“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” This statement from Arthur Conan Doyle is appropriately repeated by Anthony Franciosa as Peter Neal in Dario Argento’s superb giallo film, Tenebrae (1982). Sherlock Holmes’ statement proves to be the key in solving the film’s puzzle.
Peter Neal’s is a mystery and suspense writer, visiting Rome to promote his new book, curiously also called Tenebrae. During his visit, a series of gruesome murders begins, most involving beautiful women of immoral dispositions. The killer’s targeting people whom he considers morally loose and deviant. Of course, the definition of what “deviant” truly means is incomplete, if not elusive.
The murderer is obsessed with Neal, and immediately upon Neal’s arrival to Rome, sends cryptic notes that inextricably tie the writer to the murderer. The obsession isn’t merely with Neal but with his literary output—the murderer is merely following the plot of his novel.
Neal’s an easy-going American, and although he doesn’t necessarily clash with the Italian culture or police authority, his disposition toward the murder is one of self-absolving. “You wouldn’t go after the maker of Smith and Wesson,” Neal says jokingly to Captain Germani. Germani isn’t amused, yet he can’t help but be thrown pleasantly into the world of writing. He’s read all of Neal’s books and is a fan, but laments that he can never solve the mystery, despite being a detective. This kind of meta-commentary runs throughout the film.
One of many Dario Argento’s gifts as a filmmaker is his ability to show fear and dread in mundane and familiar settings and events. We experience a sense of dread along with the characters, especially if they’re women. The first murder victim is Elsa Manni—an attractive and voluptuous shop-lifter, who gets caught stealing Neal’s novel at a store.
Elsa gets out of the punishment by offering the store manager sex. He seems amenable to the terms. But when she walks to her house, she’s accosted by a tramp who wants to rape her. He’s an old man, drunk and disheveled, but the fear and frustration that Elsa’s exhibiting is all-too familiar to any woman who’s felt afraid of the possibility of rape. Creeps lurk from every corner is what Argento tells us.
In most of his films, Argento plays around with the idea of sexuality and sexual orientation. Although plenty of psychoanalytic theory could be attached to Argento’s films, what’s most fascinating is the bluntness of hetero- and homosexuality. Women are strong, despite the fact that they’re also damsels in distress. When Elsa’s trying to seduce the store manager, she’s losing patience with him. “You’re not gay?” she says dismissively and annoyingly.
The characters partially accept male homosexuality as misogyny and react accordingly toward gay men. A lesbian woman and her bisexual partner experience the friction and ease of the sex act. The bisexual woman brings home a man she picked up at a bar only to throw it in her lesbian lover’s face. One wonders whether the anger is personal or primarily and primordially sexual. The subtext of sexuality is continuously present in Tenebrae, as if the real monster of the film isn’t the murderer but sex itself, or the violent act that it represents. Yet it’s “the monster” we can’t resist.
This kind of bluntness of misogyny, homosexuality, and feminism is almost never seen in American films. Argento isn’t a political filmmaker, yet he has a talent for bringing forth the cultural issues in giallo, the most unlikely vehicle for social commentary. When the potential murderer runs away from Captain Germani and his assistant, Inspector Altieri (who just happens to be a woman), she submissively tells him: “I couldn’t get him.” Germani’s visibly annoyed and says, “I should have a tough male assistant who runs fast.” Altieri puts on an innocent charm. “You’d hate it,” she says. “You’d have nothing to bitch about.” He can’t help but admit it. This kind of exchange, physical or metaphysical, isn’t pervasive in American cinema or American culture and consciousness.
The masculine and feminine roles are at the continuous subtext in Tenebrae, and the gruesomeness of seemingly meaningless homicides is what adds horror to the “shadows” of the film. Argento hasn’t only created a horror film in a traditional sense, but also in an aesthetic one. It may be giallo but it’s sublime horror. An erotic elegance runs through Argento’s work that deems all of us “sexual personae,” feeding on fear and paroxysm of sex.