Blind Terror

Florence, 1817. Henri Marie Beyle - Stendahl to you and I - pays a visit to the basilica of Santa Croce. Absorbing the sheer glut of visual experience beneath its vaulting, he feels dizzy and faint; a sensation that lasts for days. 'My feeling is so profound', he writes, 'that it borders on pity. All that speaks clearly to my soul. Ah! If only I could forget it!'
Florence, 1996. A young female police officer - Anna Manni - is searching the Uffizi Gallery in the hunt for a brutal serial rapist.

In the opening sequence to Dario Argento's The Stendahl Syndrome (1996), her every move is cut with masterpiece after masterpiece. The score is quietly ominous: she'd be safe if she just listened to the soundtrack. Manni pauses to look at Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano. Increasingly faint and shaky, she passes by Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Reaching Breughel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (the music really peaks here) Anna begins to hallucinate and promptly passes out. On waking up, she's unable to remember her name, why she's in Florence, nor, more importantly, why her police-issue 9mm is missing. Hours later, she is attacked by her quarry. Sent for counselling, a psychiatrist diagnoses her fainting fits as Stendahl Syndrome - psychosis triggered by overexposure to beauty. As she sets about exacting revenge, Anna takes up painting, finding solace in creating brutal post-Expressionist pictures, or rolling around on large canvases, covered head-to-toe in paint.

Stendahl Syndrome is rare, and the efficacy of art therapy in the style of Yves Klein (or is it Tony Hancock?) is dubious. Nevertheless, it afflicts enough people each year for Florentine hospitals to set aside one or two beds for victims of sensory overload. Like the messianic delusions symptomatic of Jerusalem Syndrome, stendahlismo is a self-fulfilling condition: a product of desperately wanting to be moved by art. Like going to see a horror film - you know you're there to be scared witless - the genius loci is as much to blame as the impact of a Botticelli painting. (Then again, why does vandalism against art have such a long history?)

The body of 13 films made by Dario Argento is pretty much an extended study in stendahlismo. His work sits in menacing company with the curiously large number of arts-based horror movies - Abel Ferrara's Driller Killer (1980), a perversely punk take on a painter's creative block; or A Clockwork Orange (1971), that most infamous marriage of Beethoven and GBH. Visually dense, Argento's Gothic thrillers throw painters, writers, musicians, dancers, opera singers, and actors into the maw of ultra-violence as both victims and predators. Tense, complicated plots are the twisting paths along which his audience encounters the vicious, unremittingly gory set pieces he's famous for. His glossy characters are stylish, bourgeois, and bored. Sociopathic writers get skewered on spiky Cubist sculptures; butchered limbs spray blood across stark white Modernist apartments like psychotic Action Painting; and blind pianists are ripped apart by their own guide dogs. His murders rival any vision of brutality Bosch could envisage. Even the language used to describe his films is taken from the creative lexicon - 'a symphony of violence', 'stylishly choreographed', or 'rhapsodically violent'. Argento's artists are tortured. Literally.

The son of a film producer (his earliest memory was of sitting on Sophia Loren's knee), Argento's break came when he collaborated with Bernardo Bertolucci on the script of Once upon a Time in the West (1968), Sergio Leone's classic Spaghetti offering. Argento paid his dues under Leone - 'He taught me to use the camera as my eye'. Along with fellow directors Mario Bava and Ricardo Freda, his sado-erotic thrillers fast became a horror sub-genre in themselves - gialli, named after the cheap, yellow-bound pulp novels popular in Italy at the time. 1970 saw Argento's debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (photographed by Vittorio Storaro, fresh from shooting Easy Rider the previous year), a Hitchcockian thriller about a woman driven to murder by a painting. Whereas directors such as Ruggero Deodato descended to third-rate slasher movies such as The Washing Machine (1992) (about a bloodthirsty... washing machine), Argento hacked out a niche of his own.

Content gives way to style in Argento's work, but then the look is what they're all about. His ambiguously anti-narcissistic tableaux are a litany of abuse perpetrated against eyes and vision - capriccio variations on Un Chien Andalou's (1929) infamous razored eyeball. Take Opera (1987), for example: getting off to a bad start by joining a production of Verdi's Macbeth, a young soprano is abducted by a killer stalking the cast and crew. Taping needles under her eyes, the psychopath forces her to watch the carnage he wreaks. Every murder involves a blinding, and if she closes her eyes, the pins will gouge her own eyeballs. It's hardly subtle, but boy it's scary.

