Dario Argento bio by Sasha Slaughter

This week on Dead End it's all about Foreign Horror. I'm not nearly as familiar with foreign horror as my partner in crime Zombie Zane is, so bear with me huh?? Since our topic is foreign horror, I'll be giving a brief bio of Dario Argento, an Italian film director, producer, and screenwriter. Argento is best known for his work in the horror genre, and also in the subgenre known as giallo. He's had a major influence on horror and slasher films.

Dario Argento was born in Rome on September 7, 1940. He was the son of Salvatore Argento, a film producer/executive and Brazilian born Elda Luxardo, a photographer. He started his career as a movie critic, writing for various magazines while still in highschool. After finishing highschool, Argento elected to skip college and take a job as a columnist at the newspaper Paese Sera. While working for the newspaper, he became a screenwriter. His most noted work was for Sergio Leone; he and Bernardo Bertolucci worked together on a story for the spaghetti western classic Once Upon A Time In the West. The film was released in 1969 and soon after Argento began working on his directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plummage. It was released in 1970 and was a huge success in Italy.

In his early directing career, Argento focused mostly on the giallo genre (mostly known as "thriller" in Italy. The word "giallo" means yellow in Italian, mainly referring to generic mystery works.) He directed two more successful thrillers, The Cat o'Nine Tails (1971) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972.) Along with The Bird with the Crystal Plummage, these three inital films were a part of Argento's "animal trilogy". After some time, he turned his attention away from giallo films and produced two Italian dramas and a period comedy (Five Days in Milan, 1973). He returned to giallo in 1975 with Deep Red, often hailed as the best giallo ever made. The film made Argento internationally famous and inspired a number of other directors to work in the genre.

His next movie was Suspiria (1977), a violent supernatural thriller. Argento planned for Suspiria to be the first intallment of a trilogy about "The Three Mothers", three ancient witches residing in three different modern cities. The second part of the trilogy was Inferno (1980) and then The Mother of Tears (2007) concluded the trilogy.

In between working on the trilogy, Dario collaborated with George A. Romero on Dawn of the Dead that earned him a producer credit on the zombie classic. After Inferno Argento returned to the conventional giallo with Tenebrae (1982). He then combined giallo with supernatural fantasy when he made the film Phenomena, which later became known as Creepers (1985). And then his next film, Opera (1987) was set in Parma's Regio Theatre during production of Verdi's Macbeth.

His next movie was The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) and it starred Argento's daughter Asia, who happened to suffer from Stendhal Syndrome. It was about a policewoman (played by Argento's daughter) who was trapped by a serial killer in an abandoned warehouse. It was the first Italian film to use computer-generated imagery (CGI). The opening of The Stendhal Syndrome was shot in Florence, at the famed Uffizi Gallery, and Argento was the only director ever to recieve permission to shoot there.

His follow up was in 2004 with The Card Player, a giallo about a killer whose murders happen during internet poker matches with the Rome police. Many felt that the movie was too mainstream and that Argento didn't stick to his usual way of directing.

In 2005 was Argento's Do You Like Hitchcock, which was broadcast on TV. Later that year, he directed a segment of Masters of Horror, and a Showtime television series called "Jenifer". Shortly after, Argento directed an adaptation of the F. Paul Wilson short story "Pelts" for season 2 of Masters of Horror.

On June 26, 2009 Argento's latest movie "Giallo" premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival, but it failed in Italian cinemas. Because of the films failure, he decided to try again. He is involved in a horror memorabilia store located in Rome, named Profondo Rosso, after his classic film Deep Red. The store is managed by his long friend Luigi Cozzi. He also contributed in the development of the survival horror video game Dead Space. And later this year, Argento will produce the American remake of his cult classic Suspiria and he is also planning on filming Dracula 3D in Budapest.

There you have it, a short, or maybe kinda long, bio of Dario Argento. Don't forget to read up on Zombie Zanes articles and our foreign horror movie reviews, coming soon!! And as always, be sure to check back next week!!