On friday March 7th, 1975 - exactly 50 years ago - a new horror-thriller hit Italian theatres: Profondo rosso (Deep Red) was directed by Dario Argento, already a star after his thrillers that since 1970 had defined the "Italian Giallo" genre (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o' Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet) and the 1973 tv series Door into Darkness, in which he had been assisted by Luigi Cozzi (co-writer of Four Flies and other Argento movies, and later director, among others, of the science fiction cult movie Star Crash). The Italian Giallo usually mixes serial murders and a few supernatural elements, and Deep Red is considered its masterpiece.
The 50 years celebrations will include, in April 2025, a series of Profondo Rosso Concerts by composer Claudio Simonetti's group, Goblin, performing live their original soundtrack during screenings of the film. But the first act of the celebrations is a book: the most unusual kind ot tie-in.
Fantasmi di oggi e leggende nere dell'età moderna is a collection of original mystery/horror short stories by ten different writers, conceived by Mario Gazzola, who edited it with me (Andrea Carlo Cappi), containing original artwork by artist Roberta Guardascione, here also at her writing debut. The "lost book from the movie Deep Red" is published by Luigi Cozzi (also author of one of the short stories) through his publishing brand Profondo Rosso and will be available since mid-March 2025 at the famous Profondo Rosso Store in Rome in via dei Gracchi, 260 (which is also the home of the Dario Argento Horror Museum) and later all over Italy and in online bookshops. Before explaining what kind of book this is, let's look at where it comes from.
Like Argento's previous movies, Deep Red is the story of a killing spree aimed to hide a secret, which the main characters are forced to investigate if they want to survive. The film is set in a fictional Rome - actually made up with bits of Turin, Perugia and Rome itself - and starts with a public lecture during which German psychic Helga Ulmann (Macha Méril) suddenly feels a murderous presence in the audience. The same night Helga is killed near the window of her apartment.
British jazz pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings), who lives in the same building, witnesses the murder from the street and runs into the victim's apartment, too late. His friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), also a jazz pianist, who was with him in the street, is too drunk to be of help, But Daly, after having been threatened at his home by the killer, finds himself on the trail along with crime journalist Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi, who after filming started a long relationship with the director and later gave birth to actress Asia Argento).
More victims are brutally killed, including non-fiction writer Amanda Righetti (Giuliana Calandra), whose book Ghosts of Today and Dark Legends of Modern Age (in Italian: Fantasmi di oggi e leggende nere dell'età moderna) gave Daly a few clues on a previous unsolved mystery that seems to be connected to the killing spree through an old children song and an abandoned villa. Everything is explained in the end, during the final confrontation between Daly and the killer.
Almost everything, because there's a few little mysteries left. Where does the strange puppet used by the killer to attack professor Giordani (Glauco Mauri) come from? Why is the mysterious villa called "the villa of the shrieking kid"? And why is Amanda Righetti - whose book was originally published in 1956 and doesn't seem to contain compromising information about the killer - murdered almost 20 years later, in 1975? All of this is explained at last in our book.
In the movie we can see the cover of Fantasmi, its index and the first pages of the chapter about the mysterious villa. Everything is so detailed that you might think the book - published in 1956 by Sgra in Perugia, Italy - really existed. It's just a "pseudobiblion", a book that is quoted and mentioned, though it never really existed. But what if we could write it?
The idea came to writer-editor Mario Gazzola, author a couple of years ago of Hyde in Time, a book containing the fake (but rumoured) first draft of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and two (also fake) sequels by two descendants of the writer, all illustrated by - apparently - three different artists... all of them actually Roberta Guardascione, working in three different styles.
Since I'm a writer and an editor as well, Mario suggested we might call in a few fellow mystery-thriller-horror authors to write the ten chapters listed in the index, each apparently a "non fiction story" written by Amanda Righetti about a supposed "real Italian mystery". We assembled the group, but while we were working on Amanda Righetti's fictional biography, something surprising happened: we discovered her life.
In 1956 Amanda published the first edition of Fantasmi, based on her university dissertation, from which she had omitted a few personal details that might have seemed too strange to her professors. Then she became a well known "paranormal reporter" and went on investigating mysteries, including some she had already dealt with in the book... and, also, some that regarded her. Including her interest for the works by Regina Calamai, a maudit artist of the early 20th century, some of which - The Black Paintings - had been collected by Helga Ulmann. That's why, around 1974, Amanda decided to work on a new edition of Fantasmi, with all the material she had left out in 1956 and her later discoveries, including an eleventh chapter, all illustrated with The Black Paintings. But, just a few days before going in print, she was murdered and the publisher decided to shelf her new book, which remained unknown for fifty years...
So our Fantasmi "by Amanda Righetti, new edition edited by Mario Gazzola and Andrea Carlo Cappi" is at the same time a collection of eleven short stand-alone stories (by Claudio Bovino, Andrea Carlo Cappi, Luigi Cozzi, Paolo Di Orazio, Mario Gazzola, Roberta Guardascione, Enrico Luceri, Gian Luca Margheriti, Claudia Salvatori and Giada Trebeschi), a novel about Amanda Righetti (by Cappi, Gazzola & Guardascione) and a selection of Regina Calamai's The Black Paintings (by Roberta Guardascione; one of them above).
It's up to readers to discover the connections among the stories, the untold secrets of Deep Red, the hints to the whole film universe by Dario Argento (including Suspiria or Inferno) and the details hidden in the anamorphic pictures, that can be discovered by looking at the book upside down.
Fantasmi di oggi e leggende nere dell'età moderna (214 pages, 19.00 euros, published by Profondo Rosso) is available since mid-March at the Profondo Rosso Store and website, and since April also in online and physical bookshops.
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