Trailer
Plot summary
At Christmas in 1956, a knife falls at a child's feet in a family home. Twenty years later in Rome, the psychic Helga Ulmann speaks at a parapsychology conference and is overwhelmed by the murderous thoughts of someone in the audience. She tells Professor Giordani she believes she can identify that person. That night a black-gloved figure kills her with a meat cleaver, and the English jazz pianist Marcus Daly, passing below, sees the murder from the window and rushes to her apartment. After the police arrive, he thinks a painting there has disappeared, though he cannot say which. The press names him as the eyewitness, and the killer comes to his door with a whispered threat. Reporter Gianna Brezzi, who took the published photograph, begins helping him investigate.
Cast
- Aldo Bonamanoas Carlo's Father
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Deep Red (1975)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Dario Argento shot Deep Red mainly in Turin because at the time the city had more practising Satanists than any other European city except Lyon, and he had already used Turin for The Cat o' Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet.
- Argento first hired jazz pianist Giorgio Gaslini to score the film, was unhappy with the result and failed to get Pink Floyd as a replacement. He then found the local prog-rock band Goblin, whose leader Claudio Simonetti wrote two compositions in a single night, and signed them immediately.
- Dario Argento himself removed twenty-six minutes from Deep Red, mostly scenes between Daria Nicolodi and David Hemmings, footage that was never dubbed in English. For years the cuts were blamed on the American distributors until a Blu-ray release confirmed Argento had approved them.
- The British Board of Film Classification cut eleven seconds of animal cruelty from Deep Red in 1993, and those cuts were waived in 2010 after examiners decided the "fighting" dogs were playing and the production company said the lizard on a knife was a "visual effect".
- Co-writer Bernardino Zapponi said the murder scenes were built on painful injuries the audience could relate to, since being stabbed or shot is outside most viewers' experience. Their original screenplay ran about 500 pages until, judged unfilmable, Argento cut it to 321.
- Director Dario Argento performed the close-ups of the killer's black-gloved hands himself, convinced that doing all the killing scenes himself was quicker and easier than teaching the moves to an actor who would need endless re-takes.
- The lead-up to the exploding-head scene in David Cronenberg's Scanners was modeled on Deep Red's parapsychology discussion, and Rick Rosenthal's Halloween II has a scalding-water death inspired by that of Giuliana Calandra's character Amanda Righetti in Deep Red.
- The film's "House of the Screaming Child" was Villa Scott, a historical villa that at the time was owned by a convent of nuns and run as a boarding school.
