pieroni
Ania Pieroni
Ania Pieroni is an Italian actress from the late 1970s and early 1980s.- Early life :Ania Pieroni was born in 1957 in Rome to a middle-class family. Her paternal grandfather was the mayor of Pescara, while her maternal grandfather was a German architect. Her father was a Knight of Malta, a pilot...
) is brutally razor-slashed to death by an unseen killer. The murderer sends Neal a letter informing him that his books have inspired him to go on a killing spree. Neal immediately contacts the police, who put Detective Giermani (Giuliano Gemma
Giuliano Gemma
-Biography:Born in Rome, Gemma first worked as a stuntman, then was offered real acting parts by director Duccio Tessari, starting with the film Arrivano i titani . He also made an appearance in Luchino Visconti's Il Gattopardo as Garibaldi's General...
) in charge of the investigation, along with the detective’s female partner Inspector Altieri (Carola Stagnaro).
More killings occur. Tilde (Mirella D’Angelo), a beautiful lesbian journalist, is murdered at her home along with her lover. Later, Maria (Lara Wendel), the young daughter of Neal’s landlord, is bloodily hacked to death with an axe after stumbling into the killer's lair. Neal notices that TV interviewer Christiano Berti (John Steiner
John Steiner
John Steiner is an English actor. Tall, thin and gaunt, Steiner attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and worked for a few years at the BBC. Steiner featured in a lead role in a television production of Design for Living by Noel Coward. Later he found further work primarily in films...
) appears to have an unusually intense interest in the novelist's work. At night, Neal and his second assistant Gianni (Christiano Borromeo) watch Berti’s house for suspicious activity. Neal decides to separate from Gianni in order to get a better view. Alone, Gianni watches in horror as an axe-carrying assailant brutally hacks Berti to death. But he is unable to see the murderer’s face. Gianni finds Neal unconscious on the lawn, having been knocked out from behind.
Giermani's investigation reveals that Berti was unhealthily obsessed with Neal's novels, and now that he is dead it is believed that the killings will cease. However, Bullmer, who is having an affair with Jane, is stabbed to death while waiting for his lover in a public square. Gianni is haunted by the thought that he had seen, but did not recognize, something important at Berti’s house during the night of the interviewer's murder. He returns to the house and suddenly remembers what was so important— he had heard Berti confessing to his attacker, "I killed them all, I killed them all!" Before Gianni can share this important detail with anyone, he is attacked from the back seat of his car and strangled to death.
Jane sits at her kitchen table when a figure with an axe leaps through her window, hacking off one of her arms. She spews gallons of blood over the kitchen walls before falling to the floor, the killer continuing to hack at her until she is dead. Neal is her murderer. Upon learning the details of Berti's sadistic murder spree, Neal had suddenly been overwhelmed by a forgotten memory involving Neal's murder of a girl who had sexually humiliated him when he was a youth in Rhode Island
Rhode Island
The state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, more commonly referred to as Rhode Island , is a state in the New England region of the United States. It is the smallest U.S. state by area...
. The memory now constantly torments him and has inflamed his previously repressed lust for blood. Neal has become completely insane, and it was he who also killed Berti, Bullmer and Gianni.
When Inspector Altieri arrives at the house a few minutes after Jane's death, Neal kills her too. Later, Giermani and Anne arrive at the house in the pouring rain, and when Neal sees that he cannot escape, he slits his throat in front of them. Finding the telephone out of order, Giermani and Anne go outside to report the incident from his car radio. Giermani returns to the house and is suddenly murdered by Neal, who had faked his own death. Neal waits inside for Anne to return, but when she opens the door, she accidentally knocks over a metal sculpture that impales and kills the demented writer. The horror-stricken Anne stands in the rain and screams over and over again.