Although Opera marks the gruesome epitome of Argento's obsessions, Suspiria (1977) shared similar preoccupations. Set in an elite ballet school in Germany, new arrival Susie Banyon (Jessica Harper) attempts to discover the identity of a killer stalking her peers. Accompanied by probably the loudest soundtrack ever, courtesy of Italian band Goblin, and filmed using outdated Technicolor stock, Suspiria is a breathtakingly strange film. Whole scenes are soaked in suffocating reds or psychedelic blues. The school's architecture places it in a peculiar fin de siècle bubble: an astonishing piece of set design, its oppressive geometry and stained glass intensity is shown off by Argento's flamboyant cinematography. Vision is not as central to the plot as it is in Opera, but it's the people who don't watch out that come a cropper: see the poor girl who doesn't look before she leaps into a roomful of rolled up barbed wire; or Daniel, the blind pianist savaged by his faithful guide dog and left to desanguinate in front of an imposing neo-Classical façade.

Art house devices aside, Argento's films tread a razor wire between fear and loathing. Taking Edgar Allan Poe's dictum that 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world' to an even more disturbing conclusion, he's unrepentant in his use of attractive women as the majority of his victims - perhaps that memory of Ms Loren is responsible. 'I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or a man. I certainly don't have to justify myself to anyone about this.' In Argento's world, fear is invariably feminine and a murder weapon is chosen for its capacity to disfigure above all else. Sure, beauty, as traditionally defined, can only make sense when countered with an opposing concept - like horror - but as exploitation cinema shows, there's a limit to the ways of articulating that opposition.

Italian horror, like the Spaghetti Western, has always suffered from being regarded as cheap imitation. Critical opinion has always placed less-is-more suspense above show-everything chop 'em ups, and, as a result, Italy's horror films have languished in a dank cellar of critical neglect. Positive readings of horror tend to reposition it as an oppositional or subcultural form - a move that proved easier with, say, Psycho (1960), or Peeping Tom (1960), than with the gialli's Grand Guignol excesses. Paradoxically, while only fervently devoted (male) contributors to grass-roots fanzines have attempted to keep Argento's reputation above the fetid waters of 'video nasty' hysteria, the most influential film for the makers of gialli was probably Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966) - Argento even cast David Hemmings as a composer in Profondo Rosso (1976).

From analytical, comic-store-geek titles, such as Sleazoid Express or Photon, to the retarded adolescence of Trash Compactor and Sheer Filth, Xeroxed publications have been instrumental in establishing some form of critical dialogue around Argento's work. Unlike the more extremist practitioners of Performance Art, Argento's movies survive without the sanction of the art museum or critic, planting niggling doubts in the minds of censors and free speech advocates. As the aptly-named Charles Kilgore, editor of Ecco fanzine asked: 'Where in the nether-world of exploitation does freedom of expression end and the necessity for social responsibility begin [...] is it possible to advocate cinematic celebrations of human depravity and cruelty in a socially responsible context?'. It's a question that's been asked before, but when - like Argento - you're in a limbo between art and exploitation, it's certainly a pertinent one. Most exploitation flicks are catalogues of misogynistic abuse, with storylines as risible as the tagged-on plot of a ropey porn film. After Wes Craven and The Blair Witch Project (1999), Argento's films can seem hackneyed; yet, they still drag you into a world in which surface beauty only leads to pain, and where, shoddy scripts aside, exquisitely crafted cinematics have you covering your eyes.

We live in a world in which Florentine hospitals testify against art's edifying power and horror films can reaffirm our sense of security and safety. Art as socially acceptable madness is a great Romantic cliché, yet horror directors have to align themselves with art to provide a refuge for their own ghosts. After all, Carravaggio was a murderer, Pollock liked a good fight, an actress shot Warhol, and as for the Viennese Actionists... Of all the cities in Europe, London currently has the highest number of artists living in its environs. Be afraid... be very afraid.