Tenebre

• Christopher Walken was reportedly Argento's first choice to play Peter Neal but turned the role down; Anthony Franciosa was cast in his place.
• Tenebre was placed on the UK's 'video nasty' list; cut versions circulated for years and the film wasn't passed fully uncut by the BBFC until 2003.
• Argento has said the film was partly his direct response to critics -- and hate mail -- who accused him of misogyny after Inferno; in the story, the killer specifically murders people who accuse the protagonist-author of hating women.
• The gliding crane shot that scales the outside of the lesbian couple's house used a Louma crane imported from France -- the first time the device had been used on an Italian production. The roughly two-and-a-half-minute shot took three days to film.
• The heavily cut 1985 US version, retitled 'Unsane,' trimmed about ten minutes of footage, stripping character setup, most of the gore effects (supervised by Giovanni and Tonino Corridori) and even the famous crane shot.

The split-killer structure reads as Argento confessing that giallo itself is a genre built on male doubles: the detective and the murderer are always the same man seen from different angles. Neal and his attacker share a creative impulse, and the film's refusal to fully separate them suggests the genre's violence is always self-directed.

Anne is the only major character left alive by the final scene, and read through that lens, Tenebre is about women being killed by narratives authored by men -- her survival in the final moments becomes a refusal to become another page in Neal's manuscript.

The repeated motif of the killer forcing pages into victims' mouths suggests the real murder weapon is language itself: the book literally enters the body. Argento stages the killings as acts of authorship, making every throat-cutting a sentence being written in flesh.

American horror novelist Peter Neal arrives in Rome on a publicity tour and finds a killer working through his latest book's murder scenes in real life. Pages of his prose arrive at each crime scene, stuffed in the victims' mouths. Neal's agent, assistant, and a local detective all get pulled into the spiral. Argento splits the killer's identity, plays games with audience identification, and stages some of the most elegant throat-cuttings in giallo history. The mystery keeps folding back on itself until Neal is revealed to be a killer himself — the violence in his fiction turns out to be autobiography.