Production
Argento has claimed that Tenebrae was influenced by a disturbing incident he had in 1980 with an obsessed fan. According to Argento, the fan telephoned him repeatedly, day after day, until finally confessing that he wanted to kill the director. Although ultimately no violence of any kind came of the threat, Argento has said he found the experience understandably terrifying and was inspired to write Tenebrae as a result of his fears.Although tenebrae/tenebre is a Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
/Italian word meaning "darkness" or "shadows",
Argento instructed his cinematographer Luciano Tovoli
Luciano Tovoli
Luciano Tovoli , is an Italian cinematographer, film director, and screenwriter. While the majority of the titles in his filmography are Italian, he has worked as cinematographer on several United States and French productions.His films include Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger , Walerian...
to film the movie with as much bright light as possible. Shot on location in Rome, much of the film takes place during daytime, or in harshly overlit interiors. Except for the finale and some night scenes, the entire movie is shot with clear, cold light permeating the surroundings. Argento’s stated rationale for this approach was an attempt to approximate the allegedly “realistic manner of lighting” used in television police shows. The director explained that he was adopting "...a modern style of photography, deliberately breaking with the legacy of German Expressionism
German Expressionism
German Expressionism refers to a number of related creative movements beginning in Germany before the First World War that reached a peak in Berlin, during the 1920s...
. Today's light is the light of neon, headlights, and omnipresent flashes...Caring about shadows seemed ridiculous to me and, more than that, reassuring." He also admitted that the lighting and camerawork used in Andrzej Żuławski's Possession
Possession (1981 film)
Possession is a 1981 cult horror film directed by Andrzej Żuławski.-Plot:Mark returns home to Berlin to find his wife Anna is leaving him for unclear reasons. He initially suspects an affair and hires detectives to track her, but gradually discovers clues that something far stranger is afoot...
(1981) greatly influenced his decision to have Tovoli shoot Tenebrae with such stark lighting.
For one of Tenebraes main setpieces, the murder of the lesbian couple, Argento and Tovoli employed the use of a Louma crane
Crane shot
In filmmaking and video production a crane shot is a shot taken by a camera on a crane. The most obvious uses are to view the actors from above or to move up and away from them, a common way of ending a movie. Some filmmakers like to have the camera on a boom arm just to make it easier to move...
to film a several minutes-long tracking shot
Tracking shot
In motion picture terminology, a tracking shot is a segment in which the camera is mounted on a camera dolly, a wheeled platform that is pushed on rails while the picture is being taken...
that acted as an introduction to the sequence. The tracking shot, due to its extreme length, was fraught with potential problems and proved to be the most difficult and complex part of the entire production to complete. Patrick McAllister, writing as 'Ironwolfe' on Gerry Carpenter's Scifilm website described it as
Although an Italian production, the film was shot with most of the cast members speaking their dialogue in English in order to increase its chances for successful exportation to the United States. For domestic consumption, the film was dubbed into Italian. In the Italian language version, the killer's voice heard reading aloud from Neal's book in the opening sequence was supplied by Argento himself. In the English language version, Franciosa, Gemma, Saxon and Steiner all provided their own voices, while Nicolodi's voice was reportedly dubbed by actress Theresa Russell
Theresa Russell
Theresa Russell is an American actress.-Biography:Russell was born Theresa Paup in San Diego, California, the daughter of Carole Platt and Jerry Russell Paup. She attended Burbank High School, but did not graduate. She married English film director Nicolas Roeg , in 1982...
.
Response
Tenebrae had a wide theatrical release throughout Italy and Europe, something the director very much needed after having suffered major distributionFilm distributor
A film distributor is a company or individual responsible for releasing films to the public either theatrically or for home viewing...
problems with his previous film, Inferno. In the United States, however, the film fared far less well. It remained unseen until 1984, when Bedford Entertainment briefly released a heavily edited version under the title Unsane. It was approximately ten minutes shorter than the European release version and was missing nearly all of the film’s violence, which effectively rendered the numerous horror sequences incomprehensible. In addition, certain scenes that established the characters and their relationships were excised, making the film's narrative difficult to follow. Predictably, this version of Tenebrae received nearly unanimously negative reviews.
British Board of Film Classification
The British Board of Film Classification , originally British Board of Film Censors, is a non-governmental organisation, funded by the film industry and responsible for the national classification of films within the United Kingdom...
prior to its theatrical release. It later became one of the thirty-nine so-called "Video Nasties
Video nasty
"Video nasty" was a colloquial term coined in the United Kingdom by 1982 which originally applied to a number of films distributed on video cassette that were criticized for their violent content by the press, commentators such as Mary Whitehouse and various religious organizations.While violence...
