Tenebre

Tenebre (1982) is Dario Argento's stylish Italian giallo, available to watch online on iFILM. American thriller writer Peter Neal flies to Rome to promote his latest novel and walks straight into a nightmare lifted from its pages.

A razor-wielding killer starts cutting down people around the city, and every murder mirrors a scene Neal already put in print. The culprit doesn't hide — he sends the author taunting notes, as if recruiting a collaborator. Neal begins digging into the case himself, and the deeper he goes, the harder it gets to tell where someone else's fiction ends and his own begins. Anthony Franciosa leads, joined by John Saxon and Daria Nicolodi, Argento's longtime muse.

Argento made the film partly to answer critics who called his work too violent, and the result is icy and blindingly bright on the surface, drenched in red underneath. The pulsing electronic score from former Goblin members cuts as sharply as anything on screen, and one notorious crane shot crawling up a building's facade is still dissected in film schools. For Italian-horror devotees it's essential; for newcomers it's a clean way into the genre. Stream Tenebre (1982) online on iFILM.