*200 copies limited edition.* Dario Argento was born in Rome, Italy, on September 7, 1940. Before becoming a screenwriter and later a director, he was a film critic. Ever since his "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" heart-stopping directorial debut in 1970, Dario Argento has been redrawing the boundaries of cinematic horror with flamboyant violence, feverish plotting, and deliriously stylized compositions. Initially associated with giallo, the pulpy Italian subgenre he helped formalize and would later take to unprecedented heights with his international breakthrough, Deep Red (1975), Argento embraces a gamut of fantastical influences—from sublime Gothic art and penny dreadfuls to Murnau, Hitchcock, and Disney with his distinctively baroque style of disorientating cinematography, stained-glass colorwork, and elaborate musical scores (often composed by his own rotating house group, Goblin). As far as horror film directors go, few are more influential and prolific than Dario Argento. With over half a century of films under his belt, the Italian Argento became a popular purveyor of giallo, but none made more of an impact than Argento.
"With his first cinematic foray, Argento instantly elevated giallo into an art form. Horror was never the same again. The director is often referred to as the Italian Alfred Hitchcock, and while both auteurs were skillful at building pressure-cookers for plots, Argento developed a trademark style, sophistication, and perversity all his own. In film after film — The Cat o’ Nine Tails, Deep Red, and Suspiria among his very best — he employed the familiar trope of a maniac on the loose to build delicious, glamorous, vivid, and vicious jigsaw puzzles, with plenty of blood, eerie electronic music, whispering psychopaths, children’s nursery rhymes, vertiginous camera angles, odd animal cameos, and, Argento’s particular forte, over-the-top baroque deaths. Argento was making murder and mayhem into something far stranger: a seductive deep dive into our dark psychologies, with all the attendant political and sexual upheaval of the time".
To celebrate the cinema of Dario Argento, Eighth Tower has called musicians from various countries and asked them their musical interpretation of his movies and his "dark giallo" universe".
6 panels matte digipack.