Clearly, if Argento and his co-writer Franco Ferrini had an idea, they put it in. It defies convention, throws peerlessly bizarre protagonists into the mix, and veers tonally all over the map. ( SUSPIRIA is part of an unofficial-official witchcraft trilogy, with 1980’s INFERNO and 2007’s THE MOTHER OF TEARS.) 1985’s PHENOMENA is even more of a departure. The aforementioned SUSPIRIA (1977) is a giallo film with somewhat more of a supernatural angle than usual. His films THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1970), DEEP RED (1975), TENEBRAE (1982), and OPERA (1987), among others, are giallo hallmarks. Of all giallo directors, Dario Argento is the one whose name is arguably most synonymous with the genre. That’s how significant a movement it was. That assumption - about the connection between giallo films and slashers - is not entirely incorrect, but of course it’d be foolish to write off an entire genre, particularly one so influential.ĭirectors like Mario Bava, Massimo Dallamano, Aldo Lado, Umberto Lenzi, Sergio Martino, and Lucio Fulci were the most prominent practitioners of giallo films, though genre journeymen more famous for other types of movies, such as Enzo Castellari, Antonio Margheriti, and Fernando Di Leo, also worked in the arena. I love HALLOWEEN (for the reasons given here) but I don’t love most slasher films. I’m a guy who prefers giant monsters and the movies about them to those starring lady-killing knife-murderers, and - unfairly or not - I’d always figured giallos to be the artier precursor to slashers, like the FRIDAY THE 13TH series. Quite honestly, I stayed away from the giallo genre for a long time because, despite its encouraging tendency to feature female protagonists, giallo as a result and by nature also features a preponderance of graphic and vicious violence towards women. Giallo films may or may not have supernatural elements, but the color red (ironic, due to the name) is a near-constant. Think Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO, only with a significant level-up on the gore. Generally speaking, giallo films tend to be lurid, bloody psychological thrillers. The term Giallo does promise a kind of a pulp tale, but rather than more traditional pulp topics such as noir or sci-fi, giallo quickly diverged into its own beast. We’ve gone through this on the site before, but in case you’re just joining us, here’s one last primer: Giallo literally means “yellow” in Italian, and it’s an evocative reference to the yellowed pages of the pulp novels that were so popular in the first half of the previous century. Argento’s primary milieu is within the genre of film known as giallo. PHENOMENA, originally released in the United States as CREEPERS (the reason for which are apparent on the poster above), is the work of Italian horror auteur Dario Argento. The single best-known Argento film is probably 1977’s SUSPIRIA, but SUSPIRIA is far from the only notable film in his arsenal. You can find vastly differing opinions elsewhere, but this essay is about mine. Let me say it here in black-and-white without quotation marks: I sincerely, absolutely believe that PHENOMENA is a brilliant horror film.
#Jennifer connelly phenomena movie#
It makes me smile just to think about this movie, but it makes me smile weirdly, because the movie is insane. Stop me on the street sometime, I’ll bend your ear. I could literally talk about this movie all day. PHENOMENA hasn’t been in my life as long as some of my other favorite movies, but it’s rapidly skyrocketing up that stratosphere into rarified air.
It’s also a Hitchcockian wrong-man thriller starring an ape! Let me also add that for much of the movie, you can’t be sure that the chimpanzee isn’t the murderer. Do you know what that means? Take a moment if you need to absorb that information slowly. Jennifer teams up with the unlikely trio of a local bug expert (played by Donald Pleasence, of course), his chimpanzee lab assistant Inga, and a flesh fly in a box, in order to solve the murders. Let me try recapping it and you can decide for yourself:Ī teenage girl (Jennifer Connelly) who has the ability to commune with insects arrives at a Swiss boarding school, where a diminutive murderer has been killing girls at night.
Every time I try to describe the movie to a regular human person who has never heard of it before (an unfortunately high number of human persons, in this country and state at least), they decide that I am making it up, and also that I am insane. It’s the kind of horror movie you wish for.
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