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?’"