Frightening Filmographies: Daria Nicolodi, Giallo Queen and Argento Muse

Appearing in this as what feels like almost a courtesy, Nicolodi plays the dead mother of hero Sarah (her real-life daughter with director Dario, Asia Argento) who provides a silly deus ex machina not once, but twice. The film is a disaster in all the ways as Dario Argento’s other output after a certain point (I would say the last great film he made is the deeply-problematic Opera, 34 years ago) were disasters: self-referential in a tone deaf way, bloated without a commensurate deepening of theme, clunky and arrhythmic in a way that speaks to a certain desperation to recapture the old magic that he must know has been lost.

I had been waiting thirty years for the conclusion of the “Three Mothers” trilogy begun with Suspiria and Inferno and… this ugly, cynical, sometimes vile, always awkward film is the result. Casting Nicolodi as a phantom who saves the day a couple of times is a little bit on the nose as metaphor for her relationship with Argento: they’re ghosts to each other now, and however Nicolodi might have saved him from himself in the past, she’s no longer available to do so now. Maybe Argento should’ve shot Nicolodi’s script for the final “Three Mothers” film when he had the chance.

Where to stream Mother Of Tears

Inventively violent and the better version of The Phantom of the Opera than his later attempt to adapt The Phantom of the Opera, Argento casts, two years after their break-up, Nicolodi in a key role as Mira, dedicated agent for ingenue Betty (Cristina Marsillach) who is being stalked by a sadistic killer. A film about performance and sight, the key image of it is a row of needles taped to Betty’s eyes to prevent her from closing them against a series of murders. There’s also a dazzling crow point-of-view shot that, by itself, is worth the price of admission as it’s not just empty spectacle like so many of Argento’s films would quickly become, but is tied here to the film’s overall motifs involving spectatorship and objectification.

Nicolodi is introduced as a figure of authority and energy. She sniffs out a fraud, saves Betty from a bad decision, and then dies a martyr’s death with a virtuoso effects shot of a bullet through a peephole, then her eye. I don’t know that she had anything to do with the script, but she agreed to do the film despite her acrimonious break-up with Argento because she wanted to do the death scene. Nicolodi was Argento’s brain. She would have understood the symbolic resonance of a mother figure in a film about watching getting it through a “lens” from a director she now despised.

Where to stream Opera

An insane film about a young woman (Jennifer Connelly) who can communicate with insects teaming up with a grieving chimp to avenge the death of a wheelchair-bound entomologist played by Donald Pleasance. That’s right. There’s also a girl’s school in the Swiss countryside, a constant wind that drives people insane, and a murderer, of course, keeping a secret about a deformed child in a mirror-less house. Along with Argento’s Deep Red, it shares the curious thing of revealing the identity of the murderer in the first few minutes of the film in something like a subliminal flash of information. It’s worth watching.

I can’t help but wonder if this early reveal doesn’t inform the mood of unease for the rest of the film: you know you’ve seen something important, but you’re not sure when or how. Argento’s “supernatural” side is still keen here, as is his pettiness as he casts Nicolodi as a frigid scold dressed in the squarest, most unflattering Vera Miles outfit of her career. Shot during the heat of the end of their romantic imbroglio, the strain of it is in every moment of her humiliation onscreen.

Where to stream Phenomena

Working from a screenplay by Nicolodi, this Luigi Cozzi curiosity takes the myth of Paganini having sold his soul to the devil in a Robert Johnson-esque deal for instrumental virtuosity and runs with it in a story about an all-girl rock band who decides to shake things up a little bit by recording a Paganini tune, riot grrrl-style. There’s a gag in here that was subsequently stolen by Cabin in the Woods, and a lot of fun kills in which a very angry, reanimated Paganini kills people with his violin.

Nicolodi, in addition to writing duties, also stars as the owner of a mansion once owned by the demon composer and the dispenser of exposition involving how Paganini was also a wife-murderer. It’s a fun movie, but what’s memorable about it is the centering of strong women artists who are preyed upon by a caricature of the “difficult genius.” More, the resolution of the curse and the dispelling of the bogey involves a very clever bit about Stradivarius, ancient moss, and an unending curse in which Nicolodi is trapped in this dance with powerful, and abusive, men for all of eternity.

Where to stream Paganini Horror

The same year as Paganini Horror, Nicolodi almost teamed again with Cozzi on what was to be the unofficial completion of the “Three Mothers” trilogy using a script Nicolodi had written for just that eventuality. Argento, obviously, wanted nothing to do with Nicolodi at this point, and Argento had grown fond of feeding the storyline where he was the sole creator of his twin masterpieces Deep Red and Suspiria. Often referred to as the “Italian Hitchcock” early in his career, he at least shares Hitchcock’s pathological reluctance to share credit.

Anyway, The Black Cat took its title as a means to capitalize on a recognizable property (Edgar Allan Poe’s short story), added aliens and different planets and then a film-within-a-film in which attempts to film “The Mother of Tears” leads to the actual Mother of Tears manifesting through a mirror and killing everyone for their temerity in making a picture about her. It’s hard to describe how disjointed and insane this movie is, but what remains of Nicolodi’s script for “The Mother of Tears” reveals a constant throughline of issues of performance, as well as of spectatorship and voyeurism that inform her best collaborations. What I wouldn’t give to see the straight adaptation of her script and, finally, a completion to the “Three Mothers” that does the first two films proud. As time goes on, they feel more like Nicolodi’s films in terms of subtext than Argento’s.

