Dario Argento Panico Is an Incomplete Look at an Unknowable Director

There’s a scene in the third reel of the 1980 Dario Argento film Inferno featuring a miserable old man on a pair of crutches trying to drown a sackful of cats. It’s set at night somewhere in New York City, and so of course there’s a hot dog truck off in the distance, its inviting light and the barely-visible form of the hot dog vendor, the suggestion of skyscrapers in the background, a constant reminder that this scene of callous, clinical cruelty is occurring right in the middle of an otherwise indifferent city.

The old man succeeds in finding a spot in the pond deep enough to drown the cats, but then he loses a crutch in the deeper part of the water and falls in. Then he is immediately, totally swarmed by rats who start eating him. “Help me!” he starts crying out, “I’m being eaten by rats!”

The hot dog vendor hears his distress and comes running—only to jam a butcher knife into him and then kick his corpse closer to the drainage pipe where the rats are coming from. For context, it is important to note that this faceless hot dog man’s motivations are never elucidated, that he shows up in neither prior nor subsequent scenes, and that the drowned cats mauled a woman half to death in an earlier scene.

“Everything in Argento’s movies is trying to kill you,” says Guillermo del Toro partway through Dario Argento Panico, a documentary on the Italian director’s career. He’s absolutely right about that. It’s so pervasive and unexplained that you often have no idea what might happen in a given scene: Any character might die; any other character, even a perspective character, might turn out to be a psychotic killer.

It’s appropriate, then, that a look into Argento’s career is titled “Panic.” That’s the overarching feeling his movies evoke. From early on, you are taught that something might come bursting from out of frame at any moment, splattering blood all over the place.

Simone Scafidi’s documentary follows Argento, still active in his fifth decade as a director, as he isolates in a cushy Italian hotel to finish a script. Coming in at under 100 minutes, though, Dario Argento Panico  feels frustratingly light when you consider the length of Argento’s career and the long shadow of his influence on horror, both in the giallo subgenre and well beyond it. It’s gratifying that Scafidi pulled in big names like Gaspar Noé, del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn, whose works all recall Argento’s in one way or another, it’s just that they’re not nearly as interesting as the material we get from Argento himself, or his sister, or especially from his daughter and actor in many of his films, Asia Argento. What does baring it all in movies directed by one’s own father do to a familial relationship? We get what feels like just a suggestion of that here.

You get the unmistakable impression, though, that the reason is because Argento himself isn’t willing to go much deeper. This may be all we’re able to glean from him, in light of that. It seems like the documentary crew were only able to get a precious few candid scenes with him approved, and so it’s telling what touches of personality do make it in: Argento at one point asks a server for something in a way that feels terse, but then calls a “Grazie!” over his shoulder, as if belatedly realizing that he was short with someone.

In the contemporary scenes like that one, Argento looks annoyed, troubled and sullen, but we don’t know why for certain. As someone who often finishes assignments by chaining myself to a desk and putting on blinders, I see a lot of myself in his discomfiture, but it’s the sort of material that it’s all too easy to read into.

Where Dario Argento Panico sings is in its talking head interviews with Argento’s artistic collaborators and family members (who are often, also, his artistic collaborators). We spend quality time with ex-wife and mother to some of his children Marisa Casale, his sister Floriana, his daughters Fiore and Asia, and other names in the Italian film industry who worked closely with him. It’s in these segments, and in archival behind-the-scenes and interview footage, where we really learn the most about the man, rather than in any of the scenes shot with Argento himself in 2023.

A lot of that comes across as somewhat flattering: Argento’s daughters decided to come live with him following his divorce. Floriana reminisces about a brother who chased her around a house scaring her. We see a younger Argento getting down and dirty directing his scenes, and there’s perhaps never been a more appropriate-looking director for the material he writes and directs: In his younger days, a lanky, long-haired Argento has the look of a weirdo secondary character in a gonzo horror movie, and it’s touching to see earlier interviews where he earnestly and self-consciously talks about the ghastly imagery he seems compelled to put out into the world.

The darkness is lurking there under it, though we get only tantalizing views of it. Argento was, at one point, inexplicably suicidal until he inexplicably wasn’t. (Move a dresser in front of the window, he recalls being advised, because by the time you’re able to shove it aside, the feeling will have passed, and he rather blithely reports that this worked. But that’s all we get of this episode.) His relationships with his family aren’t always rosy either: Asia Argento, whose segments are some of the most fascinating, describes a years-long falling out the two had over her choice to go do a film in America instead of collaborate with her father.

Most frustrating, though, is the account of one of the stars of Argento’s Opera, Cristina Marsillach. Marsillach’s face is synonymous with one of the more arrestingly gruesome images in Argento’s catalog, in which a row of pins is situated along her lower eyelid in such a way that blinking will cause her to impale herself. Setting it up in such a way not to actually harm Marsillach was time-consuming and stressful, as was shooting the scenes where she was being tortured in this way. Marsillach says Argento was kind and patient during this time, but also talks about how he was the center of the universe on set, involved in every aspect of production.

And, when asked what kind of man he is, Marsillach breaks down crying on camera and says she has no idea. You wonder what’s behind that, and Dario Argento Panico won’t or can’t go any deeper. Contrast it to Hollywood Dreams and Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story, the recent doc on the life and career of an actor with a career about as long as Argento’s, and you feel how this doc feels all too brief and indistinct.

For fans of Argento’s work or those interested in wading into it, though, it draws a line between a prolific provocateur and the new horror icons he’s inspired. Dario Argento Panico is now available on horror streaming service Shudder, along with a good fistful of Argento’s films, including notables like Inferno, Tenebrae, The Stendhal Syndrome and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. For those looking to seek what the masters sought, it’s a good opportunity to take a deep, ill-advised dive into a pool that’s definitely full of dead bodies.

Kenneth Lowe is BEING EATEN BY RATS!!! You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.