By Ludovico Cantisani, essayist, film scholar and Roman producer.no.
The light that chases: this is the tasty paradox from which Tenebrae, Dario Argento’s 1982 film, the second collaboration with Luciano Tovoli on photography, was photographically and oxymorically constructed, which intended to asymmetrically reverse the nocturnal colorism of Suspiria. Among the geometries of the EUR already blessed by Antonioni with L’Eclisse, even the night has its brightness: the light slips in everywhere, no less than the knife of the mysterious assassin who, in one of the wildest twists of the entire Argento cinema – spoiler alert – will reveal himself to be the protagonist.
In a rural Sweden that Bergman never seems to have laid eyes on, a group of American tourists do not know they have paid for their own death sentence. The religious man always rebels against those looks that want to reduce everything to folklore. The Americans will be gradually torn to pieces in complex rituals – all except one, who will become the queen of the party. Almost forty years after Tenebrae, Ari Aster plays the horror card again in full light – and succeeds completely: the result, Midsommar, is a horror that James Frazer would have desperately liked.
Let’s go back in time. Robin Hardy’s 1973 film The Wicker Man competes with Hitchcock’s The Birds for the title of the first horror film in broad daylight – but since the label “horror” always has something of a false feel to it on a Hitchcock film, let’s go with The Wicker Man then. Starring Christopher Lee and Lindsay Kemp, the film shows a police officer, on the trail of a missing child, discovering that Celtic paganism is still practiced on a mysterious Scottish island. Blood will follow, and sacrifices. In short, out of three classics of “horror in broad daylight”, two have to do with the survivals of archaic rituals. That’s something less than a clue.
The entire Western tradition sings the praises of light against the night. “God from God, light from light, true God from true God”: the positivity of the gaze, the imperialism of the theoria permeates even the Christian Creed repeated at every Sunday Mass, while, more mockingly, Pirandello with his lanterninosophy let emerge a sinister dialectic between what we know, the light, and the immense darkness of things we do not know, cannot know, do not know that we do not know. “The light becomes miserly/Bitter the soul”, wrote Montale in Ossi di seppia, an unaware future Nobel Prize winner – undoubtedly the most attentive of the Italian poets of the twentieth century to the play of light, closely followed by Ungaretti and his garlands of stars. But Dante’s Paradise itself, six centuries earlier, was all a chant to light.
Western horror films carry with them infinite traces of the Christian heritage. But a peculiar anthropological maturity, and archetypal originality, are demonstrated by those few horror films set at dawn. It must be said that it is cognitively difficult to demonize light – that of the clear view has remained a stable ideal even two centuries after the death of God. And yet, someone has been able to close the curtains on certain all-too-stable categories of our thinking. The truth, since the beginning of Greek language, has always been connected to the theme of seeing. Most horror films, set at night or at dusk, already denounce their false, artificial, constructed character with the setting. Solar horror films, in which the light gives no escape, allowing a clear vision, also inculcate total horror.
Not that we need to demonize the demonization of darkness, typical of our culture even before our cinematography – quite the opposite. Perhaps the deepest meaning of horror is when, from the darkness, something that should not have been there suddenly appears, in full light, an Unexpected Monstrous, a return of the enraged repressed. The epiphany requires a dark outline to reveal itself – Bacon knows this well, with his very Deleuzian figures. The authentic epiphany – not necessarily joyful – is very well represented by those “minimal films” by Philippe Grandrieux, in which female figures stand out violently in a black and neutral space, screaming, reduced to a desperate but irreducible individuality. Here then is our prehistoric moment – out of the cave.
It oscillated, the light oscillated – mocking, perpetually in flight, yet sinisterly regular, in its capriciousness. The light must have seemed no different to the first men, who contemplated the alternation and pursuit of day and night with eyes that hopelessly wondered about the morrow: would the light return? From this uncertainty all the rites spring.
There are many ancient myths and tales that have to do with the death of the Sun – the same title that, millennia later, the obscure Italian philosopher Manlio Sgalambro would dedicate to one of his major books, between one Battiato song and another. Not to mention the eclipse – which also opens in Occhiali Neri, Dario Argento’s latest film, more predictable than Suspiria or Tenebrae in its handling of light and darkness, yet still capable of evoking archetypal nightmares.
But the aporia, the difficulty lies precisely in the concept of nightmare, in the automatic negativity that our language confers on the night, on every night: only the highest form of art that Western culture has produced, tragedy, has been able to achieve the collapse of these schematic categories. “Sun, Sun, may I see you now for the last time!”: Oedipus’s scream still resounds, not yet made explicit in all its epistemological implications. Films like Midsommar or The Wicker Man show us the other half of the rite: that is, they place themselves on the side of the victims, or at least of external spectators who discover, sometimes at the cost of their own blood, what the cost of the Day is.
Lessons of darkness, love of chiaroscuro. Who said that night is the ultimate killer?