The Legendary Hideo Kojima Recommends Unmissable Trilogy of Italian Horror Shockers
Dario Argento is a legend in the world of horror, and everywhere you look you feel his influence. Filmmakers around the world have embraced his heavily stylized works of suspense and dark fantasy, but he’s also influenced novelists, artists, and video game icons like Hideo Kojima.
As you might know, the creator of games like Metal Gear and Death Stranding frequently updates his social media accounts with what he’s watching, reading, or otherwise experiencing in the pop culture world. Not too long ago he highlighted Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, and just recently he posted images from an Argento box set containing a thematic trilogy that kicked off the director’s career.
Argento worked as a writer, in various genres, in the Italian film industry throughout the late 1960s, piling up more than a dozen credits by the end of the decade. In 1970 he made his directorial debut with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, a film still considered an essential in the giallo subgenre of Italian thrillers and proto-slashers.
The next year, Argento released two more giallo features, The Cat o’ Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet, cementing his place as a maestro among Italian thriller filmmakers. Because all three films have a type of animal in their title, they’re referred to as Argento’s “Animal Trilogy” by fans, and it looks like Kojima was ready to dive into all three.
So, are the films really a trilogy? Not in the franchise movie sense, but they do share a lot of stylistic and thematic concerns, and they’re all giallo classics. Each concerns a protagonist – a writer in the first, a reporter in the second, a rock musician in the third – who’s roped into a conspiracy involving murders, and each features Argento’s signature elaborate kills. The “animal trilogy” moniker is a bit misleading, since none of the films are really about animals, but because they share a certain energy, they’re forever linked. This is Argento at the start of his directorial career, ready to unleash everything he’s learned about filmmaking in the 1960s on an unsuspecting audience in the 1970s, and that makes them essential.
The films don’t stand on equal footing, particularly since The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is still held up as a genre-defining giallo, but taken together they’re both a great introduction to Argento and a hell of a triple feature. And after you’ve seen them, you can dive into Deep Red, still Argento’s best giallo, and the film that catapulted him into the upper echelon of horror filmmakers in the 20th century.
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