{"id":554866,"date":"2026-03-30T20:53:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-30T20:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/554866\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T20:53:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T20:53:09","slug":"dario-argentos-inferno-traps-you-in-new-yorks-most-evil-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/554866\/","title":{"rendered":"Dario Argento’s Inferno traps you in New York’s most evil building"},"content":{"rendered":"

While this month\u2019s action-horror-comedy They Will Kill You<\/a> boasts a garish and gory onslaught of secondhand images during its fight scenes, the film also taps into an evocative setting that has made for even more effective genre storytelling in the past: A big evil building in New York City filled with murderous weirdos and demonic energy. Regardless of whether you were on the gleefully immature wavelength of Kirill Sokolov\u2019s Hollywood debut\u2014which, to be honest, skimps on showing its audience the various themed floors of its sin-based establishment\u2014it presents a great opportunity to check out one of the best and least predictable films that takes place in one of these killer high-rises. Drenched in the detailed yet indecipherable logic of a nightmare and filled with some of its filmmaker\u2019s most arresting ideas, Dario Argento\u2019s 1980 head trip Inferno engulfs those who view it in its hallucinogenic flames.<\/p>\n

The second entry in the giallo master\u2019s Three Mothers trilogy, Inferno takes place in what Keith Phipps described<\/a> as \u201ca suspiciously Italian-looking version of New York City,\u201d where a succession of characters are consumed by a building that an ancient tome describes as the headquarters of the powerful witch Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother Of Darkness. Like in They Will Kill You, the lead, Mark (Leigh McCloskey), willingly ventures into rent-controlled hell in search of his missing sister Rose (Irene Miracle), only instead of finding a population of masked stuntmen and over-the-top weaponry ripped from Newgrounds Flash games, he discovers a den of neo-Gothic depravity, countless angry cats, and Death incarnate.<\/p>\n

If They Will Kill You brings the \u201ceveryone is 12\u201d theory<\/a> of modern life to cinema\u2014where the plot elements, dialogue, and action sequences of an R-rated film attempt to appeal to the middle-schooler part of the brain that sounds like Beavis And Butt-Head\u2014Inferno tackles similar material using the far more engaging \u201ceveryone is a very strange Italian\u201d approach. The film is a glob of raw imagination, scooped out of Argento\u2019s psyche with a metaphysical melon baller. Though loosely inspired by Thomas De Quincey\u2019s Suspiria De Profundis (as was Argento\u2019s better-known Suspiria<\/a> and lesser-known 2007 Mother Of Tears<\/a>), it\u2019s how this opiate-addled text is filtered through the filmmaker\u2019s predilections that make it so tantalizing. De Quincey wasn\u2019t writing about flinging feral cats at innocent actresses, psychotic NYC hot dog vendors, a man strangled by his own electrolarynx, or sexy-scary musicology students (embodied here by Ania Pieroni and her incredible eyebrows).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

All of this contributes to an atmosphere not just of dread or tension, but of something truly malevolent. There\u2019s a PETA-provoking chaos in the cat-attack scene that captures the unpleasant realism of the violence. On the other end of the spectrum, it\u2019s completely absurd when a man being eaten alive by a tidal wave of rats in a Central Park pond (already a nasty idea) cries out for help\u2014only to be murdered by the nearby purveyor of franks who seemed to be his rescuer. The wienerslinger is entirely unrelated to the corrupted affairs of the evening, perhaps just momentarily infected with the evil emanating from everything that was once in Tenebrarum\u2019s building. Or maybe this is just Argento\u2019s way of warning his audience not to trust anyone on the mean streets of NYC.<\/p>\n

But even when their more specific notions align, Inferno offers a more satisfying take on the demonic landlord allegory of an NYC apartment building in the thrall of some otherworldly force. Besides a shared infatuation with fire, the other Inferno-like sequences of They Will Kill You involve cramped labyrinthine tunnels. While Sokolov\u2019s film applies action-movie air vent logic to these spaces, as well as an ambulatory eyeball that\u2019s easily the best part of the movie, Argento makes them into architectural veins that pump Mark to the witchy heart of the building. Inferno\u2018s crawlspaces are also lit like a haunted nightclub, the debris cast in reds and blues and soundtracked to Keith Emerson\u2019s operatic freakout score, because how else would Argento do it? And both films culminate in a confrontation, found either at the peak or in the bowels of their buildings, face-to-face with the otherworldly presence for whom these temples were built. They Will Kill You ascends to the roof for a martial-arts smackdown with a pig-headed demon, while Inferno goes deep into the cave-walled and inexplicably windswept dungeons to meet (and then flee) from a spooky skeleton.<\/p>\n

Sure, these films are going for different things. They Will Kill You rides on the coattails of all the other kill-the-rich Raid-like beat-\u2019em-ups, while Inferno followed up on the surprising success of Suspiria. But if you\u2019re comparing them on Zillow, it\u2019s the intangibles that set these evil apartment buildings apart. While an action film benefits from an air of possibility, the setting needs a sense of doom\u2014of meddling with things beyond comprehension, where you\u2019re fully out of your depth\u2014to be anything more than another John Wick riff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While this month\u2019s action-horror-comedy They Will Kill You boasts a garish and gory onslaught of secondhand images during…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":554867,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-554866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/554867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}