Memories of horror... good ones!

The horror website Terror Trap recently invited me to contribute a piece about a memorable horror movie viewing experience. It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that I chose an Argento movie. But I got a pleasant surprise when the luck of the layout placed me next to Jessica Harper. And she nails who the terror of The Wizard of Oz, namely those damned creepy flying monkeys, with their silly hats, bellhop vests and nasty simian smiles.

Anyway, if you're up for a stroll down sleaze-memory lane, my recollection of seeing Deep Red in one of Times Square's many long gone theaters is here.

Argento posters, stripped to the essentials

So, apparently there’s this fad among artists and designers for creating elegantly stripped-down posters for well-known films -- Google “minimalist movie posters” and see for yourself.

An Italian designer/photographer named Federico Mauro took it upon himself to do designs for the entire Argento canon. See them here.

Overall I think they’re very cool, and no Argento fan will have to read the title copy to match these elegantly unadorned images to the appropriate film.

And I have to say that I’m amused by the way Mauro appropriated the knife design used on early Giallo posters (itself appropriated from the Italian cover of Roberto Saviano's book Gomorra) and assigned it to The Bird With the Crystal Plumage.

The Argento that Got Away: Profondo Rosso: il Musical

How did Profondo Rosso il Musical fly entirely under my radar? I mean, it’s not as though I would have flown to Italy to see it, but I can’t believe I had no idea it even existed until a few days ago.

Were you to have asked me which Argento film I thought best suited to adaptation into a theatrical musical, I’d say Suspiria. The narrative is stylized and dreamlike the existing score is strong and it’s set at a ballet school, so dance numbers would flow naturally from the narrative. And that art nouveau fever-dream production design is just screaming to be adapted into spectacular stage sets.

I would not have suggested Deep Red, but lo and behold, it was Profondo Rosso il Musical that premiered on January 21, 2008, at the Teatro Civico in Vercelli , a Northern Italian town best known for its lavish annual carnivale. The show went on to play dates in Varese, Sassari, Novara, Castiglione, Savona, Lugano, Venaria and Assisi before winding up in Milan’s Teatro Smeraldo five months later, hard on the heels of Hair.

Argento was credited with the production’s artistic supervision, and longtime collaborators Claudio Simonetti and Sergio Stivaletti provided, respectively, the music and special effects. Profondo Rosso il Musical, was hyped in typically breathless Italian pre-release pieces as a hybrid of France’s legendary Theatre du Grand Guignol and such tongue-in-cheek horror musicals as Little Shoppe of Horrors, The Phantom of the Paradise and, of course, The Rocky Horror Show.

Conspicuous by its absence was any mention of Carrie (1988), easily the closest precedent — a serious work of dramatic musical theater based on an acclaimed horror movie. But of course, it was also a disaster of legendary proportions (you can see a clips — including the climactic horror-at-the-prom scene on youtube — though the video quality is pretty poor, the train-wreck appeal is off the scale.

Profondo Rosso il Musical starred Italian-French actor/singer Michel Altieri — one of those European sensations who never cracked the US market — in Hemmings’ role.

Yes, Altieri, like Detective Altieri in Opera (1987) and diva Carlotta Altieri in Phantom of the Opera (1998), which is one of many reasons I at first assumed that Profondo Rosso il Musical was an elaborate in joke.But no, the guy’s name really is Altieri; he started out in a 1990s Euro-boy band and was supposedly handpicked by Luciano Pavarotti for a secondary role in the 2000 Italian production of Jonathan Larson’s Rent, though that may be pure press puffery. In any event, the exceptionally pretty Mr. Altieri came to Profondo Rosso fresh from a hugely successful run in Italian playwright Tato Russo’s 2002 musical version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. You couldn’t make it up… at least, I couldn’t.

The musical included all the film’s main characters — doomed psychic Helga Ulmann (Claudia Donadoni); ballsy reporter Gianna Brezzi (Silvia Specchio, in the role originated by Daria Nicolodi); Mark’s fragile friend Carlo (Alberto Pistacchia) and his possessive mother (Maria Maddalena Trani); unfortunate writer Amanda Righetti (Alessandra Azimonti) and poor Professor Giordani (Claudio Lobbia), whose big death scene is hijacked by a mechanical doll — along with dancers and a trio of mysterious figures in masks.

To be honest, it sounds like a total disaster, and I haven’t been able to track down anything that suggests otherwise. But oh, what I wouldn’t give to have seen it!

Broken Mirrors/Broken MInds mugs: Be the first on your block!

Imagine sipping your morning coffee/tea from a Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds mug... now imagine that you don't have to imagine. You can order one here: All three covers are available, and they look fabulous.

Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds... on Miss Flickchick.com

Just a reminder that in addition to the Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento Facebook page I created for the new edition, there's also a page on MissFlickChick.com where I'm posting news and links to interviews. The plus with this page is, of course, that you don't have to belong to Facebook.

And now, one for the fans: Above, the real Mother of Tears, as glimpsed in Inferno.

New interview about the expanded edition of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds is online...

I was recently interviewed by Film Threat about the new edition of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento and the director's films.
You can read the interview here.

The book will be available in April... just a few days from now, which means I can officially start fretting about reviews. Oh, and if you're on Facebook, please become a fan of my straightforwardly named group Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento.

The Strange Case of the Argento Movie Tie-in Novel...

