Horror Legend Argento, 81, Brings Gory Swan Song To Berlin Film Festival

BERLIN: A interval of pandemic-enforced solitude and his actress daughter’s enthusiasm led Italian horror legend Dario Argento, 81, to snap open his director’s chair after a decade’s absence to make yet another of his signature gorefests.

“Dark Glasses," the director’s latest film, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on Friday, reprising the unique combination of lurid horror, the supernatural, and pure slapstick that define the Italian ‘giallo’ - pulp - movement of the 1970s, of which his “Suspiria" (1977) was the crowning work.

Asia Argento, the director’s daughter, performs one in every of many characters who meet lavishly-depicted, blood-spattered ends within the movie, whose script he first drafted in 2000 earlier than dropping it right into a drawer the place she later discovered it.

“Before the pandemic," Argento told Reuters, “Asia was looking for something on her past, on my life and her life and going through the drawers she found this script and she asked me ‘what is this?’"

She urged him to movie it, prompting him to spend lockdown revising the script and introducing facets of recent life, equivalent to cellphones, that didn't but exist when he wrote it.

Ilenia Pastorelli performs Diana, a prostitute on the run from a serial killer who, after being blinded in a automotive accident, bonds with Chinese orphan baby Chin, performed by Xinyu Zhang.

Such a plot could be susceptible to prices of exploitation had been it not for the doggedness with which Argento pursues his blood-and-gore agenda to the purpose the place audiences are left gasping with inconceivable laughter.

“I simply needed to make an ideal movie, an essential movie, the place maybe for the primary time there could be some tenderness and heat," Argento said, highlighting his protagonists’ unlikely friendship.

“It’s a scary but tender movie," stated his daughter. “Working with him once more is a superb pleasure."

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