Red Herrings and Profondo Rosso

                Robin Wood emphasizes in The American Nightmare the importance of the concepts of repression and the Other in generating horror within film. He explains that “Otherness represents that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with … in one of two ways: either by rejecting and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it, converting it as far as possible into a replica of itself.” (27) In classical Western society, the “bourgeois ideology” he refers to generally implies that the power resides of those who traditionally fit the ideal bourgeois image; Caucasian, male, heterosexual, capitalist, fairly upper-class people. Horror is generated when the social order is disturbed by the Otherness; when the dominant ideology can’t reject or assimilate it. This principle manifests concretely whenever the horror comes from a single killer, particularly in murder-mysteries and slasher films, in which case the killer generally violates one or more aspects of the bourgeois ideology described earlier. Dario Argento’s “Deep Red” however, both uses and violates the same principles to create a different kind of suspense and intrigue.

                Throughout the course of “Deep Red”, Argento uses Wood’s idea to throw suspicion of the identity of the killer around until the very end. Near the beginning of the movie, when Marcus and Gianna, his female love interest, meet, the movie takes time to have Marco argues that women are weaker than men, and Gianna challenges him to an arm wrestle. This scene was put in to not only show that Gianna is a liberated woman, but also functions to place some suspicion on her as the killer. As a liberated female, she deviates from the societal status quo that women should know that they are weaker than men. Carlo is portrayed throughout the movie as not very masculine, especially in comparison to Marcus. In the second act of the film, Marcus attempts to visit Carlo, but meets his mother, Martha. She informs him that she was told of him by Marco. Martha however seems to be under the adamant impression that he is an engineer, which is widely regarded as a male-oriented profession. Carlo himself is revealed in the following scene that he is homosexual. These moments and character traits are used to implant Marco, and the audience, with the suspicion that Carlo is the murderer. However, at the very end, it's revealed that he is in fact a red herring, and the real murderer is his mother. A woman, yes, but heterosexual, white, seemingly well-off, judging by her home; it is not known until the very end that she violates the regular social order in any way.
               Argento used the concept of the Other not only as a way to generate horror, but to misdirect the audience into suspecting innocent people. As Adam Knee explains, "The emphasis of narratives of investigation puts further, often highly reflexive, focus on the image and, more generally, on the processes of perception, of seeing and hearing, and of memory, as well as on the ambiguity and fallibility of all of these." (223) By making this movie simultaneously a slasher flick and a mystery, the film utilizes the common uses of women (as plot devices) in horror movies and misdirects the viewers. The "bourgeois ideology" emphasizing male dominance and female vulnerability, as displayed with the Final Girl and other similar tropes, is actually used by Argento here to simultaneously frame the empowered female and non-heterosexual male, characters used to create tension with society, and draw suspicion away from the heteronormative female killer.

Works Cited

Knee, Adam. "Gender, Genre, Argento." The Dread of Difference: Gender & The Horror Film. Ed. Barry K. Grant. Austin: U of Texas, 1996. 213-30. Print.
Wood, Robin. "The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s." American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. By Andrew Britton. Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 1979. 25-32. Print.
Deep Red. Dir. Dario Argento. Perf. Macha Meril and David Hemmings. Rizzoli Films & Seda Spettacoli, 1975. Film.