Tenebrae (Unsane) | 1982
- DIRECTOR |
- Dario Argento
Another of Dario Argento’s triumphs of Giallo style over content, with a superb shock effect cheekily lifted by Brian De Palma for the ending of Raising Cain.
Apart from a brief opening sequence of author Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) cycling to John F Kennedy International Airport in New York, the film was shot in Rome.
Argento, unusually, chose to film in dazzling sunlight (the ironic title means ‘darkness’) around the near-deserted, antiseptic suburb of EUR (Esposizione Universale Romana), a grandiose project planned by Benito Mussolini but not completed until the Fifties, about four miles south of Central Rome on Via Cristoforo Colombo.
You can see more of the area’s Fascist architecture as ‘Imperial Rome’ for Julie Taymor’s 1999 film Titus, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus with Anthony Hopkins, and in Kurt Wimmer's 2002 sci-fi Equilibrium, with Christian Bale.
