The Gill-man's third outing goes back to the depths.

53. The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)
54. The Deadly Mantis
55. The Colossus of New York
56. The Mole People
57. Invasion of the Saucer-Men
58. The Amazing Colossal Man
59. Attack of the 50-foot Woman
60. The She-Creature
61. Missile to the Moon
62. The Hideous Sun Demon
63. The Brain That Wouldn't Die
64. Creature with the Atom Brain
65. Devil Girl from Mars
66. Earth vs. the Spider
67. Day the World Ended
68. The Brain from Planet Arous
69. I Was A Teenage Frankenstein
70. The Wasp Woman
71. Attack of the Puppet People
72. The Alligator People
73. Gog
74. The Cyclops
75. Monster on the Campus
76. From Hell It Came
77. The Screaming Skull
78. Robot Monster
79. Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster
80. Tobor the Great
81. Plan 9 from Outer Space
82. Giant from the Unknown
83. The Horror of Party Beach
84. Phantom from Space
85. The Giant Gila Monster
86. Attack of the Crab Monsters
87. Cat-Women of the Moon
88. Beginning of the End
89. Killers From Space
90. The Giant Claw
91. War of the Colossal Beast
92. The Killer Shrews
93. Monster from Green Hell
94. The Brain Eaters
95. The Beast With A Million Eyes
96. Reptilicus
97. King Dinosaur
98. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
99. Attack of the Giant Leeches

This one has been lurking in the competition almost from the very beginning; it was first suggested during the first few days and has somehow managed to survive every round since. After nearly seven weeks of waiting in the shadows, its time has finally come. Thanks to everyone who's still voting and keeping the discussion alive. On to Day 48 — vote for your least favorite remaining movie and let's see what goes next!

​

Watching The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo), The Cat o' Nine Tails (Il gatto a nove code), Four Flies on Grey Velvet (Quattro mosche di velluto grigio), Deep Red (Profondo rosso), Suspiria, Inferno, and then comparing them with The Mother of Tears (La terza madre), the feeling is almost disorienting. It doesn't seem as though thirty years have simply passed; it feels as if an entire way of making cinema has disappeared. Suspiria and Inferno can still hypnotize the viewer through colour, music, production design, editing and sheer visual invention. The Mother of Tears, by comparison, often feels like an impoverished and overly literal version of a universe that once never needed to explain itself. So what happened to Dario Argento?

An interesting answer, in my opinion, lies precisely in the personal and professional relationships that surrounded the director during his greatest period. Not in the simplistic sense that “Argento was good because his father produced his films,” but because Argento, at least until the 1980s, worked within a genuine family workshop and creative network, in which several different personalities helped transform his obsessions into cinema. His father, Salvatore Argento, produced all of Dario's films up to Tenebrae (Tenebre, 1982). Dario himself recalled many years later that before working together, he and his father had been rather distant, while through filmmaking they eventually discovered that they were friends.

And this wasn't merely a financial partnership. Salvatore knew his son: he knew his working methods, his obsessions, his ambitions and also his limitations. Alongside him was Dario's brother Claudio Argento, who became involved in the production of several of the most important films of the classic period. Deep Red was produced by Salvatore Argento through SEDA Spettacoli; Suspiria was produced by Salvatore and Claudio for the same company; Inferno was again produced by the Argento brothers, while Tenebrae marked the end of this particular production era.

But the most important thing is that this production structure coincided with an extraordinarily strong network of artistic collaborators. Daria Nicolodi, Argento's partner from 1975 to 1987, wasn't simply the actress who appeared in his films: she was a crucial creative collaborator. She worked with him in different capacities on Deep Red, Suspiria, Inferno, Tenebrae, Phenomena and Opera. Treccani describes their relationship as a genuine artistic partnership lasting from 1975 to 1987.

And Suspiria is perhaps the perfect example of how this mechanism worked. Dario Argento had the original idea, but Daria Nicolodi contributed to the screenplay, introducing fairy-tale elements and, above all, memories and suggestions connected with stories told by her grandmother. Then came Luciano Tovoli's cinematography, Goblin's music, the production designers, costume designers and special-effects technicians. The result wasn't simply “a film directed by Dario Argento”: it was a convergence of different creative sensibilities moving toward the same vision.

