Welcome to How to Start Watching, in which our staff will recommend movies that will help you start watching a particular genre, director, film movement, etc. It’s a list of movies, but with a purpose that isn’t recounting the best or even favorites. Each entry will suggest a few films that will help you find a way into more movies! A starter pack, if you will.

by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer

It’s been a decade since Italian horror maestro Dario Argento last directed a feature film, but he’s finally returning this October with Dark Glasses! There’s never been a better time to dive into his filmography, but where do you start with a figure that looms so large in cult and horror cinema? Do not worry, friends, for I am here to show you the way.

Coincidentally enough, Dario got his start as a film critic writing for magazines and newspapers as a teenager. It was his writing that paved the way to filmmaking, in fact, and he has screenplay and story credits on a handful of war and spy films of the mid-to-late 60s. His most notable work of this era, though, was working on the story for Sergio Leone’s 1968 epic Once Upon a Time in the West.

It seemed fated that Argento would start directing his own films, and indeed it wasn’t long after that his first effort would hit theaters, which brings me to my first suggestion…but first! A quick note about the term giallo. “Giallo” is the Italian word for “yellow” and was used in Italy as a by-word for mystery, crime, and psychological thrillers. It’s a reference to cheaply-made paperback novels from a publisher called Mondadori, whose covers featured a bright, yellow background, but has come to be used primarily (at least outside of Italy) for films.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)

I think that Argento's most accessible film, if you’re approaching his work for the first time, is his directorial debut. It was hugely influential in Italy, starting the trend of long, often bizarre titles that dogged Italian horror and thriller films through the 70s and early 80s. It wasn’t the first giallo film to be released in the US, but it was certainly one of the first to have a significant cultural impact here.

Bird introduces a lot that would carry through Argento’s most popular efforts in the 70s and 80s: The outsider protagonist, often a creative, emotionally and socially isolated despite populated surroundings. The upsetting, often violent scene witnessed in passing, leaving the protagonist with some clue that lies just beyond their recall until a crucial moment. The convoluted mystery that must be unraveled before the protagonist (and those close to them) fall victim to a black-gloved killer, a killer whose preparations are shown in foreboding POV shots. And, as in nearly all of his films, it’s Argento himself who provides the killer’s hands in Bird.

Unlike Argento’s more famous work, though, Bird features a relatively conservative jazz- and funk-inspired score by famed composer Ennio Morricone, whose work seems ever-present in Italian genre films of the era. This is true for the remaining two films in Argento’s so-called animal trilogy: 1971’s The Cat o’ Nine Tails and 1972’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet. It’s not until his fifth film that audiences would be introduced to Goblin.

Deep Red (1975)

Though Cat and Flies were both reasonably successful, neither proved to have the same impact that Bird had. After his sole directorial foray outside of horror, 1973’s Italian Revolution-set dramedy The Five Days, Argento returned to the giallo genre with what is considered its quintessential work: 1975’s Deep Red. The signatures are there: an English jazz musician living in Rome, a black-gloved killer, a mystery to be solved, but Red was such a huge leap forward for Argento and for horror.

It marked his first collaboration with Italian prog rock band Goblin, whose score for Deep Red was quite a breakthrough. Despite having a lot in common with previous Argento scores in terms of instrumentation, Goblin’s work gives the film a tenseness that somehow still feels gothic. It doesn’t quite reach the perfection of the Suspiria score, and notably includes several tracks by jazz composer Giorgio Gaslini, but it’s an incredible contribution to horror filmmaking nonetheless.

Deep Red also shows Argento’s significant development as a visual storyteller. It features some of the most gorgeous and inventive compositions in his filmography and, I think, can sometimes be overshadowed by Suspiria’s perfectly controlled visual language. Deep Red features a lot more location work, though, which showcases a different set of skills than seen in his next film.

Look, I could go on at length about Argento’s incorporation of the supernatural, his first collaboration with Daria Nicolodi, the massive influence this had on the slasher genre, but he just happened to follow it up with one of the best films ever made.

