Film - Blood Not So Simple, From Dario Argento, Italys Hitchcock - NYTimes.com FOR nearly 40 years Dario Argento, the so-called Italian Hitchcock, has had blood on his hands: deliberately, unashamedly, darn near literally. When a deranged killer stabs, slashes, throttles, garrotes or otherwise violates the corporal integrity of a screaming victim in one of Mr. Argento's films - this happens with some frequency - the hands inside the black gloves have traditionally been those of the director himself. It's his version of the Hitchcock cameo. The hands may be the same, but the blood has changed a bit over the years, from the bright comic-book red of his early thrillers like "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage" (1970) and "Deep Red" (1975), in which the vital substance is roughly the color of maraschino cherries, to the dark, almost black stuff that gushes so freely in his latest film, "Mother of Tears" (opening Friday). It's never quite the color of real blood, though, which is, for the sanity of the viewer, fortunate, and is also perfectly consistent with Mr. Argento's aesthetic: his brutal and often beautiful movies touch reality very lightly, if at all. "Mother of Tears" is one of a small minority of his films in which the agencies of evil are supernatural, explicitly unreal. The movie is the long-delayed - and, for many of his fans, breathlessly anticipated - conclusion to a kind of trilogy begun in "Suspiria" (1977), continued in "Inferno" (1980) and then, for 28 years, apparently abandoned. In the earlier films the audience learned of the existence of three powerful witches: Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, who wreaks havoc in a German ballet academy in "Suspiria"; Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, who cranks up the stress on the already jittery New Yorkers of "Inferno"; and Mater Lachrymarum, the Mother of Tears, briefly glimpsed in "Inferno" as a voluptuous, smoky-eyed temptress, waiting patiently, it appears, for just the right opportunity to lure Rome to its doom. She gets her chance in "Mother of Tears," though she seems to have evolved in the intervening years into something more like Mater Pectorum: a bare-bosomed vamp commanding a coven of comparably endowed and similarly undressed young women. It's apocalypse, Italian style. The red-hot Mater here may remind some viewers of the lusty villainesses Barbara Steele used to play with such regal tawdriness in a previous era of lurid Italian shockers - pictures like "Black Sunday" (1960), whose director, Mario Bava, contributed special effects to Mr. Argento's "Inferno." It was the last film Mr. Bava worked on. This national tradition of dubiously tasteful screen horror is clearly a much stronger influence on Mr. Argento than the acknowledged source of the three-mothers concept, which is, of all things, the writings of the great Romantic essayist Thomas De Quincey, author of "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" (1821). In his sequel to that work, "Suspiria de Profundis" (published 24 years later), De Quincey describes an opium dream in which these three women, whom he calls "Our Ladies of Sorrow," appear to him, but - maybe it's just an Englishman's reticence - he doesn't say a word about the grisly skills they display in Mr. Argento's trilogy: impalement, decapitation, disembowelment, eye gouging. And he doesn't even mention their breasts. Making fun of this sort of ripe, over-the-top horror isn't difficult: it's impaling fish in a barrel. What's tougher to account for in Mr. Argento's work is the often extraordinary grace of his filmmaking, which shows itself in the long, tense intervals between outbursts of stomach-turning gore. He's both a sensationalist and a sensualist, and the line that separates Argento the showman from Argento the artist is razor thin. In "Mother of Tears," for instance, the prelude to the big, orgiastic climax is a remarkable sequence in which the heroine, Sarah Mandy (played by his daughter Asia Argento, who has starred in two of his previous films), explores an apparently abandoned villa, searching for the witches" lair, and Mr. Argento treats himself to a three- or four-minute Steadicam tracking shot of thrilling complexity: the camera follows Ms. Argento up and down stairs, through delicate variations of light and shadow, and the effect is so lovely, you almost forget to be frightened. Or rather, you remember why you allow yourself, against your better judgment, to be frightened again and again by this problematic, profoundly contradictory artist. The instruments of death his movies favor are sharp: like the Surrealists, he traffics in the more intimate, close-up forms of