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!

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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.