Credit: Dangerous Minds / Cineriz

Dario Argento’s Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) isn’t just a high point in the giallo canon—it’s a full-bore descent into operatic horror, part art film, part slasher, part paranoid fever dream.

Over the years the movie has been butchered by distributors, trimmed, dubbed into mush, and released in more versions than Blade Runner, but now that it’s finally available through a gorgeous 4K restoration, you can actually see what Argento had in mind: gleaming knives, crimson curtains, and murder sequences that feel more like cursed ballets than standard horror fare.

This is Argento before the rot set in, before the budgets bloated and the plots curdled. Deep Red is where the giallo genre reached full saturation, colour-wise and gore-wise. It’s the moment where Argento stopped pretending to be Italy’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock and became something more lurid, more decadent, and frankly, way more fun.

David Hemmings (the guy from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up) plays Marcus Daly, a pianist who watches a woman get butchered in full daylight and ends up knee-deep in mystery. Along for the ride is Daria Nicolodi as Gianna Brezzi, a sharp-tongued journalist who’s just as obsessed with the case. Bodies pile up, things get weirder, and Argento’s camera lingers with a kind of pervy intensity.

This was Nicolodi’s first outing with Argento, but not the last—not by a long shot. The two became partners in every sense. Their daughter, Asia Argento, would arrive the next year and eventually join the family business of cinematic bloodletting.

Bernardino Zapponi, best known for his surreal work with Federico Fellini, was given co-writing duties. He wanted to make the deaths more tangible – not just knives and scream queens, but real-world horror: skulls cracked on marble, faces boiled under faucets.

If you’ve seen The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, you’ll recognise one of Argento’s favourite tricks: faulty memory. In Deep Red, he builds the entire mystery around something seen but not understood, pushing you to doubt your own eyes. It’s maddening, and brilliant.

You can feel Hitchcock’s shadow all over this thing—Psycho, obviously—but Argento’s not content to play student anymore, and this is where he breaks free. The kills in Deep Red are more than just stylish, they’re borderline fucking operatic. One poor soul gets smashed into every piece of furniture like a pinball. Another dies while a hideous mechanical doll clatters into the scene. It’s performance art with murder props.

The visuals are psychosexual mayhem. Mirrors, mannequins, blood on plush velvet, and sculptures that seem to leer at the carnage. It’s like watching a museum exhibit on Freudian nightmares. And underneath it all, Goblin’s snarling prog-funk soundtrack crawls under your skin and sets up shop.

As many will know now, Argento was disappointed with Giorgio Gaslini’s score for Deep Red, so he asked Pink Floyd if they’d come aboard; they declined. The director, scrambling for sound, was subsequently given a demo tape of an Italian group called Cherry Five, and was so impressed he hired them. The band would soon change their name to Goblin. The jazz-rock score the unit composed and performed for the film is fantastic, and went on to sell millions of copies on vinyl. Argento and Goblin would work together on other pictures, including the director’s follow-up, Suspiria. But it is their work on Deep Red that lingers on.

Now, though, the reason we’re all here. The excerpt we have below is taken from one of the murder scenes and includes one of the many relatable injuries featured in the film, so you’ll need to be ready for that (my teeth hurt just thinking about it). But what’ll haunt your dreams is the super-creepy mechanical toy (known as the “mad puppet”) that emerges from a closet at the start of the clip.

Every shot choice Argento makes here is just perfect.