Every week, we spotlight a kill that we just can’t get enough of. This is Kill of the Week.
The discovery of Suspiria led me to dive deep into the filmography of Dario Argento in my teenage years, which of course brought a handful of gems into my world. On the heels of Suspiria and Inferno, Argento released one such gem, Tenebrae (or Tenebre, if you prefer) in 1982, an Italian Giallo film that most consider to be one of his best.
Without giving away too many plot details for those who haven’t yet seen it, Tenebrae centers on Peter Neal, an American horror writer who arrives in Italy to discover that a mysterious killer, inspired by Neal’s own books, has recently embarked on a murder spree.
Like all of Argento’s films, Tenebrae is home to some memorable sequences of bloodshed, and the one that made the biggest impression on me involves an axe and an arm. Jane, Peter Neal’s ex-wife, is brutally murdered in her home by the killer, who slams an axe through her window… then straight through her arm… and then into her back.
There’s something decidedly unrealistic about the effects work, in hindsight, but the image of Jane’s stump spewing arterial spray all over the walls of her home is one that I’ve never quite been able to get out of my head; Quentin Tarantino would tell you the same thing, I can only assume, as Kill Bill features a very similar moment of gory arm trauma.
Typical for Argento, the murder of Jane isn’t just a cool kill scene, it’s a work of art.