Deep Red – Dario Argento, 1975

After her intervention, Helga gradually overcomes the psychic impact she has just suffered and tells her friend Giordani (one of the organizers) that she now knows who the person who has caused these vibrations is (“someone cruel and childish at the same time”), and that she is willing to write about the case. Someone has been listening to them, standing behind one of the theater columns. Shortly before, in the toilets, this person had put on some black leather gloves…

In the evening, at home, Helga is on the phone when there is a knock at her door. She goes to open the door but immediately perceives that it is an evil presence… The intruder knocks down the door and without a word begins to stab Helga with a large butcher’s knife.

At the same time, in the street, Mark meets his friend Carlo; the latter is quite drunk. They are both pianists; Mark is in a jazz orchestra and Carlo works in a nearby bar at night. At that moment he has just gone out to take one of his breaks. Suddenly the two of them hear a feminine scream of terror in the deserted square. A few moments later, when Carlo has re-entered the bar, Mark looks up and sees Helga in blood trying to look out of her window. The murderer from behind pushes her head against the glass, thus ending up killing her.

Mark knew her, because she was his neighbor. Helga lived in the same building as him. The English pianist runs to the victim’s floor finding the dead medium in the middle of a pool of blood. His attention is drawn to the macabre paintings hanging in the corridor of his house. Looking out of the same window from which Helga was trying to look, Mark sees a figure in a black raincoat fleeing the scene. When the police arrive, the commissioner begins to question Mark. The journalist Gianna, who is a friend of the pianist, also appears at the scene.

Several hours later, Mark returns home after giving a statement at the police station. In the square, next to the fountain, he meets Carlo again, now completely drunk. Mark continues to think about what happened that night, and confesses to his friend that he has the impression of having seen a painting entering the murdered woman’s apartment through the corridor, which has since disappeared… A painting that could be an important clue to the resolution of the case. Carlo is dissatisfied with his life, and gets drunk to try to escape his depressive crises.

The next day Helga’s burial takes place in a Jewish cemetery. Mark and Gianna come to see who is among the attendees. Among them is Giordani, the organizer of the congress. Mark is a little concerned because his photo now appears on the front page of the newspaper as one of the key witnesses in the case; the photo was taken by Gianna the night before at Helga’s house shortly after the crime. This could draw the killer to him.

Mark and Gianna decide to investigate the case together. They go to the theater and try to reconstruct with Giordani and other participants Helga’s intervention, who spoke during her trance of “a children’s song, a village and a lot of blood… a cruel and childish person at the same time…”.

There is no doubt that the psychopath, knowing he was discovered by the medium (“He has already killed and I feel he will do it again”), murdered her to prevent a dark secret from the past from coming to light.

Mark remembers that his friend Carlo was in the square, albeit quite drunk, when the killer in the black raincoat rushed out of the victim’s building. The pianist with a detective’s vocation goes to the house of the other less fortunate pianist. There is only his mother, a nice old lady with incipient signs of senile dementia, who had been an actress in her youth, and who after many detours informs Mark of her son’s whereabouts. Carlo is at a friend’s house, the mother gives him the address.

Mark now goes to the house of this Massimo, a friend of Carlo’s. When he gets there he finds out that this Massimo is a transvestite. Besides falling into alcoholism, the tormented Carlo also seems to have homosexual inclinations. His psychological state is becoming more and more worrying, he is drinking unrestrainedly and his depressive crises harass him more intensely than usual. In that state, there is little he can do to help Mark in clearing up the case.

Mark becomes obsessed with the memory of that painting that he is convinced he saw when he entered Helga’s apartment, and that later was no longer there. At night in his house, while he rehearses on the keyboard of his piano, he hears a little children’s song and steps inside his house… He quickly closes the door of his living room and hears a sinister voice from beyond the grave telling him that “You can’t run away, I’ll kill you sooner or later. Later, when the intruder leaves, he sees through the window the same figure in a black raincoat and hat that he saw on the night of Helga’s murder.

After telling what happened to Gianna and Giordani, another interested in parapsychological themes and friend of the second one recommends him to read a book where the strange case of a children’s song and a villa was mentioned. Mark goes to the public library, finding a compilation of legends and recent supernatural events. The story that interests him most is “The Village of the Screaming Child”. Mark tears out the page from the book where a photograph of the mansion appears and sets out to contact the author of the book, one Amanda Righetti. The pianist-detective asks Gianna to locate her.

In the meantime, Amanda Righetti receives another visit… Someone has been hanging dolls from the ceiling as if they were being executed. When the writer tries to turn on the light, she realizes that the electricity has been cut off. There is someone else inside her house… Someone wearing black leather gloves, who is getting dangerously close to the frightened woman… The same nursery rhyme starts playing again.

By the time Mark arrives it is too late: Amanda has been killed too. She has been drowned by repeatedly dipping her head into the boiling water of the bathtub. But before her death she had had time to write something on the steam on the glass wall. Mark doesn’t realize this, but the next one to arrive is the paranormal researcher Giordani. Making the bathroom steamy again, Giordani comes to read what the dead woman had written with her finger.

Mark initially fears that the police will now suspect him, as the writer was killed shortly before the date they had both agreed on. This motivates him even more to find the killer. He continues his investigations and through a very rare plant that appears in the photograph of the villa he finally manages to find the abandoned mansion…

Mark is accompanied to the villa’s doors by a disturbing redheaded girl, daughter of the caretaker of the property, who tells him to “be careful” – for the villa seems to be cursed, full of ghostly presences. Mark ignores her and goes inside to investigate…