Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dario Argento: Panico’ on Shudder, a Deepish Dive Into the Life and Work of a Horror Master

Suspiria is the rare film that changes your perception of what filmmaking is and can be, and that alone justifies the existence of Dario Argento: Panico (now streaming on Shudder). But of course, the influential Italian auteur has a far more expansive career than just one groundbreaking film – Deep Red is hailed as the greatest giallo ever made, rousing thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was a global hit, Inferno and Tenebrae were standard-bearing films in the fertile ground of ’80s horror and he not only produced Dawn of the Dead, he co-wrote Sergio Leone’s masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West. All this is covered in Panico, a documentary retrospective that tries to give us a sense of who Argento is as an artist, father and human being, but does it succeed?

DARIO ARGENTO: PANICO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The first face we see is Nicolas Winding-Refn, which is quite the audacious opening to this documentary. The next? Guillermo del Toro’s. Eventually, we’ll get to Gaspar Noe, and if the movie was just the three of them talking about Argento and his work, it’d be fascinating as all hell. But there’s more to the movie than that, of course – we get to hang with the man Argento himself, first in a sequence that apes the opening of Suspiria as he’s driven to a fancy Italian hotel, and then as he reflects on his life during interviews conducted between writing jaunts in his hotel room. And Argento seems, well, a bit cranky. He gripes in cranky-old-man fashion that he hates fancy hotels like this. But he soon settles in and begins working on his new screenplay and sharing reflections on his life and career.

You might say Argento’s fame was predestined: His mother was a photographer and his father was a film producer; his sister Floriano says “our world was cinema.” Argento loved Hitchcock. He was a teenage film critic, published in the newspaper, before becoming a screenwriter in his 20s, most notably sharing writing credit with Bernardo Bertolucci for Once Upon a Time in the West, which Argento proudly says was an outlier in cinema at the time, for having a well-rounded female protagonist. Soon after, his father would produce Argento’s directorial debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and they butted heads when the production went over budget. The film was a smash in Italy, and even nudged into the no. 1 spot on the U.S. box office chart. 

Released in 1970, Crystal Plumage made Argento famous, and during the subsequent decade, he made several well-received thrillers, some ill-fated television projects, the unforgettable giallo Deep Red and then Suspiria, which feels a tiny bit underemphasized in this doc, considering it’s a tonal and aesthetic masterwork featuring one of cinema’s all-time greatest scores (by Goblin, led by composer Claudio Simonetti, interviewed here). Refn gives Suspiria a little juice, though: “It will indoctrinate you emotionally and physically” to Argento, he says, and I – and hopefully you, too – can attest to that truth. Refn calls it “the ultimate cocaine movie,” which is… well, I’ll take his word for it. In one of the doc’s most revelatory moments, Argento shares how, after Suspiria’s release, he was occasionally overtaken by suicidal urges. He’d fight the inclination to throw himself out his hotel window. He consulted a doctor, who told him to push a wardrobe in front of the window. See, the urges arrived and dissipated quickly, and by the time he moved the wardrobe and opened the window, the impulse would pass. And so here he is, in his 80s, talking about it.

Panico works its way through some of the high points of Argento’s life and career, unafraid to celebrate his influence and peer into some of the darker recesses of his psyche. It almost becomes a film-by-film progression, but poignant commentary from his daughter Asia Argento – who starred in several of his 1990s films, even some of his more erotic ones – lends color and deeply personal insight to the filmography. As for the title of the documentary, Argento explains in an archival clip that inciting terror is base-level stuff for amateurs; he wanted to raise the heat to panic-inducing levels. He seems really wigged out in the clip. I’d wager he was high on cocaine at the time, but that’s just an informed assumption. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: How did Kevin Smith get nearly two hours with his docubio Clerk, but Panico runs barely past 90 minutes? (As I did with RoboDoc: The Making of RoboCop, I’d watch several hours on the making of Suspiria alone.)

Performance Worth Watching: Somehow, Refn never discusses the fetishistic qualities of Argento’s filmmaking, which feels like a grave error. Therefore the most insightful commentary here is del Toro’s, whose insights provide rich, meaningful context and analysis of Argento’s work. 

Memorable Dialogue: “With Inferno you start realizing that these movies are part of a larger puzzle. And you get again the sense that it’s not just a house and a victim and a killer – the universe is insane.” – Del Toro

Sex and Skin: Some brief, mildly racy clips and stills from Argento’s films.

Our Take: Despite the feeling that Argento is absolutely not someone we’d get to know and understand thoroughly in 97 minutes – and distractingly bad subtitles that frequently mangle the Italian-to-English translation – Panico is a reasonably insightful documentary. It highlights his best work, gets about knee-deep into his upbringing/personal life, and makes some connections between the two. It brings in luminaries to speak on Argento’s influence and the context of his work. And it isn’t afraid to touch on some of his less creatively and commercially successful films. It covers all the bases, although it sometimes dashes right past what fans and admirers might deem important, whether it’s his collaborations with George Romero or how he established filmmaking techniques that helped shape the horror genre for decades.

Whether all this contributes to a complete picture of who Argento is? It’s debatable. We’re left with the sense that Panico is trying to give us an insider look at the man without fully penetrating his mystique. It’s a safe assertion that one doesn’t have a robust career of making strange and upsetting films without nursing an obsession with the darker fringes of humanity, but why exactly Argento explored such subject matter is left up in the air. He’s clearly drawn to the aesthetics of bright-red blood, soft and vulnerable flesh, the glint of sharpened steel, and there are archival clips in which he has the look and mannerisms of a wide-eyed, wild-haired madman. 

The film doesn’t seem fully committed to asking whether making death-obsessed movies that teeter between beautiful and grotesque is a compulsion or a curated intellectual pursuit. Maybe we can assume the former is true, but we’d rather hear Argento discuss it in his own words. Simonetti asserts that “Dario Argento is fear,” and it comes off as a superficial soundbite, hype without substance. Refn says that few filmmakers were so unapologetically themselves like Argento has been throughout his career, a statement that finds greater purchase in the pursuit of outlining and defining the man and his work. And the film concludes with a staged, faux-profound shot of Argento cracking a demented smile, one last opportunity to creep us out a little. Even if Panico doesn’t quite deserve that moment, Argento certainly does. 

Our Call: Dario Argento: Panico isn’t quite a fully satisfying profile of the iconic filmmaker, but it at least functions as a reminder of his cult-level prestige, and as a solid primer for his strongest work. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.