The Beyond: Tenebre (1982) — shocktillyoudrop.com

The Christian liturgical service known as Tenebrae is celebrated in the shadows. Candles flicker against the walls of the church while the Psalms are chanted by various readers, each reciting a chapter about the final days in the life of Jesus — the Passion, which leads to the crucifixion. They extinguish the candles one by one until the congregation sits silent in total darkness.  Dario Argento’s 1982 film Tenebre signifies another kind of blindness — the gray areas of morality and the artist’s amoral and compulsive nature. In one of the film’s stunning murder set pieces, in which the journalist character Tilde (Mirella D’Angelo) is dressing — head shrouded by her white shirt — the killer’s black-gloved, razor-wielding hands appear, slicing an ocular window into the fabric. It frames Tilde’s wide-eyed expression, which just moments before was gazing into Argento’s camera as the disembodied voice of the killer hisses, “Pervert. Filthy, slimy pervert!” It’s a telling moment when audience and director are implicated in the crime — us, for watching these female bodies being sliced to pieces, and the director, for crafting such brutality. Tenebre’s very first line, narrated by the director in the Italian cut of the film (his hands are used to stand in for the murderer’s) becomes Argento’s artistic confession: “The impulse had become irresistible. There was only one answer to the fury that tortured him. And so he committed his first act of murder. He had broken the most deep-rooted taboo, and found not guilt, not anxiety or fear, but freedom. Any humiliation which stood in his way could be swept aside by the simple act of annihilation: murder.”

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