Pop’s Cult Theater: Giallo Double Feature

Pop’s Cult Theater is here! Every month, we’ll be curating a double feature featuring flicks that are a little bit weird, a little bit different, and a whole lot of kickass.

For our March installment, we’re looking at two of the finest Giallo works by Italian horror master Dario Argento: The blood-curdling DEEP RED (aka PROFONDO ROSSO) and OPERA.

With DEEP RED, the evening’s first film, Argento perfected the classy, ultra-violent sub-genre that would come to be known as giallo—and also perfected playing audiences like a fiddle. Musician Marcus Daly (David Hemmings, Blow Up), looking up from the street below, witnesses the brutal axe murder of a woman in her apartment. Racing to the scene, Marcus just manages to miss the perpetrator… or does he? As he takes on the role of amateur sleuth, Marcus finds himself ensnared in a bizarre web of murder and mystery where nothing is what it seems. Aided by a spook-a-delic prog-rock score from regular Argento collaborators Goblin, Deep Red (aka Profondo Rosso and The Hatchet Murders) is a hallucinatory fever dream of a giallo punctuated by some of the most astonishing set-pieces the sub-genre has to offer. Presented in a beautiful 4K remaster of original 127 minute Italian version.

There’s nothing else like OPERA, our . After the artistic highs of TENEBRE and PHENEMONA, Dario Argento (SUSPIRIA) was on a mission to make the most accomplished giallo of his career. And that’s exactly what he did. OPERA follows Betty, the star of an avant-garde production of MACBETH, as she deals with a black-gloved maniac on a mutilation spree at the opera house. With its ultra-stylized photography, complex metaphors, and intense violence, OPERA is a brilliantly deranged spectacle—and the most breathtaking horror experience of 1987. Presented with a brand new 4K restoration from Severin Films.