" that were successfully prosecuted and banned from sale in UK video stores under the Video Recordings Act 1984
Video Recordings Act 1984
The Video Recordings Act 1984 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that was passed in 1984. It states that commercial video recordings offered for sale or for hire within the UK must carry a classification that has been agreed upon by an authority designated by the Home Office...
. This ban lasted until 1999, when Tenebrae was legally rereleased on videotape, with an additional one second of footage removed from the film (this version was also missing the previously censored five seconds). In 2003, the BBFC reclassified the film and passed it without any cuts.
The film has since been released basically uncut minus approximately 20 seconds of extraneous material on DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
in the US, allowing the film to be properly evaluated for the first time.
Ed Gonzalez, of Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine is an online publication that features reviews of movies, music, TV, DVDs, theater, and video games, as well as interviews with actors, directors, and musicians. The site covers various film festivals like the New York Film Festival.- History :...
, said that "Tenebre is a riveting defense of auteur theory, ripe with self-reflexive discourse and various moral conflicts. It's both a riveting horror film and an architect's worst nightmare." Keith Phipps, of The Onion
The Onion
The Onion is an American news satire organization. It is an entertainment newspaper and a website featuring satirical articles reporting on international, national, and local news, in addition to a non-satirical entertainment section known as The A.V. Club...
's A.V. Club, noted "...Argento makes some points about the intersection of art, reality, and personality, but the director's stunning trademark setpieces, presented here in a fully restored version, provide the real reason to watch." Almar Haflidason, in a review for BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
.co.uk, opined, "Sadistically beautiful and viciously exciting, welcome to true terror with Dario Argento's shockingly relentless Tenebrae." Tim Lucas
Tim Lucas
Tim Lucas is a film critic, biographer, novelist, screenwriter, blogger, and publisher/editor of the video review magazine Video Watchdog.-Biography and early career:...
, in Video Watchdog
Video Watchdog
Video Watchdog is a bimonthly, digest size film magazine started in 1990 by publisher/editor Tim Lucas and his wife, art director and co-publisher Donna Lucas....
, said, "Though it is in some ways as artificial and deliberate as a De Palma
Brian De Palma
Brian Russell De Palma is an American film director and writer. In a career spanning over 40 years, he is probably best known for his suspense and crime thriller films, including such box office successes as the horror film Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Scarface, The Untouchables, and Mission:...
thriller, Tenebrae contains more likeable characters, believable relationships, and more emphasis on the erotic than can be found in any other Argento film." Justin Felix of DVD Talk
DVD Talk
DVD Talk is a website for DVD enthusiasts founded in January 1999 by Geoffrey Kleinman when DVDs and DVD players were first beginning to hit the market.The site started as an online forum, an email newsletter, and a page of DVD news and reviews...
said, "Tenebre is an effective murder mystery with a number of visual and audio flourishes that exemplify why Dario Argento is well-admired in cult circles." Gordon Sullivan of DVD Verdict
DVD Verdict
DVD Verdict is a judicial themed website for DVD reviews. The site was founded in 1999. Current editor in chief is Michael Stailey, who also reviews for Rotten Tomatoes...
wrote, "Tenebre is a straight-up giallo in the old-school tradition. It may have been filmed in 1982, but it comes straight out of the '70s tradition. We've got all the usual suspects, including a writer for a main character, lots of killer-cam point of view, some crazily over the top kills, and approximately seventy-two twists before all is revealed... For fans of Argento's earlier giallo, this is a must-see."
Not all of the recent critical reaction to Tenebrae has been positive. Gary Johnson, editor of Images, complained that "Not much of Tenebre makes much sense. The plot becomes little more than an excuse for Argento to stage the murder sequences. And these are some of the bloodiest murders of Argento's career." In 2004, Tim Lucas reevaluated the film and found that some of his earlier enthusiasm had dimmed considerably, noting that, "Tenebre is beginning to suffer from the cheap 16 mm-like softness of Luciano Tovoli's cinematography, its sometimes over-storyboarded violence (the first two murders in particular look stilted), the many bewildering lapses in logic...and the overdone performances of many of its female actors..."
