Dario Argento (Rome, 1940), is a living legend of horror cinema, especially of the giallo subgenre that marked his career in the 1970s with works like Dark Red or Suspiria. In 1999 he received the Time Machine award at the Sitges Festival, in 2012 the Honorary Award and this year the maestro is being honored with the Golden Honorary Award for his "monolithic contribution" to genre cinema, to which he again contributes in this edition the screening from his first film in ten years, Occhiali Neri (Black Glasses).
"The story of this film is like a film. I wrote it 20 years ago and was going to produce it with a famous Italian producer but one morning I woke up and read in the newspaper that he was in prison. So I put the script in a drawer and I started with another project. After a while my daughter Asia was writing an autobiographical book and asked me for documents. So the script appeared. She read it and was enthusiastic about it, she contacted a producer and we made the film, "he said at a press conference about a story of serial killers starring a young blind woman.
Argento assures that he never thinks that he is a cinematographic icon: "I live a very solitary, reserved life and I continue to do what marks my heart". From his fascination with the aesthetics of violence, blood and dreams, he recognizes that his films "are dreamlike" and that they are "inspired by reading Sigmund Freud's work, which helped me to search within my depth. It's something automatic that is born and I let it flow".
Asked why in Italy horror films are no longer made as they were half a century ago, Argento believes that "unfortunately now it is more important to make comedy because it is less expensive to make than fantastic cinema, which is practically dead in my country." The filmmaker, whom we recently saw star in Gaspar Noé's drama Vortex, in which he played a film critic with health problems, agreed to appear in front of the camera because "Noé assured me that there was no script, that he could improvise and the proposal excited me since it reminded me of the era of neorealism and I am a son of neorealism".
Argento, who has proposals to shoot three new films, one in France in the spring and the other two in England and Italy, maintains that "horror cinema is like the sea, always in motion" and that what comes from the East attracts him , especially South Korea and Japan. Also Mexico. "I have always followed my style and my inspiration. What my heart asks for and in this way also and inspired other directors".
