Dario Argento Panico
Directed by Simone Scafidi
Written by Manlio Gomarasca, Davide Pulici, & Simone Scafidi
Featuring Dario Argento, Asia Argento, & Fiore Argento
Unrated
Runtime: 98 minutes
Available to stream on Shudder February 2

by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer

When photos from the premiere at the Venice International Film Festival first popped up on Dario Argento’s Instagram (yes, I follow Dario Argento on Instagram), I didn’t properly appreciate just how ripe the time was for Dario Argento: Panico. In the English-speaking world, interest in the director’s work had been limited to cult film circles for decades. Though his films have always had champions, it wasn’t until the late 2000s/early 2010s that this started to shift more broadly. Luca Guadagnino’s high-profile remake of Suspiria was, if nothing else, a herald of Argento’s arrival into the mainstream. In 2022-23 alone, there were Dario Argento retrospectives at New York’s Lincoln Center, the BFI Southbank in London, and the Melbourne International Film Festival.

Despite the broader appreciation of Argento’s body of work, discussion on the director has remained pretty meager. Maitland McDonagh’s book Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds was first published in 1991 and is still the most prominent piece of Argento scholarship, though an expanded edition released in 2010 helped ensure its continued relevance. What’s more shocking to me is that the only Argento documentary predating Panico is Michele Soavi’s Dario Argento’s World of Horror, which was released in 1985 and is almost 40 years old!

Enter Simone Scafidi, who had already dipped his toes in the giallo documentary with 2019’s Fulci for Fake on Argento contemporary Lucio Fulci. Panico certainly makes sense as a next step, especially with someone like Michele Soavi as a bridge to connect the two productions. Panico features a far broader cast with names that will be more recognizable to both Italian horror fans and cinephiles in general. Soavi appears alongside other Argento collaborators like Luigi Cozzi and Lamberto Bava, but the inclusion of Nicolas Winding Refn, Gaspar Noé, and Guillermo del Toro brings an international flair to the otherwise Italian proceedings.

Though I’m far from an expert on documentary filmmaking, my impression is that Panico is fairly conventional: aside from a few fun vignettes of Argento at a hotel, his life and career are traced chronologically through interviews and archive footage. Speaking as a fan of his films and of late 20th century Italian horror in general, it was wonderful to hear from the people who helped make those films happen. Discussions of Dario’s life outside of film came via faces both familiar and unfamiliar. Interviews with his daughter Asia Argento, perhaps the most traditionally “famous” person in his orbit, were expected (and welcome), but just as interesting were the interviews with his sister Floriana Argento, first wife Marisa Casale, and daughter Fiore Argento, none of whom were familiar to me.

Panico also devotes time to some lesser-known (or at least under-seen) works of Argento’s, like the 1973 anthology series Door into Darkness; his 1996 film The Stendhal Syndrome; and several of his post-Sleepless (2001) films that were mostly straight-to-DVD releases. These remain on the fringes of popular consciousness, so I’m happy to see this documentary choose not to pass them over. It also does not avoid the contested authorship of Suspiria, with Asia speaking to the involvement of her mother Daria Nicolodi. Panico’s timing is both unfortunate and significant in that Nicolodi died in 2020 and can no longer speak to her involvement.

This is not the only thing conspicuous in its absence from the documentary, however. Perhaps unsurprisingly, since it’s supposedly Argento’s least favorite of his own films, 1971’s The Cat o’ Nine Tails is barely mentioned, and even then it’s only in an allusion to its title. Completely left out is the director’s work with George A. Romero, first as a producer on 1978’s Dawn of the Dead and later with 1991’s two-part anthology film Two Evil Eyes. Licensing Dawn is apparently very expensive and Eyes wasn’t well-received, but it’s still an odd omission.

What’s worse is that the filmmakers Panico chose to feature are almost exclusively men. Asia worked extensively with Dario, yes, and Fiore appeared in a few of his films, but as family members they were going to be in no matter what. In fact, the only woman that is neither directly related to Argento nor his ex-wife is Cristina Marsillach, who starred in 1987’s Opera. Surely if the producers of Panico wanted to find women to interview they could have: Argento is particularly popular with women, whether they be filmmakers, cinephiles, academics, or film critics. There was nothing essential about the three interviews with “outside voices,” Gaspar Noé, Guillermo del Toro, and Nicolas Winding Refn. These could just as easily have been with women.

It’s not surprising to see women’s interest in horror left out, but it is disappointing. Dario Argento: Panico is otherwise an engaging documentary that will undoubtedly be popular with horror and cult film fans.