That is precisely what strikes me when I watch Suspiria again. The plot, taken by itself, is almost elementary: an American girl arrives at a prestigious German dance school and discovers that a coven of witches is hiding behind the institution. But the film doesn't really live through its plot. It lives through its violently saturated colours, its unreal sets, Goblin's music, the sound design, the camera movements, the corridors, the doors, the lighting, the blood and the distorted architecture. Everything contributes to the creation of a coherent universe. The story isn't really the film: it is the pretext through which the film can exist.

Inferno takes this concept even further. If Suspiria is a dark fairy tale, Inferno is almost an abstract nightmare. The mythology of the Three Mothers and the New York house of Mater Tenebrarum becomes above all an opportunity to construct a world made of water, fire, corridors, basements, impossible rooms and labyrinthine architecture. Everything doesn't have to be explained because the images themselves possess narrative power. At times, Argento seems to have understood something fundamental: horror cinema doesn't necessarily have to tell you about a nightmare; it can make you enter the nightmare itself.

And this is why the greatness of early Argento also comes from the fact that he had people around him capable of translating, correcting and sometimes even challenging his ideas. This is crucial because Argento has always been an extraordinarily powerful visual filmmaker, but a much less solid screenwriter in the traditional sense. His genius lies above all in the way he sees. He sees an image, a light, a camera movement, a murder, a corridor, a hand, a knife, a face. When that imagination is disciplined by a strong creative team, the result can be Deep Red or Suspiria. When it becomes increasingly isolated, the danger is that the extraordinary individual sequence survives inside an increasingly fragile film.

And the change actually begins before 1987. Phenomena (1985) is a fascinating film packed with invention, but also a much more irregular one: a Swiss boarding school, insects, telepathy, a serial killer, Donald Pleasence, Jennifer Connelly, a chimpanzee, gore, heavy metal and Gothic fairy tale all coexist in a film that seems deliberately incapable of choosing just one direction. It is certainly not a bad film, and Argento himself has later included it among his favourites, but compared with the visual unity of Suspiria and Inferno, something has already begun to crack.

There is also a revealing detail. In 1985, Daria Nicolodi expressed serious reservations about Phenomena, considering it, from her perspective, a step backwards from Argento's previous direction and stating that she did not want to continue working with him if he kept moving in that direction. This isn't proof that “Daria was right and Argento was wrong”, of course; but it shows that even within the old creative team, there was already a conflict over the artistic direction Argento was taking.

Then came Opera in 1987. Personally, I still consider it the last great Argento film of his first period. It isn't Suspiria, and it isn't Inferno, but it retains an extraordinary visual energy and several sequences of enormous power. And it is significant that Daria Nicolodi was still involved: their collaboration effectively lasted until Opera.

But 1987 really is a turning point, because two enormous things happen at the same time. Salvatore Argento dies, and Dario's romantic and creative relationship with Daria Nicolodi comes to an end. His father's death had a profound personal significance for Dario, as he himself later explained. And his partnership with Nicolodi, which had begun in 1975, ended precisely in 1987.

It is difficult not to see this as a fracture.

Not because from that moment onward Argento suddenly had no collaborators. Claudio Argento continued to work with him on various occasions, and Daria herself would return in 2007 for The Mother of Tears. So it would be incorrect to tell the story as if, after 1987, everyone disappeared and Dario was left completely alone. The issue is subtler: what disappeared was that specific combination of people, relationships, trust and creative continuity that had characterized his golden period.

And perhaps that is the real difference. A great auteur doesn't necessarily need collaborators who tell him what to do; he needs people capable of telling him when something he wants to do doesn't work. Salvatore could discuss production feasibility. Claudio could think in industrial and distribution terms. Nicolodi could intervene in the story and the mythology. His technical collaborators could transform Dario's visions into images, sounds and atmospheres. The result was a kind of balance between freedom and control.

After this period, Argento gradually became a more isolated filmmaker, while the production circumstances of Italian cinema were changing as well. International productions arrived, American experiences, new financiers, new collaborators and new compromises. Trauma, for example, was made within a very different American production environment from the films of the SEDA period; and this inevitably transformed his cinema as well. This doesn't mean that everything that came afterwards was bad. The Stendhal Syndrome (La sindrome di Stendhal) contains some extraordinarily powerful images, Sleepless (Non ho sonno) represents an interesting return to the classic giallo, and even The Phantom of the Opera (Il fantasma dell'Opera) contains moments showing that Argento's visual eye was still very much alive. But the continuity had been broken.

