Argento: Inferno (1980)

Imagine a horror film with no characters, no story and no real setting, just a series of suspenseful thresholds that grow more and more liquid as they unfold. In some ways, you’d be imagining Inferno, one of the most rarefied films of Dario Argento’s career, and about as close as horror cinema can come to abstract painting. Despite a nominal supernatural narrative that’s cobbled together from Argento’s previous works – the merest of narrative residues – the entire film is effectively an elaboration of a gigantic haunted house in midtown New York, by way of a series of stylised deaths that don’t advance plot or character but instead simply deepen Argento’s ambience and mise-en-scene through one precipitous descent after another. While the supernatural power of this house is never adequately explained – or important – what is clear is that it depends in some way on alchemy, inducing Argento to escort us through one alchemical threshold after another, which means positioning the entire film at the the gorgeous blue-red cusps that he made his own, finding a million different ways to flood the frame with the exact moment at which blood turns blue, until every encounter, interaction or conversation feels as deoxygenated, strangulated and suffocated as the silences that seem to dub every space they leave in their wake. As a result, everything in the film feels on the verge of transformation, or transubstantiation - there’s no other film in Argento’s career that captures the profound Catholicism of his vision quite as well as this monastic fusion of austerity and sensuality – in a kind of cinematic answer to Dante’s topology, even if it’s hard to conceive of Argento ever carrying his vision through to any paradisial or even purgatorial sequel. As with Dante’s exotic spatial imagination, too, a point is quickly reached at which these huge zones of abstract space and light quickly exceed the structures within which they’re housed, even if they’re still anchored – tenuously – in the antiquated fixtures that play such a pivotal role in Argento’s horror universe, a concatenation of taps, grates, locks, pipes and vents that transport us from one metaphysical boundary to the next. And while that strict spatial focus may remove any emotional attachment to the characters and their individual deaths, no death is redundant either, since every gruesome mise-en-crime-scene is seamlessly absorbed into the grotesque architecture of the mansion, a veritable killing-machine that adorns itself with its own prey. For that reason, it often feels like the pinnacle of Argento’s auteurism – or his most sustained case for himself as an auteur – right down to the ingenious climax, which bypasses any typical horror catharsis to introduce us to the supreme architect of the house, so dedicated to his craft that he’s morphed into it, and can only escort the film to its breathtaking finale by way of a giant, gialloesque sound studio concealed in the cellar: “I built this house, then I buried myself here. This building has become my body – its bricks my cells, its passageways my veins, and its horror my very heart.”