Inferno is a 1980 Italian supernatural horror film written and directed by Dario Argento, and starring Irene Miracle, Leigh McCloskey, Eleonora Giorgi, Daria Nicolodi, and Alida Valli.
The plot follows a young man's investigation into the disappearance of his sister, who had been living in a New York City apartment building that also served as a home for a powerful, centuries-old witch.
Principal photography of Inferno took place largely in studio sets in Rome, though some location shooting also occurred in New York City.
In 1986, a year after Fox had issued the film on video in North America, they gave it a limited theatrical release for one week in New York City.
Rose suspects that she resides in the building of one of them, Mater Tenebrarum, and writes to her brother Mark, a music student, urging him to visit her.
A hot dog vendor hears Kazanian's cries for help and rushes over, but then proceeds to kill him with a knife and move the corpse in front of the drain entrance.
He follows hidden passages to a suite of rooms and finds Varelli, an elderly wheelchair user who speaks via an electronic voice generator.
In 1977, Suspiria had been an unexpectedly big box office hit for 20th Century-Fox, released in the U.S. under the studio's "International Classics" banner.
[10][11] The film was budgeted at USD $3,000,000, and producer Claudio Argento secured additional co-production money from Italian and German consortia.
'"[12] Working from Nicolodi's original story notes, Argento wrote the screenplay while staying in a New York hotel room with a view of Central Park.
[3] Argento has called Inferno one of his least favorite of all his films, as his memories of the movie are tainted by his recollection of the painful illness he suffered.
[3] Argento invited his mentor, Mario Bava, to provide some of the optical effects, matte paintings and trick shots for the film.
[16] The apartment building that Rose lived in was in fact only a partial set built in the studio—it was a few floors high and had to be visually augmented with a small sculpture constructed by Bava.
Maitland McDonagh has suggested that Bava had his hand in the celebrated watery ballroom scene,[17] but that sequence was shot in a water tank by Gianlorenzo Battaglia, without any optical effects work at all.
After the production's principal photography had been completed, the film's producer, Claudio Argento, asked if McCloskey would be willing to perform the stuntwork himself, as the stuntman hired for the job had broken his leg.
The actor agreed, and when he walked onto the set the following day he observed "three rows of plexiglass in front of everything and everyone is wearing hard hats.
"[20] Dario Argento chose progressive rocker Keith Emerson to compose Inferno's soundtrack because he "wanted a different sort of score [from that by Italian prog group Goblin on Suspiria], a more delicate one".
[21] Argento prominently featured a selection from Giuseppe Verdi's Nabucco throughout Inferno, the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves ("Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate"), an operatic chestnut, from scene two of the opera's third act.
Time Out's Scott Meek noted that "Argento's own over-the-top score [for Suspiria] has been replaced by religioso thunderings from the keyboards of Keith Emerson".
[28] On 15 August 1986, it had a belated U.S. theatrical release by Fox, playing for a one-week engagement at New York City's Thalia Soho theater[29][30] as part of a double feature with The Shining (1980).
[33] The film received a VHS release in the United States in October 1985 for the Halloween season via 20th Century-Fox's Key Video subsidiary.
[34] Anchor Bay Entertainment released the film on DVD as a standalone disc in 2000,[35] followed by a double-feature "Dario Argento Collection" edition in 2001, paired with Phenomena (1985).
In a review that was later reprinted in McDonagh's critically acclaimed Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento (1994), Variety said Inferno was a "lavish, no-holds-barred witch story whose lack of both logic and technical skill are submerged in the sheer energy of the telling", then complained that the film "fails mainly because it lacks restraint in setting up the terrifying moment, using close-ups and fancy camera angles gratuitously and with no relevance to the story.
Buckets of full frontal gore, spooky interiors, an idiotic narrative and a risible script: a shambles of a film in all senses.
"[29] However, Cinefantastique described the film as "the stuff of all our worst dreams and nightmares and a tour de force from Italian director Dario Argento ... Inferno brings his personal redefinition of the genre close to perfection.
[46] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 69 out of 100, based on 8 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.
Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide gave the film two and a half stars and opined it was a "surreal, hypnotic shocker ... short on sense, but long on style.
92; in the resulting critical commentary for the film, Nigel Floyd wrote, "Horror cinema at its most baroque: a simple libretto is embroidered with elaborate, flowing camera movements, abstract blocks of colour, unsettling sound effects and soundtrack composer Keith Emerson’s thunderous rock variations on Verdi ... Argento’s best work is far behind him, but this alone justifies his cult reputation.