violence, the Buñuelian menace of knives and razors. Guns don't interest him at all. And the pleasures his silky technique provides can be just as acute. Mr. Argento, 67, has devoted most of his career to the Italian suspense genre known as giallo, which designates a kind of hyperbolic serial-killer mystery, generally with urban settings and disturbingly creative murders. The word giallo means yellow, and refers to the covers of a popular series of paperback thrillers published by Mondadori. Although "Suspiria," his sixth feature, was an enormous hit, and one of his most striking exercises in style, he has nonetheless continued in the 30 years since to stick pretty closely to the nonsupernatural giallo form and its more mundane manifestations of wild, destructive unreason. There's horror enough to be had in this world without invoking any other. And maybe more to the point, the genre lets Mr. Argento do what he does best, which is stylizing reality, turning the everyday strange. All his best gialli, like "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage" and "Tenebre" (1982), which are set in Rome, and "Deep Red," which takes place in Turin, are distinguished by his lively appreciation of urban geography: the fearsome emptiness of nighttime plazas, the rustling ominousness of parks. The apartments his characters live in tend to be modern looking, angular, with long corridors that muffle the sounds of intruders and that take some courage to negotiate in the dark. One character in "Mother of Tears" says of Rome, "The city is 2,700 years old, and we are standing on five layers of graves." But even when there are no witches around, no ghosts rising from the catacombs, Mr. Argento's cities seem to quiver with the presence of the dead. So supernatural entities, however buxom, are sort of coals to Newcastle for his brand of horror. What matters in an Argento picture is the geometry of dread, the weird thrill of looking at familiar places through the magnifying lens of fear, which heightens perceptions and sometimes - before the worst happens and the world blacks out - makes everything keenly beautiful. It's no accident that the most memorable scenes in Dario Argento's movies are often those that involve stalking, the slow-motion pursuit of a victim by his (or more commonly, her) killer, because he uses these little danses macabres to lay out, stage by agonizing stage, the progress of awareness on the part of the stalkee: the dawning suspicion that something is different, wrong, then the sharp certainty, then the fast calculation of the possibilities of escape, and finally the awful clarity of resignation. There's a wonderful sequence of this sort in Mr. Argento's most recent big-screen giallo, "The Card Player" (2003), which is included (along with "Tenebre" and three lesser gialli) in a DVD box set just released by Anchor Bay. The movie's heroine, a policewoman played by Stefania Rocca, is alone in her house when she notices a figure - one staring eye in a black-masked face - reflected in a glass bowl on her coffee table. An elegantly choreographed cat-and-mouse game follows, moving in and out of the house, the hunter and the hunted changing roles once, twice, then again, much of the action occurring in dim light or full darkness, the restlessly tracking camera searching for a silhouette against a window or an open door. That sequence doesn't conclude with a death, but many of Mr. Argento's virtuoso stalker set pieces do, gruesomely. As with the movies of Brian De Palma - whose 1980 "Dressed to Kill" is an American giallo, a near-homage to Mr. Argento - the violence can be a sticking point (so to speak) for viewers who might otherwise enjoy the precision and the sheer sensual exuberance of the filmmaking. Others, of course, prize the gore above all else, but it's probably not a good idea to sit too close to them. And that reservation about, or even revulsion at, Mr. Argento's work may have more validity than it does in the case of Mr. De Palma, because there is no single film in Mr. Argento's body of work that has the coherence and aesthetic self-sufficiency of Mr. De Palma's "Blow Out" (1981), nothing that compels a reasonably thoughtful viewer to believe that the end really justifies the queasy means. But there's also a stubborn kind of integrity in Mr. Argento's refusal to look beyond the immediate, moment-to-moment sensations movies can supply, his persistent avoidance of anything approaching a meaning. It stalks him, but he always gets away. He isn't, as some have charged, a sadist: he's too detached. He may be a nihilist. What he is most fundamentally, I think, is a serial hands-on aesthete. And there's nothing scarier than that.