Themes
Critics have identified various major themesTheme (literature)
A theme is a broad, message, or moral of a story. The message may be about life, society, or human nature. Themes often explore timeless and universal ideas and are almost always implied rather than stated explicitly. Along with plot, character,...
in Tenebrae. In interviews conducted during the film’s production, the usually somewhat reticent Argento offered his own views as to the thematic content of the film. As Maitland McDonagh noted in Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, “…Argento has never been more articulate and/or analytical than he was on the subject of Tenebrae.”
Vision impairment
Paul Flanagan has observed that Argento's protagonists in his giallo films almost always suffer from vision impairment of some kind.It is these characters’ chronic inability to find the missing pieces of a puzzle (the puzzle being the solution of a murder or series of murders) that generally provides much of the films’ narrative thrust. Most obviously is the blind Franco Arno (Karl Malden
Karl Malden
Karl Malden was an American actor. In a career that spanned more than seven decades, he performed in such classic films as A Streetcar Named Desire, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, On the Waterfront and One-Eyed Jacks...
) in The Cat o' Nine Tails
The Cat o' Nine Tails
The Cat o' Nine Tails is a 1971 Italian giallo thriller film written and directed by Dario Argento; it was his second film as director....
(1971), who must use his heightened aural sense in combination with visual clues supplied to him by his niece to solve a mystery. In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a 1970 giallo suspense thriller directed by Dario Argento . The film is considered a landmark in the Italian giallo genre...
(1970), Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante
Tony Musante
Anthony Peter Musante is an American actor.Musante was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of Natalie Anne , a school teacher, and Anthony Peter Musante, an accountant. He attended Oberlin College and Northwestern University.Musante has acted in numerous feature films, in the United States...
) witnesses a murder attempt but admits to the police that something seems to be “missing”; as the film’s surprise ending makes clear, he didn’t “miss” anything at all, he simply misinterpreted what happened in front of his eyes. In Deep Red
Deep Red
Profondo Rosso is a 1975 giallo film directed and written by Dario Argento and co-written by Bernardino Zapponi. It was released on March 7, 1975 in Italy and June 11, 1976 in the United States. The film's score was composed and performed by Goblin...
(1975), Marcus (David Hemmings
David Hemmings
David Edward Leslie Hemmings was an English film, theatre and television actor as well as a film and television director and producer....
) has a similar problem in both seeing and not seeing the murderer at the scene of the crime, and doesn’t realize his mistake until its almost too late. (In discussing this recurring theme, Douglas E. Winter noted that Argento creates “a world of danger and deception, where seeing is not believing…”)
Flanagan observes that in Tenebrae, Argento offers two separate characters who suffer from impaired vision. Gianni (Christian Borromeo) is an eyewitness to an axe-murder, but the trauma of seeing the killing causes him to disregard a vital clue. Returning to the scene of the crime, he suddenly remembers everything, and is promptly murdered before being able to tell a soul. Homicide detective Giermani reveals that he is a big fan of the novels of Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.According to...
, Mickey Spillane
Mickey Spillane
Frank Morrison Spillane , better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American author of crime novels, many featuring his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally...
, Rex Stout
Rex Stout
Rex Todhunter Stout was an American writer noted for his detective fiction. Stout is best known as the creator of the larger-than-life fictional detective Nero Wolfe, described by reviewer Will Cuppy as "that Falstaff of detectives." Wolfe's assistant Archie Goodwin recorded the cases of the...
, and Ed McBain, but admits that he has never been able to guess the identity of the killer in any of the books. He is similarly unable to solve the real mystery until the last corpses are piled at his feet—he cannot see Peter Neal for what he really is.
Neal, who ultimately responds to an ongoing series of murders by becoming a killer himself, emphatically introduces the theme of impaired vision when he admits to Giermani: “I've tried to figure it out, but I just have this hunch that something is missing, a tiny piece of the jigsaw. Somebody who should be dead is alive, or somebody who should be alive is already dead.” Of course, Neal himself is the “missing piece”, and in the end he will fake his suicide and become the “somebody who should be dead.”
