Tags: dario argento

Horror legend Dario Argento is reportedly distancing himself from his new thriller Giallo, with trade paper The Hollywood Reporter saying that he kept away from the recent premiere of his latest project at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

For the first time in his career, Argento is working as a hired director on a screenplay devised by others. American writers Jim Agnew and Sean Keller concocted Giallo as a tribute to the Italian director. In the film, which is set in Italy, Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) fears her sister Celine (Elsa Pataky) may have been kidnapped. Inspector Enzo Avolfi (Adrien Brody) fears it's worse. The two team up to rescue Celine from a sadistic killer known only as Yellow.

Giallo, like Argento's previous film Mother of Tears, will be distributed in North America by the Weinstein Company, although no news yet on a release date.

It's a sight both thrilling and familiar -- the winding staircase, especially when seen from directly above or below. Many directors and cinematographers use such shots for their guaranteed visual punch -- the landings create artificial frames, the spirals imbue the center of the screen with a sense of the infinite. Plus, the practical purpose of the stairway suggests a journey and not an easy one. Different films have used the winding staircase to evoke different things -- vertigo, insanity, a descent into hell, and even female genitalia. This Thanksgiving weekend, we give our gratitude to one of the great visual tropes in the horror-thriller by presenting six films with staircases we love.

As usual, click the thumbnails to open a larger version of the picture in a new window.(read more...)

Rarely seen outside of bootlegs, Dario Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) will see its first official DVD release on February 24, 2009, thanks to MYA Communication. The film, the third in Argento's loose "Animal Trilogy" (following The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Cat 'o Nine Tails), has been restored from the original negative. According to DVD Drive-in, the disc will present the movie uncut, in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and with both the Italian and English soundtracks as options. Special features will include trailers and an extensive photo/poster gallery, as well as the original English opening and closing credits. (read more...)

When we decided on "Foreign Horror" as the overall theme for our Shocktober review marathon this year, we made a conscious decision to leave out Italy for the most part, despite it having the second-highest horror output for a non-English-speaking country (after Japan). The fact is, we have plenty of Italian horror covered on the site, and we devoted two and a half weeks of last year's Shocktober to two of the country's best-known horror directors, Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava.(read more...)

Myriad Pictures has sent along the list of theaters where Dario Argento's long-awaited third section of his Three Mothers trilogy, The Mother of Tears, will play during its limited U.S. release. They also generously provided dozens of production stills, which you can find at the bottom of this post. In The Mother of Tears, Mater Lacrimarum (the Mother of Tears) has been hiding in Rome for centuries and her awakening triggers a chain of mysterious and terrible events: the Evil is back to cast its dark shadow over the city.(read more...)

Myriad Pictures will be rolling out Mother of Tears, the long-awaited third film in Dario Argento's Three Mothers trilogy, in limited release across the United States starting on June 6th. In the film, an art student (Asia Argento) opens an ancient urn that releases a plague of witches. Fangoria.com has the schedule:(read more...)

Yahoo! Italy has the official trailer for Dario Argento's The Third Mother, the long-awaited follow-up to Suspiria and Inferno. You can see it here. Be warned that the trailer is heavy on text, and all of that text is in Italian. Still, you can get the basic gist of things from context. The Yahoo! page also contains some exceptional-looking stills and the official poster.

Fangoria.com has received the cover art for the new two-disc special edition of Dario Argento's The Stendhal Syndrome, which is set to be released by Blue Underground on September 25th. The DVD will come with a new DTS 6.1-ES English soundtrack, as well as Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 Italian soundtracks. Blue Underground's edition will run at an uncut 119 minutes, three minutes longer than the current Troma edition. Disc 1 will also contain the film's trailer, while Disc 2 will house featurettes on Argento, Sergio Stivaletti, Luigi Cozzi, and others involved in the production.(read more...)

Sometimes, we get contacted to do an article to coincide with the release of a theatrical film or DVD. Most of the time, we don't do it because we either don't have any ideas or there are no good ideas for that particular movie. The PR folks for Universal's recent remake of The Hitcher (coming out on DVD May 1st -- check the cover art at the bottom of the page) had something different, however -- a good idea. They said, "Hey, guys, we have somebody getting yanked apart by two semi trucks in our movie. What about listing off some other brutal and/or sadistic deaths?" I was intrigued, which is often enough to get me to put fingers to keyboard, so here we go.

The list presented below isn't definitive. These aren't necessarily the ten most brutal or sadistic deaths in a horror movie, just the ones we thought were notable. Your mileage may vary. Each entry is accompanied by a screencap that can be accessed by clicking the thumbnail icon below the film title.(read more...)