The bit that most frightened me was when they have to sleep in the hall and can hear one of the witches doing this bestial snoring from behind a curtain.
Tenebrae's my favourite, although I haven't seen Fenomena. Still need to see a couple of the early ones and Opera too.
I rewatched
Phenomena last night, in 4K, still trying to resolve the eternal quandary of this film: is it brilliant or abysmal?
In some ways it's just both, but I lean more towards the former the more I watch it.
It has some spectacular sequences and is as close to being a dream picture as
Inferno; you can imagine parts of it being filmed by some visionary German in 1925. It's a triumph of pure imagination over logic and a true heir to the Grimms.
It's also a film about outsiders and how being an outsider can lead to hatred and evil or empathy and kindness. The scene where Jennifer is being bullied by the other girls, summons a massive swarm of flies to cover the school and tells her tormentors "I love you all" is strangely moving and powerful, perhaps one of the best things he ever did. It's probably his most
soulful film.
Then, in the "abysmal" column you have the scenes that are destroyed by Iron Maiden, some of the most inept dialogue in any Argento film (which is saying something), flat colours, some lazy sequences that recycle stuff he'd already done (for example, the underwater sequence near the end which is basically a bad copy of Bava's
tour de force at the beginning of
Inferno) and a serial killer plot that is stupid rather than simply illogical (illogical can be good).