The Shivers of Anguish, a masterpiece by the Italian giallo, is coming to the cinema in a restored 4K version! Don’t miss this nugget signed Dario Argento!
Dario Argento, 79, is a filmmaker as fascinating as he is exuberant. Iconic figure of the giallo (genre on the border of detective cinema, horror and eroticism), the Italian director has offered us many memorable works.
On July 12, Les Films du Camélia is offering a re-release of 6 feature films by the maestro in restored 4K versions. Among these classics, The Shivers of Anxiety is one of the most remarkable.
Oppressive staging, labyrinthine scenario, haunting music, Dario Argento puts our nerves to the test with this masterpiece of horrific thriller, with a baroque production, in the great tradition of the giallo.
The plot introduces us to Marc Daly, an American jazz pianist based in Turin. The latter attends one evening the murder of Helga Ullman, a famous parapsychologist passing through Italy. He tries to help her, but in vain.
Declared an eyewitness and himself the victim of an assassination attempt, he decides to carry out the investigation in the company of a journalist, while the murders multiply.
The Shivers of Anxiety is directly inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic, Blow Up. In both films, the hero witnesses a murder but does not understand what he sees. He only has a partial view of the events and it is by analyzing his memories that he will be able to solve the investigation.
It is no coincidence that Dario Argento chose David Hemmings for the main role, he who already carried Antonioni’s film on his shoulders. Fun fact: the killer’s black leather-gloved hands are none other than those of Dario Argento himself.
Camellia David Hemmings
THE SOUND OF GOBLIN
If The Shivers of Anxiety is so striking, it is also thanks to its disturbing and heady soundtrack. After three fruitful collaborations with the brilliant composer Ennio Morricone, Dario Argento wishes to change his musical register.
He first contacts the group Pink Floyd but the collaboration does not succeed. Then, Giorgio Gaslini became the official composer before being replaced by a progressive rock group still unknown to the general public: Goblin.
Led by Claudio Simonetti, the Goblins and their compositions become inseparable from Argento’s cinema. They sign some of the most famous soundtracks of horror cinema, including Ténèbres, Suspiria but also Zombie by George A. Romero.
DEEP RED
If the French title of the film is The Shivers of Anxiety, it is more enigmatic in its original version: Profondo Rosso (Deep Red in Italian). The name of the work changed several times during production. First, it was announced that the title would be “La tigre dai denti a sciabola” (The Saber-toothed Tiger).
The idea was to maintain the continuity of the titles of Dario Argento’s animal trilogy (The Bird with Crystal Plumage, The Nine-Tailed Cat and Four Gray Velvet Flies). However, the director later said that he propagated this title to “mocking the press”.
The project was then titled Chipsiomega (the union of the last three letters of the Greek alphabet). It was a working title. In the end, Profondo Rosso was chosen because of the dominance of scarlet colors in the feature film, from the blood to the sets to the photography.
When it was released in Italy in 1975, The Shivers of Anguish gathered 5.7 million spectators, a real triumph. In France, he landed two years later, butchered for 35 minutes, which destroyed his chances of success in our regions. Prohibited for children under 16 when it was released in France, its classification was reduced to children under 12 in 2018.