Where to stream The Black Cat (1989)

The lesser-regarded, but still spectacular sequel to Suspiria follows a poet, Rose (Irene Miracle) in New York when she buys the wrong book, makes the right conclusions, and falls into a flooded subbasement in her apartment building that features a submerged world held in watery suspense. So follows a series of uncanny, surreal, gorgeous images as the structure of the film follows, very loosely, Hitchcock’s The Birds all the way up to an attack by a swarm of rabid cats that reveals, early, a darkness to Argento and his feelings for Nicolodi. There are swarms of rats here, too, in what can be read as a reference to the poets of Rat’s Alley in T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” It’s a mystery in the loosest sense of it as Rose’s brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey) tries to unravel Rose’s building’s mysteries, but succeeding only in stumbling upon the lair of the Mother of Shadows, emerging from a mirror as the world burns down around them. It’s a visionary piece and it retains its hallucinogenic power.

Where to stream Inferno

The great Mario Bava’s last film, Shock stars Nicolodi as Dora, happily married with a young son who moves back into the home she shared with her first, vicious and abusive, husband. A druggie who is thought to have drowned himself, her return to this place follows a period of insanity and institutionalisation during which extensive electro-convulsive therapy is thought to have cured her. It hasn’t. Or it has and the strange things she experiences while alone with her son are the ghosts of her dead husband and all of the terrible things he’s done to her. Nicolodi is tremendous as a woman who has been told she is insane so constantly for so long that she’s repressed important moments in her life and begun projecting those forgotten horrors on her son. It features one of the great “Texas Switch” gags in the history of movies as a little boy runs toward the camera only to instantly transform into a man when he gets close (seriously, it’s incredible), and its ending is so bleak and aggressively-Freudian that it’s actually delightful. Whenever Nicolodi is involved, it seems, there’s real complexity at work in the way the women are portrayed.

Where to stream Shock

One of Argento’s masterworks — arguably his last one — Tenebrae follows successful author Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) on a book tour in Rome during a spate of murders the perpetrator of which has written a note blaming Neal’s books for inspiring him. Obviously Argento’s response to his critics of the violent nature of his films and their potentially-dangerous impact on society, the picture is home to the best villain-reveal of Argento’s career (one that’s stolen by Brian De Palma for his Raising Cain) and what is possibly his most beautiful/awful murder in the arterial fan of blood from an amputated arm against a blank wall. (Echoes of that appear in Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day.)

The influence of this film runs deep and Nicolodi appears as the moral center of the piece, even in a small role, who provides the audience relief from the madness and betrayal at the center of the film by screaming the horror of her realization that she’s solved the mystery — and that in solving the mystery she’s not earned any sense of resolution. None of us have.

Where to stream Tenebrae

A classic of the world cinema, Suspiria is the marriage of art and horror at the highest level. With a script credited to Nicolodi and Argento, it tells of Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper), a young American dancer arriving in Berlin to study at a prestigious dance school that is, unfortunately, the front for a coven of witches. Often misattributed as a giallo, the film is really more of a supernatural picture – not driven by a mystery so much as pushed along by a series of disconnected images and barely-coherent vignettes, all circling around Suzy’s gradual awakening to her own power. It’s Nicolodi’s influence driving this piece – what many consider to be the best horror film of all time – this story of a young woman who loses her innocence but gains the world. The final shot is of Suzy and a sly smile suggesting that for all of the horrors that we’ve just witnessed, and we’ve seen some shit, what Suzy is taking away from her experience is the understanding that she’s a woman now and not only is she no longer afraid of the wolf in the forest, she is the wolf in the forest. The score by synth group Goblin shouldn’t go unremarked upon, either. As legend has it, it’s Nicolodi who insisted upon this collaboration, one akin to Steven Spielberg and John Williams or Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann. Film history would not have been the same without it.

Where to stream Suspiria

Argento’s best film (by the slimmest of margins) is Deep Red. The best, I think, because of Nicolodi. Here, and possibly only here, she’s allowed to be fully herself in every facet of her infectious charismatic charm, her keen wit, her obvious intelligence. She is bright and funny in this film. Upon leaving our ostensible hero David Hemmings one night, we even catch her doing a joyful little dance.

She is the happiest here in her relationship with Argento and there is between them — the director and this actress — an electrical charge. The camera is in love with Nicolodi and so we are, too. She is a full partner to her male counterpart. More than an equal, she’s often the first to uncover clues. And the solution when it comes is deeply satisfying on a psychological level: the literal reveal of a child’s message left beneath layers of wallpaper and plaster like the palimpsest of the human mind described by Argento and Nicolodi favorite Thomas De Quincey. When Nicolodi’s Gianna is attacked and gravely injured, the feeling of dread simmering throughout the film finds its outlet in her injury. She is the human focal point in this insidious machine. If you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a treat. If you have, you already know.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2021. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream Deep Red