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Simone Scafidi\u2019s Dario Argento Panico<\/strong> documents the great Italian horror maestro\u2019s career through the years. A director of genre classics such as Suspiria, Opera, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Tenebrae, and Deep Red, Argento has solidified his reputation as one of horror\u2019s most visually exciting names.<\/p>\n The jumping-off point for this documentary is following a present-day Argento as he heads to a hotel to write his latest movie. It\u2019s revealed this has been part of his routine for decades regarding writing. He enjoys the isolation and its effect on him and his writing. <\/p>\n During an opening car ride to this out-of-the-way hotel, Scafidi makes a creative flourish by showing us Dario\u2019s eye for the world, with recreations of the director\u2019s most alluring shots along the way. Then Dario seemingly snaps out of this daydream to curse how long the journey is taking. Throughout these modern-day scenes, there\u2019s a cheeky infusion of the dreamlike quality found in Argento\u2019s most famous works. The lines slightly blurring between fiction and reality, only clear when the man himself allows it.<\/p>\n There are a few talking heads involved in Dario Argento Panico, including Guillermo Del Toro, Gaspar Noe, Nicholas Wending Refn, Goblin\u2019s Claudio Simonetti, and Dario\u2019s family members, but the most insightful and informative moments come from the man himself. Both in archive interviews and in the more reflective current-day footage. While we never get to dive deep into his technical prowess and process (Noe, Refn, and Del Toro do examine it in wordy gushes), you get a really clear idea of his motivations and passions as a director.<\/p>\n We learn quickly that two things drove Argento\u2019s career. Beauty and fear. He recalls doing his homework as a child, sitting in the corner peering at the women getting ready for photo shoots with his famous photographer mother Elda Luxardo. Argento claims that he learned how to frame women on screen through his mother\u2019s work, capturing the beauty of icons such as Sophia Loren.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, he and several family members describe his obsession with fear, and, more specifically, panic. Argento doesn\u2019t just create tomes of panic-inducing horror; he lives for it. There\u2019s a fascinatingly morbid archive interview where he almost casually tells the interviewer of the time he was often compelled to hurl himself out of a particular window, and in sharing this with a psychologist, he was told to put a wardrobe in front of said window as a deterrent whenever the thought came up. Argento tells this story in such a way you can tell he finds the whole thing as fascinating as it is frightening. <\/p>\n