Steven Gambles

Director

Dario Argento, The Verdict, 3 August 2005

Director Dario Argento has outdone himself in a startling way in The Verdict, and it's still a surprise and a treat. It's like a prequel, one that started out dark and dangerous but ended up funny and brilliant. Argento's previous films, including the original trilogy, often lacked this kind of fun, but his sense of joy and respect for cinema comes through very clearly here. I couldn't stop thinking about this film throughout the shoot, even late in the day.

It's really hard to explain what one feels in a movie like The Verdict. It's literally a horror movie. That is, it's about murder, torture, death and the unexpected and unwelcome return of a returning zombie, who goes to sleep each day wrapped in a shroud. It was the only film we could make with Argento in preproduction, and we rehearsed relentlessly for a week at a time. We had many very long conversations with him and his wife Ronell. That in itself was the intense and demanding work that it was. We needed them to be understanding and supportive of this. We needed their approval, and we needed them to push us to the limit.

The film opens in an alley in Rome, a little south of the city. The killer was made up of an unidentifiable man in an old uniform, a top hat and a straw hat. The killer was originally an idea that Argento had for a bit—it was something to do with a cannibal, the supernatural, and the undead. The killer stalked the alley, sending men out of the building, back into the street. The final shot of the film is of a woman approaching the body, trying to lift it, and the old uniformed man with the top hat and straw hat reaching out, grabbing her about two feet off the ground and impossibly lifting her up. It's a huge effect that is left early in the film, which was because we needed to establish the killer quickly as the background, and that wasn't possible in a larger production. Then the scene had to be established first—which was also why it shows the killer being pulled apart. And then we had to do a sequence where a young woman who was the killer's lover, walked into a middle-aged business owner's office and disemboweled him.