The Cat o' Nine Tails

• Argento has repeatedly called The Cat o' Nine Tails his least favorite of his own films, a sentiment confirmed in the book "Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento" and in archival interviews included on later home-video releases.
• It's the middle entry in Argento's so-called "Animal Trilogy," bookended by his debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and the following year's Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Despite the title, no literal whip or cat ever appears — "nine tails" refers to the nine investigative leads Franco and Carlo end up chasing.
• Filming ran through fall 1970 across Turin, Berlin, and Cinecitta Studios in Rome.
• Argento shot and then scrapped a longer ending with an epilogue resolving Lori's rescue and the fate of institute director Terzi, cutting it at the last minute because he felt it played "too American." The footage itself is lost, but the script pages survived and later surfaced on special-edition home video releases.
• In the film's tensest set piece, the blind Franco Arno stalks a cemetery mausoleum wielding a bloodstained cane-sword — tense enough that it makes both his partner and the audience briefly wonder if he could be the killer himself.

Franco Arno's blindness isn't just a gimmick—it positions him as Argento's surrogate witness. In a genre obsessed with seeing, he solves crimes through sound and intuition, suggesting the truth giallo protagonists chase can't actually be found through the eyes. The killer attacks what Franco can't see, but Franco catches what sighted people miss. Argento is arguing that perception is the real weapon.

The chromosome research at the institute frames the killer as a product of biological determinism rather than psychological trauma. In a genre that usually explains violence through Freudian wounds, this film gestures toward something more disturbing: evil as genetic fact. The killer isn't broken by society; they were built this way. The film's refusal to psychologize the murderer makes it one of the bleakest gialli of the period.

Carlo Giordani's photography obsession mirrors the killer's surveillance. Both men stalk, document, and fixate on their subjects through mechanical means—cameras, binoculars, recording equipment. The film suggests the journalist and the murderer aren't moral opposites but professional cousins, separated only by what they do with the images they collect.

A blind crossword puzzle designer and a hard-nosed journalist team up after a genetics institute break-in spirals into murder. Someone connected to the lab's research on criminal chromosomes is getting picked off, and the killer wants witnesses silenced too. Karl Malden's Franco Arno can't see the crimes but he can hear them—and that's enough to put him and reporter Carlo Giordani in the crosshairs. Argento's sophomore effort trades the baroque madness of his debut for procedural mechanics, but the set pieces still bite hard.