Suspiria (1978)

There is no talking about Dario Argento without talking about Suspiria (which he co-wrote with the aforementioned Daria Nicolodi). It’s my favorite film of his (Deep Red is a close second) and was my first Argento film, stumbled upon on an October night when I was looking for something to do. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen, and to a certain extent that remains true; there’s nothing quite like it.

The biggest shift from his previous work is that our protagonist, though still checking all the other Argento boxes (young, white, creative, emotionally and physically isolated), is a woman. Only a couple of films after Suspiria would feature leading men, in fact. It’s also Argento’s most visually distinctive film, and famously one of the last to be processed in Technicolor. It’s immediately evident, from the moment Jessica Harper steps out into the rain, that this film’s look is utterly unique.

Those eye-popping colors are paired with one of the wildest and most recognizable soundtracks in horror cinema. After Goblin’s previous work proved so effective, Argento seems to have given them rein to really stretch their boundaries. He reportedly worked with them himself in developing the score, and the main title theme remains as recognizable (and effective) as any of the more famous horror themes that came before or after.

Suspiria also represents Argento diving fully into the supernatural, something he’d only touched on in a Deep Red B-plot, and he’d spend the next several films going back and forth between plots with supernatural elements and those without. I, for one, really enjoy the occult threats of Suspiria and its follow-up, 1980’s Inferno. They build up just enough mythology without getting too specific, which really pairs well with Argento’s tendency to view a coherent plot as less than top priority.

Sleepless (2001)

Yes friends, we’re jumping all the way to 2001 for this next suggestion. Inferno (1980), Tenebrae (1982), and Opera (1988) are all worthwhile films, as is Two Evil Eyes (1990), a split feature with George A. Romero, but the rest of Argento’s run during the 90s was less than stellar. He was (and perhaps still is) a bit fixated on his daughter Asia, who featured prominently in all three of his films of that era. Despite featuring a protagonist that seems like quite a departure from the films mentioned above, Sleepless feels like a return to form.

Instead of a young foreigner trying to make sense of a mystery they find themselves thrust into, the venerable Max von Sydow plays an aging Italian detective called back in to investigate a string of murders linked to a case he never solved. It may sound like a pretty cliched setup, but it first rather well into Argento’s thematic interests. The then-nearly-70 von Sydow is a protagonist isolated in different ways: world-weary and retired, far removed from the world of violence that he’s dragged back into. Also worth noting is that, though von Sydow’s character is named Ulisse Moretti, the actor himself looks pretty darn Swedish, and so at least looks like someone who doesn’t fit in his Turinese surroundings.

Sleepless also features Argento’s return to a score by Goblin, his first since Suspiria (though Opera was his last Goblin-adjacent score, composed by the band’s Claudio Simonetti). It is also likely his last, as it was Simonetti alone credited on 2009’s Giallo and 2012’s Dracula 3D, and Dark Glasses features French musician Arnaud Rebotini. Sleepless sounds much different than Argento’s earlier films, perhaps inevitably, but the music is charming in an early-2000s kind of way. Overall it’s a really wonderful throwback that I think deserves to be up there with his work from the 70s and 80s.

Bonus Round!

Kill, Baby, Kill (dir. Mario Bava, 1966)

If you’re looking for Argento influences, the horror films of Mairo Bava are the place to start. Bava was one of the earliest giallo filmmakers, but it’s this gothic horror entry I’d recommend. It features a protagonist out of place, in this case a doctor sent to a small town high in the Carpathian mountains. Bava was also known for his use of bold colors, and Kill, Baby, Kill certainly doesn’t disappoint on this front, either.

Zombie (aka Dawn of the Dead) (dir. George A. Romero, 1978)

When Romero was unable to secure financing for his follow-up to Night of the Living Dead in the US, it was Argento who ended up coming through in exchange for European distribution rights. In an odd twist, Argento was also given some creative control over the European version, released under the title Zombie. His edit was slightly different and, instead of the stock cues and tunes used by Romero, the European release featured music by–you guessed it–Goblin.