This is the paperback tie-in paperback published in 1971 to accompany the US release of The Cat O’Nine Tails. I never knew it existed until I was walking down Broadway one day and stopped to look at some tatty used books being sold from a blanket spread out on the sidewalk. And there it was. To the best of my knowledge, The Cat O’Nine Tails is the only English-language Argento-movie tie-in novel.

The author was Paul J. Gillette and the publisher was Award Books, a small, New York-based house that was eventually bought out by and absorbed into Berkeley Books, an imprint of Penguin. I don’t know much about Award Books, but they seem to have been in business from the early 1960s through the mid-’70s. Their early titles included books about the drug culture and other “daring” topics, but starting in the late ‘60s they specialized in movie and TV tie-ins. They published original novels inspired by popular shows like Gunsmoke, Adam-12, Medical Center and Then Came Bronson, as well as novelizations of movies ranging from Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets to Radley Metzger’s Carmen, Baby. Award also published a number of science fiction books in the mid ‘70s.

It looks to me as though many — maybe most — of Award’s tie-in books were published under pseudonyms, but a handful bore names like David Gerrold (Battle for the Planet of the Apes, 1973) and poet/artist/writer/Paul Buck (The Honeymoon Killers, 1970). Literary agent Agnes Birnbaum of Bleecker Street Associates worked for Award, as did Tor/Forge Books editor James Frenkel, but the company itself is a will o’ the wisp.

Gillette was a cat of a different color: He translated Petronius and the Marquis de Sade, and was nominated for two Pulitzer prizes. He worked for mass-market magazines ranging from Esquire to Playboy, hosted the TV shows Camera Three and Enjoying Wine With Paul Gillette; and edited the trade magazine Wine Investor. Gillette’s nonfiction books included Inside the Ku Klux Klan and The Lopinson Case, about a notorious 1964 double murder in Philadelphia.

In addition to The Cat O’Nine Tails, he wrote the tie-ins for Play Misty for Me (1971) and How Did a Nice Girl Like You Get Into This Business? (1968), adapted from a briefly notorious, German-made sexploitation movie whose claim to fame was a brief appearance by the 18-year-old Barbi Benton. She parlayed her seven-year stint as Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend into a fairly successful career as a singer and actress, to which I can only say, “Run, Barbi, run!”

Gillette died in 1996 at the age of 57 and curiously, all the obituaries I tracked down describe Play Misty for Me and The Cat O’Nine Tails as original novels that were turned into movies.

That pretty much sums up what I know, but I’m dying to find out more about Award Books… partly because I’m fascinated by vintage pulp magazine/paperback publishers in general and partly because NYC-based houses exercise a particular hold over my imagination.

Dario Argento Loves Red Velvet!

For some inexplicable reason (is there any other kind on the web?), the post I did a month ago about Dario Argento's praise for Red Velvet (2009), a smart, gory, stylish slasher movie produced by my friend Sean Fernald, has vanished.

So I'm reposting it, because hey — you can't just pick up an Argento endorsement at the corner drugstore. To this day I remember how thrilled I was when Argento praised the very first version of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds, the one I submitted as my Columbia University masters' thesis.

That encounter wss rivaled only by veteran English filmmaker Michael Powell's response to my first published film article, a very formal, academic analysis of his recently rereleased Peeping Tom. I was still an undergraduate, paying for my education by working in the New York City Ballet's press office, and a dance-world friend was involved with one of the earliest attempts to bring The Red Shoes to the New York stage (the end result was the disastrous 1993 production that opened and closed in four days); he slipped Powell a copy and then introduced us at a backers' audition.

I held my breath as Powell, then in his 80s, looked at me for a moment and then said, "You know, I never intended any of those things you wrote about when I made Peeping Tom." My heart sank. "But you saw them," he continued, "so they must be there."

If that's not graciousness incarnate, I don't know what is.

The Crazies and Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds

My review of the remake of George Romero's 1973 The Crazies is live on MissFlickChick.com, and here's the surprise: It's good.

And Fangoria just did an online item about the upcoming new edition of my book Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, which is due out in April. Read it here.

Me and Dario...

It's been the better part of 15 years since I last saw Dario Argento.

We've exchanged the occasional email and Christmas card, but seeing him on the last day (June 7) of Fangoria's Weekend of Horrors at NYC's Javit's Center was amazing. Dario was as sweet and intense and eccentric as ever... I truly can't believe that he's a few months shy of 70 and I first met him close to 25 years ago.

As I've said many times and many places, Dario changed my life: If I hadn't seen Deep Red at the Victoria Theater in 1976, I would never have written my master's thesis on Argento's films.

If I hadn't written that thesis, it would never have become the book Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento.

And if Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds hadn't been published (thank you, Anthony Blampied!), perfect strangers -- from filmmaker James (Saw) Wan to horror fans of every age, both sexes and all manner of interests -- wouldn't be telling me nearly 30 years later that my book changed their lives. Life is funny that way, isn't it?

So molti ringraziamenti Dario! And thank you Bill (Maniac) Lustig, Stuart Gordon, Tobe (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tom (special effects pioneer) Savini and all the other horror legends I saw today, and thank you everyone who came up to me after the Argento panel to say you loved Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds.

And look for the new, updated edition next year from University Of Minnesota Press!

Catch Me at Fangoria's Weekend of Horrors!

I'll be at the Javits Center on Manhattan's West Side (make that the wild west, west, far West Side) this Sunday, June 7th, moderating the 1:30 Dario Argento panel.

If you're in town and so inclined, please come on by. I can say from long experience that Dario is many things — eccentric, perverse, cryptic and mercurial, for example — but dull has never, ever been one of them.