Catching up with Dario Argento’s ‘Profondo Rosso’ in Turin

I have been so busily engaged in writing up my recent experiences with My Cat is An Alien in Turin for a forthcoming issue of The Wire that I have not had many opportunities to post some of the more amazing pictures documenting my stay with them. One of the places that Maurizio, Roberto and Ramona were particularly keen to show me was the Villa Scott, tucked away in the Torino Hills, on the other side of the Po from the main city centre. Fans of Dario Argento’s 1975 masterpiece Profondo Rosso will have no trouble recognizing in these gentle art-nouveau lines the setting for one of the defining incidents from this giallo tour de force. Actual locations for movie scenes have their own special architectural presence; they are haunted in a way that only those who have grown up with cinema can possibly understand and must always exist as a link between two worlds. In this case, the gates to the villa were firmly locked, and the entire place seemed to belong only to the late-afternoon shadows. However, my attempts to reach through the railings to photograph the main entrance provoked a growl from somewhere deep in the undergrowth, suggesting that, at the very least, a guard dog was lying in wait for any sign of trespass – and that’s at the very least. Needless to say I pulled my arms back in quite quickly

Pictured above: three views of Villa Scott by KH and three by Roberto Opalio – the last one in the series shows KH and Ramona Ponzini braving the guard dog outside the main gate in the name of cinema, architecture and extreme bloodshed.