"Aberrant" sexuality
In his study of the film, Flanagan argues that in Tenebrae, “male and female sexual deviancy are the central issues,” noting that Berti targets those he considers to be “filthy, slimy perverts ”. The first victim is a sexually promiscuous shoplifter, and his next two are the lesbian reporter and her bisexual lover. He kills the comparatively “normal” Maria only because she inadvertently discovers his twisted compulsion.McDonagh notes that Tenebrae expands a theme already introduced in Argento’s earlier giallo films. "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o' Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet
Four Flies on Grey Velvet
Four Flies on Grey Velvet is a 1971 Italian mystery thriller film, directed by Dario Argento. The screenplay is also by Argento, from a story by him, Luigi Cozzi, Mario Foglietti and Bryan Edgar Wallace .-Plot:...
(1972), and Deep Red are full of sex, of course: transvestitism and sexual role playing are in all four films central factors and none lacks for imagery dealing in diverse sexual behavior. But Tenebrae’s overall sensuality sets it apart from Argento’s other gialli.” She says that the film’s sexual content and abundant nudity make it “the first of Argento’s films to have an overtly erotic aspect,” and further notes that “Tenebrae is fraught with free-floating anxiety that is specifically sexual in nature.”
Flashback (psychological phenomenon)
A flashback, or involuntary recurrent memory, is a psychological phenomenon in which an individual has a sudden, usually powerful, re-experiencing of a past experience or elements of a past experience. These experiences can be happy, sad, exciting, or any other emotion one can consider...
are key to understanding Tenebrae. These distinct but strongly related memory fragments are introduced repeatedly throughout the course of the film, usually immediately following a murder sequence. Although these flashbacks are never fully explained, the first of these memories reveals a beautiful young woman’s sexual humiliation (basically, an oral rape) of a teenaged boy (presumably Peter Neal) on a pale-white beach, followed (in the second flashback) by the vicious revenge-murder of the woman some time later. The young woman (played by transgender
Transgender
Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies to vary from culturally conventional gender roles....
actress Eva Robin's
Eva Robin's
Eva Robin's is a transgender Italian actress and activist. She was born male and developed extremely feminine features naturally. She considers herself an androgynous individual, rather than transsexual...
) is mostly topless during this first sequence, and she humiliates the young man by jamming the heel of one of her Freudian
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
shiny red shoes into his mouth while he is held down by a group of gleeful boys. McDonagh notes that all of the fetishistic
Fetishism
A fetish is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a man-made object that has power over others...
imagery of these flashbacks, combined with the sadistic details of the murder sequences in the main narrative, “set the parameters of Tenebrae’s fetishistic and fetishicized visual vocabulary, couched in terms both ritualistic and orgiastically out of control…Peter Neal indulges in sins of the flesh and Tenebrae revels in them, inviting the spectator to join in; in fact, it dares the viewer not to do so.”
Dark doubles
In his review of Tenebrae, Kevin Lyon observes, “The plot revolves around the audacious and quite unexpected transference of guilt from the maniacal killer (about whom we learn very little, itself unusual for Argento) to the eminently likeable hero, surely the film's boldest stroke.” While also noticing this device as being “striking”, McDonagh notes that this guilt transmission/transfer occurs between two dark doubles, two seriously warped individuals. She suggests that “Neal and Berti…act as mirrors to one another, each twisting the reflection into a warped parody of the other.” Berti’s obsession with Neal’s fiction compels him to commit murder in homage to the writer, while Neal seems to think that his own violent acts are simply part of some kind of “elaborate fiction.” When the bloody Neal is confronted by Giermani immediately after having killed numerous people, Neal screams at him, “It was like a book…a book!”McDonagh notes that Argento also emphasizes a similar doubling between Neal and Giermani. "Giermani...is made to reflect Neal even as Neal appropriates his role as investigator...the detective/writer and the writer/detective each belittles his other half, as though by being demeaned this inverted reflection could be made to go away." McDonagh also observes that, in what is arguably the film's most potent shock, Neal at one point really does make Giermani "go away", virtually replacing him on screen "in a shot that is as schematically logical as it is logically outrageous."
An imaginary city
In an interview that appeared in CinefantastiqueCinefantastique
Cinefantastique was a horror, fantasy, and science fiction film magazine originally started as a mimeographed fanzine in 1967, then relaunched as a glossy, offset quarterly in 1970 by publisher/editor Frederick S. Clarke...