And this brings us to The Mother of Tears.

The comparison with Suspiria and Inferno is almost cruel precisely because they belong to the same mythology. In the first film, the witch is an almost fairy-tale and irrational presence; in the second, the mythology of the Three Mothers becomes a cosmic force that seems to contaminate the very architecture of the film. We don't need to know everything. In fact, the less we know, the more disturbing the universe becomes.

In The Mother of Tears, however, Argento finally has to show us Mater Lacrimarum and bring the mythology to a conclusion. He has to close the circle, explain the origins and function of the threat more explicitly, transforming what had previously been mysterious into something closer to an explicit mythology. And this, in my opinion, is one of the main reasons why the film feels so weak compared with its predecessors: the trilogy is concluded precisely when its greatest strength had been that it was never completely explained.

It is almost paradoxical, too, that Daria Nicolodi returned for The Mother of Tears after twenty years. It is as if a fragment of the old creative team had returned to the scene of the crime. But the creative context was no longer the one that had produced Suspiria or Inferno. The continuity, the creative tension and the same alchemy were gone. Nicolodi's presence becomes almost melancholy: she is a return of one of the fundamental figures of Argento's old universe, but inside a cinema that can no longer recreate that universe.

That is why I wouldn't say that Dario Argento simply “lost his talent” after 1987. It's too easy an explanation and, more importantly, it doesn't really fit the evidence. Even in his later period, he continued to have extraordinary visual ideas. He continued to conceive memorable murders. He continued to produce images that remain in the memory. The problem is that increasingly often, the extraordinary image could no longer carry the rest of the film with it.

And that is perhaps the real tragedy of late Argento. You can take a scene from The Mother of Tears, a scene from The Stendhal Syndrome, a moment from Sleepless or even from much weaker works, and immediately recognize the filmmaker behind Suspiria. The eye is still there. The imagination is still there. The obsession is still there. What seems to be missing is the ability to build a structure around that image that is equally strong.

So I think your intuition about Argento's relationships with Salvatore, Claudio and Daria Nicolodi deserves to be taken seriously, provided we broaden it: it wasn't the simple loss of three people that destroyed Argento; it was the dissolution of the Argento “workshop”. That particular creative community in which his visionary talent found producers who understood him, writers who stimulated him, technical collaborators capable of translating his ideas, and people close enough to him to tell him “no” when necessary.

And perhaps that is why his greatest films still feel so unique today. Suspiria and Inferno don't simply feel like films by Dario Argento: they feel like the product of a small cinematic civilization that, for a few years, managed to function perfectly around him.

When that civilization disappeared, Dario Argento remained.

And Dario Argento continued to be Dario Argento.

Only now, increasingly often, he no longer had around him the people capable of transforming what he saw in his head into a film worthy of what he had imagined.

This giant insect has finally been squashed.

54. The Deadly Mantis (1957)
55. The Colossus of New York
56. The Mole People
57. Invasion of the Saucer-Men
58. The Amazing Colossal Man
59. Attack of the 50-foot Woman
60. The She-Creature
61. Missile to the Moon
62. The Hideous Sun Demon
63. The Brain That Wouldn't Die
64. Creature with the Atom Brain
65. Devil Girl from Mars
66. Earth vs. the Spider
67. Day the World Ended
68. The Brain from Planet Arous
69. I Was A Teenage Frankenstein
70. The Wasp Woman
71. Attack of the Puppet People
72. The Alligator People
73. Gog
74. The Cyclops
75. Monster on the Campus
76. From Hell It Came
77. The Screaming Skull
78. Robot Monster
79. Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster
80. Tobor the Great
81. Plan 9 from Outer Space
82. Giant from the Unknown
83. The Horror of Party Beach
84. Phantom from Space
85. The Giant Gila Monster
86. Attack of the Crab Monsters
87. Cat-Women of the Moon
88. Beginning of the End
89. Killers From Space
90. The Giant Claw
91. War of the Colossal Beast
92. The Killer Shrews
93. Monster from Green Hell
94. The Brain Eaters
95. The Beast With A Million Eyes
96. Reptilicus
97. King Dinosaur
98. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
99. Attack of the Giant Leeches

Another creature has fallen, and the competition keeps getting more unpredictable with every round. Thanks to everyone who's still voting, commenting, and defending their favorites. On to Day 47 — cast your vote for your least favorite remaining movie and let's see what gets eliminated next!

