2021.06.28
“Fresh pain that the audience can relate to”
Dario Argento asked Bernardino Zapponi for help in writing the screenplay for Deep Red. Zapponi was a famous screenwriter who supported Federico Fellini 's later works, such as Pagliacci (1970), Rome (1972), and Casanova (1976). He was also familiar with horror, having written the script for the third episode of the anthology film Tales of Mystery (1968), The Devil's Necklace. The two worked together to find a way to express horror like never before, through trial and error.
The answer that Argento and Zapponi arrived at was "raw pain that the audience can empathize with." In movies, being shot or stabbed is a common depiction, but in our daily lives, we hardly ever experience such things. It is a fear that can only be imagined in our heads. However, we can be burned by hot water or accidentally hit our foot on furniture. They thought, "Let's depict a fear that can be understood by the skin, like in everyday life."
“Deep Red” © 1974 MEDIASET
In the middle of the movie, there is a horrific murder scene in which a woman's head is pressed against a bathtub full of boiling water, but the horror is doubled because we know the heat and pain. The scene in which Professor Giordani (Glauco Mauri) is killed is a depiction that we don't even want to imagine, in which his teeth are slammed into the furniture.
Argento wrote the script with such enthusiasm that when he had his father Salvatore and brother Claudio read it, it was over 500 pages long. He shortened it to about 300 pages after they warned him that it was too long, but that was how confident he was in the script. His confidence can be seen in his interviews.
"As I was shooting, I got a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I was very relaxed and not stressed at all. The story is beautiful and I wrote it in two or three days without any difficulty. It was a miracle. If you watch the film, you will understand how the director felt when he made it." (Quoted from an interview with Dario Argento )
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