, Argento noted that the film was intended as near-science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
, taking place "about five or more years in the future...Tenebrae occurs in a world inhabited by fewer people with the result that the remainder are wealthier and less crowded. Something has happened to make it that way but no one remembers, or wants to remember...It isn't exactly my Blade Runner
Blade Runner
Blade Runner is a 1982 American science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Sean Young. The screenplay, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, is loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K...
, of course, but nevertheless a step into the world of tomorrow. If you watch the film with this perspective in mind, it will become very apparent."
Despite Argento's claim, Maitland McDonagh observed that this vaguely science-fictional concept "isn't apparent at all"
and, in fact, no critics noted the underlying futuristic theme in their reviews of the theatrical release of the film.
While rejecting this thematic concern as unrealized by Argento, McDonagh noticed that the result of the director’s experiment is a strange “architectural landscape” that becomes the “key element in differentiating Tenebrae from Argento’s earlier gialli.” Argento’s use of unusual architectural space and so-called visual “hyper-realism” results in an enormously fake looking environment. Seizing on the director's additional comment, “…I dreamed an imaginary city in which the most amazing things happen”, she notes that the film’s “fictive space couldn’t be less 'real'…Its imaginary geography is pieced together out of fragments of 'Rome'…that emphasize vast unpopulated boulevards, piazzas that look like nothing more than suburban American malls, hard-edged Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
apartment buildings, anonymous clubs, and parking garages.”
Influences
Bill WarrenBill Warren
William Bond Warren , better known as Bill Warren, is an American film historian and critic generally regarded as one of the leading authorities on science fiction, horror and fantasy films....
has observed that Tenebrae “is in most ways a typical giallo: visually extremely stylish, with imaginative, sometimes stunning cinematography...mysterious, gruesome murders, often in picturesque locations; at the end, the identity of the murderer is disclosed in a scene destined to terrify and surprise.” Those narrative and stylistic clichés had been introduced years before Argento had ever made his first thriller (most critics point to Mario Bava
Mario Bava
Mario Bava was an Italian director, screenwriter, and cinematographer remembered as one of the greatest names from the "golden age" of Italian horror films.-Biography:Mario Bava was born in San Remo, Liguria, Italy...
’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much
La ragazza che sapeva troppo
The Girl Who Knew Too Much is a 1963 Italian giallo film. Directed by Italian filmmaker Mario Bava, the film stars John Saxon as Dr. Marcello Bassi and Letícia Román as Nora Davis. The plot revolves around a young woman named Nora, who travels to Rome and witnesses a murder. The police and Dr....
(1963) as the original giallo). By the time he made Tenebrae, Argento had become the acknowledged master of the sub-genre, to the point where he felt confident enough to be openly self-referential
Self-reference
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding...
to his own past. Tim Lucas notes that Argento explicitly “quotes some of his earlier films with affection: the reckless driving humor from The Cat o' Nine Tails, the image of horror revealed behind the hero as he bends down from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.”
Bird’s climactic “murderous use of a large and unusual sculpture”, in which Tony Musante is trapped beneath a huge work of art with long spikes, is also recycled/referenced in the final moments of Tenebrae.
McDonagh argues that Argento’s influences for Tenebrae were far broader than just his own films or previous Italian thrillers. She notes that the film’s “surprisingly strong narrative” is suggestive of “the most paranoid excesses of film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
.” McDonagh suggests that Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...
’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a 1956 film directed by Fritz Lang and written by Douglas Morrow. The film, considered film noir, was the last American film directed by Lang.-Plot:...
(1956) (‘in which a man convicted of murder on false evidence…is in fact guilty of the murder”) and Roy William Neill
Roy William Neill
Roy William Neill was a film director best known today for directing several of the Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, made between 1943 and 1946 and released by Universal Studios....
’s Black Angel
Black Angel
Black Angel is a 1946 film noir, based on the novel The Black Angel by Cornell Woolrich. The film was director Roy William Neill's last film.-Plot:...
(1946) (“in which a man who tries to clear a murder suspect does so at the cost of learning that he himself is the killer”) both use such a similar plot twist to Tenebrae that Argento may very well have used them as partial models for his story.