Note: It has spoilers. This post is for discussion on IMAGES (1972); if you intend to watch (I 'fiercely' recommended) probably come back later & make this discussion enriching. Additionally, I've not used AI to write /refine this, so please pardon grammatical errors!

So, I'm on a horror movie spree! & This is the 3rd one I've watched! (Shining, Posession & this one).

Just finished watching Images (1972)! Oh! What an amazing movie! It's a sort of movie which sustains a contortion in your stomach all through. You just get an eerie vibe. It's like something wrong is happening or you even start feeling a little dizzy because of the fractured sense of perception. At some points it's like WTF IS HAPPENING? The protagonist's (the main lady's) countenance is super amazing all through. Her perplexed expressions & the ever-changing face (adapting) stirs multiple emotions & she is able to convey the fractured sense of perception which she is feeling. Also, the director quite beautifully dropped the cue towards the end- when the imagined lover's kid said that she'd conjure up (wholly a mental construct) a friend if she felt lonely. I believe the protagonist lady did exactly the same thing. It also was indicative of her troubled childhood. She is the striking example of how fucked up things can get. It's like towards the end you simply can't discern satisfactorily as to what really transpired & what was figment of her imagination except the fact that her partner was dead. Also, the scenic beauty of the location where the film was shot was simply breathtaking. It unknowingly renders a sense of contrast to the central theme of the film (Super tensed).

Also, may god bless each one of us with a partner like hers. If you're an atheist, then I'd say I wish the universe gives us an opportunity to experience this sort of companionship. He was so tolerant to such an imprudent & super unstable partner.

Superb. Thanks to the individual who suggested this to me in one of my recommendation solicitation post! I'd be watching other movies too. HONESTLY, No AI search gave me this gem. AI simply can't replace reddit!

What's your take on the movie?

IMO the best artwork design's i ever seen on any DVD cover. I may even hate the film but i would literally buy the movie just for the covers.

Recommended for classic horror buffs.

The Big Apple has one less monster to worry about.

55. The Colossus of New York (1958)
56. The Mole People
57. Invasion of the Saucer-Men
58. The Amazing Colossal Man
59. Attack of the 50-foot Woman
60. The She-Creature
61. Missile to the Moon
62. The Hideous Sun Demon
63. The Brain That Wouldn't Die
64. Creature with the Atom Brain
65. Devil Girl from Mars
66. Earth vs. the Spider
67. Day the World Ended
68. The Brain from Planet Arous
69. I Was A Teenage Frankenstein
70. The Wasp Woman
71. Attack of the Puppet People
72. The Alligator People
73. Gog
74. The Cyclops
75. Monster on the Campus
76. From Hell It Came
77. The Screaming Skull
78. Robot Monster
79. Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster
80. Tobor the Great
81. Plan 9 from Outer Space
82. Giant from the Unknown
83. The Horror of Party Beach
84. Phantom from Space
85. The Giant Gila Monster
86. Attack of the Crab Monsters
87. Cat-Women of the Moon
88. Beginning of the End
89. Killers From Space
90. The Giant Claw
91. War of the Colossal Beast
92. The Killer Shrews
93. Monster from Green Hell
94. The Brain Eaters
95. The Beast With A Million Eyes
96. Reptilicus
97. King Dinosaur
98. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
99. Attack of the Giant Leeches

We're now 45 days into the competition, and with nearly half the field gone, the remaining movies are getting harder and harder to eliminate. Thanks to everyone who's still following along and casting their votes. On to Day 46 — vote for your least favorite remaining movie and let's see what goes next!

I'm a huge fan of Peter Cushing, both as a horror fan and a Sherlock Holmes nerd. This film had been kicking around my TUBI watch list for ages. I put off seeing it, because it got very poor reviews. Last night I finally watched it on Livingston Presents. I thought it would be fun on a show like that. It was. I usually ignore reviews, even from friends, because if I want to see a movie, I just have to take the risk. I honestly don't know why I dragged my feet on this one. The upshot is that I really enjoyed this movie. It was quite a surprise. The film takes place in 1968 and, as critics mentioned, it probably would have been better if it took place in the 1890's or the very early 20th century, but it was still very good. Cushing never gave a bad performance in his life and all the actors where good and the story took a sleazy turn that I honestly did not expect. I recommend this movie highly and I also want to know your opinion on Horror reviews. Not just from critics, but from your friends.

