The Argento Syndrome is my term for discussing filmmaker Dario Argento's consistent, even obsessive, explorations on film of the nature and effects of creating and viewing violence. Argento's films are an unrelenting investigation of the cinematic uses of memory, trauma and distorted vision, and the cinematic body as threatened site of attack, mutilation and death. The films are symptomatic of a politics and aesthetics that invoke the powers of internalised and externalised forms of horror, particularly tied to the twentieth century and to the uses of media technology, including computer-generated effects. In their blurring of fact and fantasy, challenges to representation, hallucinatory quality and particular strategies to incorporate the viewer into their images, they address a world where the real and illusory have lost their clarity and where art is as dangerous as life. Argento is a filmmaker whose cinematic work is very self-conscious of the uses of horror ‘as a meditation on the aesthetics of filmmaking itself’ (Schneider, 2007: 60).

In the early years of its development from the 1890s to the First World War, Italian cinema was identified with comedy films, romances, divismo (star films) and historical spectacles. However, the effects of fascism and war from the mid-1920s to the fall of the regime in 1943 introduced conflicts over the direction of film production in the immediate post-Second World War era. These centred around what came to be identified nationally and internationally as neorealism, with its focus on the effects of the war, the hardships of everyday survival, and the emphasis on humanist solidarity in contrast to the propagandistic and Hollywood-style films identified with the cinema of the twenty years of fascism (Bertellini, 2004: 4). Neorealism offered a version of cinema averse to genre forms, but, in fact, in the cinema ‘no profound cultural and/or political break occurred’ (Ricci, 2008: 165–8).

In the late 1950s into the 1970s, a blend of genre and neorealism emerged in popular comedic and melodramatic forms. In the industry's pressure to produce a profitable cinema of quality and of popularity, ‘historical’ and mythical peplum (costume) epics emerged and achieved local and international acclaim (subsequently to be overtaken by the popularity of Spaghetti Westerns).