Legacy
Coming at the tail end of the giallo cycle, Tenebrae does not appear to have been as influential as Argento’s earlier films were on subsequent thrillers. However, many of the characters, scenes and plot turns in Lamberto BavaLamberto Bava
Lamberto Bava is an Italian film director, specializing in horror and fantasy films.Bava was born in Rome, Italy, the son of cinematographer/director Mario Bava, and grandson of cameraman Eugenio Bava...
’s A Blade in the Dark
A Blade in the Dark
A Blade in the Dark but also known by the title House of the Dark Stairway, is a 1983 horror film.-Plot:Bruno, a composer, becomes involved in a series of murders who lives in a villa. In a horror film Bruno is scoring: a young child, taunted by cruel bullies, descends into a dark cellar after a...
(1983) were arguably directly inspired by Argento’s film.
Douglas E. Winter has opined that Tenebrae’s Louma crane sequence was stylistically influential and was specifically “replicated in Brian De Palma
Brian De Palma
Brian Russell De Palma is an American film director and writer. In a career spanning over 40 years, he is probably best known for his suspense and crime thriller films, including such box office successes as the horror film Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Scarface, The Untouchables, and Mission:...
’s The Untouchables
The Untouchables (1987 film)
The Untouchables is a 1987 American crime-drama film directed by Brian De Palma and written by David Mamet. Based on the book The Untouchables, the film stars Kevin Costner as government agent Eliot Ness. It also stars Robert De Niro as gang leader Al Capone and Sean Connery as Irish-American...
(1987).”
In Raising Cain
Raising Cain
Raising Cain is a 1992 psychological thriller film written and directed by Brian De Palma, and starring John Lithgow, Lolita Davidovich and Steven Bauer.-Plot:Dr. Carter Nix is a respected child psychologist, the son of a giant in the field...
, De Palma’s “surprise reveal” of John Lithgow
John Lithgow
John Arthur Lithgow is an American actor, musician, and author. Presently, he is involved with a wide range of media projects, including stage, television, film, and radio...
standing behind a victim is often discussed as being an unacknowledged “steal” from Tenebrae.Robert Zemeckis
Robert Zemeckis
Robert Lee Zemeckis is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Zemeckis first came to public attention in the 1980s as the director of the comedic time-travel Back to the Future film series, as well as the Academy Award-winning live-action/animation epic Who Framed Roger Rabbit ,...
’s What Lies Beneath
What Lies Beneath
What Lies Beneath is a 2000 American supernatural horror-thriller film directed by Robert Zemeckis. It stars veteran actors Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer as a well-to-do couple who experience a strange haunting that uncovers secrets about their past....
(2000) also contains a very similar moment, although Zemeckis has denied having any familiarity at all with Italian thrillers.
Soundtrack
Rock Band
Rock Band is a music video game developed by Harmonix Music Systems, published by MTV Games and Electronic Arts. It is the first title in the Rock Band series. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions were released in the United States on November 20, 2007, while the PlayStation 2 version was...
Goblin
Goblin (band)
Goblin are an Italian progressive rock band known for their soundtracks for Dario Argento films ....
to provide the musical scores to two of his previous films, Deep Red (1975) and Suspiria (1977). The group had disbanded in 1980, but three of the band's members—Claudio Simonetti
Claudio Simonetti
Claudio Simonetti is an Italian composer who has specialized in the scores for Italian and American horror films since the 1970s.- Biography :...
(Roland Jupiter-8
Roland Jupiter-8
The Jupiter-8 is an eight-voice polyphonic analog subtractive synthesizer introduced by Roland Corporation in 1981.The Jupiter-8, or JP-8, was Roland's flagship synthesizer for the first half of the 1980's...
, Roland Vocoder
Vocoder
A vocoder is an analysis/synthesis system, mostly used for speech. In the encoder, the input is passed through a multiband filter, each band is passed through an envelope follower, and the control signals from the envelope followers are communicated to the decoder...
Plus, Minimoog
Minimoog
The Minimoog is a monophonic analog synthesizer, invented by Bill Hemsath and Robert Moog. It was released in 1970 by R.A. Moog Inc. , and production was stopped in 1981. It was re-designed by Robert Moog in 2002 and released as Minimoog Voyager.The Minimoog was designed in response to the use of...
, Piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
, Electric piano
Electric piano
An electric piano is an electric musical instrument.Electric pianos produce sounds mechanically and the sounds are turned into electrical signals by pickups. Unlike a synthesizer, the electric piano is not an electronic instrument, but electro-mechanical. The earliest electric pianos were invented...
, Oberheim
Oberheim
Oberheim Electronics is an American company, founded in 1969 by Tom Oberheim , which manufactured audio synthesizers and a variety of other electronic musical instruments.-Oberheim Electronics:...
DMX Digital Drum, Roland TR-808
Roland TR-808
The Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer was one of the first programmable drum machines . Introduced by the Roland Corporation in early 1980, it was originally manufactured for use as a tool for studio musicians to create demos. Like earlier Roland drum machines, it does not sound very much like a real...
, Roland MC4 Computer), Fabio Pignatelli
Fabio Pignatelli
Fabio Pignatelli is an Italian musician. He was the bass guitar player for the defunct Italian progressive rock band Goblin. Goblin provided soundtracks for several horror films, most famously Dario Argento's Suspiria and George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead...
(Fender bass
Bass guitar
The bass guitar is a stringed instrument played primarily with the fingers or thumb , or by using a pick....
normal and fretless
Fretless guitar
A fretless guitar is a guitar without frets. It operates in the same manner as most other stringed instruments and traditional guitars, but does not have any frets to act as the lower end point of the vibrating string...
), and Massimo Morante
Massimo Morante
Massimo Morante is an Italian musician. He was the guitar player for the Italian progressive rock band Goblin. Goblin provided soundtracks for several horror films, including Dario Argento's Deep Red and Suspiria , and George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead .-External links:...
(Electric and Acoustic Guitar
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
)—reunited at Argento's request to work on Tenebrae. The resulting synth
Synthesizer
A synthesizer is an electronic instrument capable of producing sounds by generating electrical signals of different frequencies. These electrical signals are played through a loudspeaker or set of headphones...
-driven score was credited to "Simonetti-Pignatelli-Morante".
While not as well regarded as Goblin's earlier scores for Deep Red, Suspiria, or Dawn of the Dead (1978), Tim Lucas felt the soundtrack
Soundtrack
A soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, book, television program or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or TV show; or the physical area of a film that contains the...
is "...so fused to the fabric of the picture that Tenebrae might be termed...a giallo musicale; that is, a giallo in which the soundtrack transcends mere accompaniment to occupy the same plane as the action and characters."
The Tenebrae soundtrack album
Soundtrack album
A soundtrack album is any album that incorporates music directly recorded from the soundtrack of a particular feature film or television program. In some cases, not all the tracks from the movie are included in the album; however there are rare cases of songs in the trailers that do not appear in...
has been enduringly popular enough to have had multiple reissues in numerous countries since its original release in 1982 on the Italian Cinevox label. That version consisted of only eight tracks. In 1997, Cinevox issued a greatly expanded version on CD
Compact Disc
The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...
, including eleven bonus track
Bonus track
In terms of recorded music, a bonus track is a piece of music which has been included on specific releases or reissues of an album. This is most often done as a promotional device, either as an incentive to customers to purchase albums they might otherwise not, or to repurchase albums they already...
s, with a running time of over an hour. In 2004, the expanded CD was released in the U.S. on the Armadillo Music label.
Title
Some European publicity materials for the film, including posters and lobby card sets, advertised the film as Tenebre, and the 1999 Anchor Bay DVD release uses that same title. However, on the print itself, during the opening credits, the title is clearly Tenebrae. In addition, the title of Peter Neal’s latest book in the film is shown in closeup as being Tenebrae. In a lengthy interview with Argento that appeared in Fangoria (Issues #33,34, 1983), the movie was always referred to as "Tenebrae".On the DVD review website, DVD Times, Michael Mackenzie argues that the film's actual title is Tenebre, since it is that title that was "used for the Italian prints and the cover of the US DVD." But a DVD Talk reviewer, Justin Felix, noted in his review of the DVD release that, "In its package art, Anchor Bay refers to this movie as Tenebre - although the movie itself is titled Tenebrae.
External links
- Tenebrae at Rotten TomatoesRotten TomatoesRotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
- Tenebrae at KinoEye
- Tenebrae and Autobiography