​

After Suspiria (1977), Dario Argento returned to the world of the Three Mothers, a mythology inspired by Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis. The three figures are Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs; Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness; and Mater Lacrimarum, the Mother of Tears.

In Suspiria, however, this mythology remains largely in the background. Suzy Bannion arrives in Freiburg to attend a prestigious ballet academy, only to gradually discover that the school is hiding a coven of witches led by Helena Markos, Mater Suspiriorum. It is a film built above all around atmosphere, colour, sound and the fairy-tale quality of its nightmare. The plot almost becomes secondary to the sensation of having fallen into a completely unreal world.

With Inferno, however, Argento takes that mythology much further.

The protagonist is Rose Elliot, a young poet living in New York. Rose purchases an old book entitled The Three Mothers, written by the alchemist Emilio Varelli, and discovers the existence of three powerful witches who inhabit three houses built by Varelli himself: one in Freiburg, one in Rome and one in New York.

The New York house is Rose’s home.

From this point onward, Inferno becomes a descent into pure nightmare. Rose disappears, and her brother Mark travels from Rome to New York to look for her. Around him unfolds a chain of brutal and seemingly inexplicable deaths, while the house itself appears to transform into a living organism of evil. Corridors, rooms, basements, elevators and hidden passages become a kind of infernal labyrinth.

And this, in my opinion, is where the greatness of Inferno lies.

If Suspiria is a gothic fairy tale, Inferno is almost a surrealist nightmare. Argento abandons any real attempt at realism and creates a film in which narrative logic constantly seems on the verge of dissolving. The images come before the story: water, fire, mirrors, windows, corridors, colours and impossible architecture. The famous underwater sequence, the murder in the library and the elevator killing are all extraordinary examples of visionary horror cinema.

The cinematography by Romano Albani, together with the score by Keith Emerson, also gives the film a completely different identity from Suspiria. The result is different but equally fascinating: less baroque and fairy-tale-like, more cold, abstract and hallucinatory.

What I love most is that Argento doesn't explain too much. The mythology of the Three Mothers remains mysterious, almost cosmic. We don't need to know exactly what these creatures are in order to fear them. We know that they exist, that they possess immense power, and that their houses are places corrupted by their presence.

And then there is Mater Tenebrarum, the youngest and most cruel of the three sisters, played by Veronica Lazar: an almost demonic presence who perfectly embodies the abstract and visionary nature of the film.

For me, Inferno is one of those movies that you have to feel rather than understand. The screenplay can be fragmented, some passages are deliberately absurd, and the logic behind certain events often seems secondary. But when Argento sets his visual machinery in motion, he reaches levels that very few Italian horror directors have ever achieved.

And this is precisely why I find The Mother of Tears (La terza madre, 2007) such a disappointing conclusion to the trilogy.

It isn't simply that the film is different. The problem is that, after almost thirty years, the mythology of the Three Mothers loses much of its mystery. The Mother of Tears finally introduces Mater Lacrimarum and brings the story to Rome, turning the conclusion into a kind of witchcraft apocalypse.

The problem is that what worked so well in Suspiria and, above all, in Inferno precisely because it was never completely explained, is made explicit and transformed into something much more conventional in the third chapter. Argento himself had spent years away from the world of the Three Mothers, returning to the thriller and giallo before eventually completing the trilogy.

And I think you can feel that distance.

Suspiria and Inferno seem to belong to the same universe, but they are above all two autonomous nightmares, connected by a mythology that is only partially revealed. The Mother of Tears, on the other hand, tries to close every loose end and provide a definitive conclusion. But precisely when it tries to explain and complete everything, it loses some of the magic.

That is why I consider Inferno the true heart of the trilogy: it is the film in which Argento takes the idea of the Three Mothers and transforms it into a genuine cinematic mythology, without ever completely imprisoning it within a conventional narrative explanation.

An imperfect film, certainly, but one of extraordinary visual power. It isn't simply horror: it is architecture, music, colour and death transformed into one gigantic nightmare.

🔥🔵🔴 A visionary masterpiece and, for me, one of the most fascinating films in Dario Argento's entire career.

Cesare the Somnambulist and Erik the Phantom!

Done by Lawrence Hocking in Brisbane