Movies - Tenebrae

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	Movies - Tenebrae

Tenebrae (also known as Tenebre) is a 1982 horror thriller written and directed by Dario Argento. The film stars Anthony Franciosa, John Saxon, and Daria Nicolodi. After having experimented with two exercises in pure supernatural horror, Suspiria
(1977) and Inferno
(1980), Tenebrae represented a brief return to the giallo form for Argento, a sub-genre he had helped popularize in the early to mid 1970s.

Plot

Peter Neal (Franciosa) is an American writer of violent horror novels whose books are tremendously popular in Europe. In Italy to promote his latest work, entitled Tenebrae, he is accompanied by his literary agent Bullmer (Saxon) and his adoring assistant (Nicolodi). Also lurking about is his ex-wife Jane (Veronica Lario), who seems to be slightly insane. Immediately prior to Neal’s arrival in Rome, a beautiful young shoplifter (Ania Pieroni) is brutally razor slashed to death by an unseen killer. The murderer sends Neal a letter informing him that his books have inspired him to go on a killing spree. Neal immediately contacts the police, who put Detective Giermani (Giuliano Gemma) in charge of the investigation, along with the detective’s female partner Inspector Altieri (Carola Stagnaro).

More killings occur. Tilde (Mirella D’Angelo), a beautiful lesbian journalist, is murdered at home along with her lover. Later, Maria (Lara Wendel), the young daughter of Neal’s landlord, is bloodily hacked to death with an axe.

Neal notices that TV interviewer Christiano Berti (John Steiner) appears to have an unusually intense interest in the novelist’s work. At night, Neal and Gianni (Christiano Borromeo) watch Berti’s house for suspicious activity. Neal decides to separate from Gianni in order to get a better view. Alone, Gianni watches in horror as an axe carrying assailant brutally hacks Berti to death. But he is unable to see the murderer’s face. Gianni finds Neal unconscious on the lawn, having been knocked out from behind.

Giermani’s investigation reveals that Berti was in fact unhealthily obsessed with Neal’s novels, and now that he is dead it is believed that the killings will cease. However, Bullmer, who is having an affair with Jane, is stabbed to death while waiting for his lover at a public bench. Gianni is haunted by the thought that he had seen, but did not recognize, something important at Berti’s house during the night of the interviewer’s murder. He returns to the house and suddenly remembers what was so important—-he had heard Berti confessing to his attacker, “I killed them all, I killed them all!” Before Gianni can share this important detail with anyone, he is attacked from the back seat of his car and strangled to death.

Jane is sitting at her kitchen table when a figure with an axe leaps through her window, hacking off one of her arms. She spews gallons of blood all over the kitchen walls before falling to the floor, and the killer continues to hack at her until she is dead. Neal is the murderer. He is completely insane, warped by a childhood trauma that torments him forever, and when he had first discovered that Berti had murderous obsessions, he immediately concocted a clever plan in which he would murder his ex-wife and her lover and then pass the blame on Berti. When Inspector Altieri arrives at the house a few minutes after Jane’s death, Neal kills her too. Later, Giermani and Anne also come to the house in the pouring rain, and when Neal sees that he cannot escape, he commits bloody suicide in front of them. Anne runs outside to her car for a moment. Giermani relaxes and is suddenly killed by Neal, who had faked his own death. Neal waits inside for Anne to return, but when she opens the door, she accidentally knocks over a metal sculpture with sharp spikes that lands on, and gorily impales, the demented writer. Having witnessed the bloody death of her friend and employer, Anne stands in the rain and screams over and over again…

Production

Argento has claimed that Tenebrae was influenced by a disturbing incident he had in 1980 with an obsessed fan. According to Argento, the fan telephoned him repeatedly, day after day, until finally confessing that he wanted to kill the director. Although ultimately no violence of any kind came of the threat, Argento has said he found the experience understandably terrifying and was inspired to write Tenebrae as result of his fears.

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