A common point made about Argento's movies is that he eroticizes murder. It's a point that could probably be made about most horror films, even ignoring the fact that many seem to revolve around men who are obsessed with plunging sharp deadly objects into the bodies of, mostly young, women. Not surprising, then, that like most masters of horror Argento has been accused of being a misogynist.

In many Argento films it is frustrated desire that leads to a murder which can, without much difficulty, be equated with sexual climax and fulfillment. But Jenifer inverts Argento's usual paradigm. Here it is violence, or horror, that leads to desire. In fact, it doesn't seem to matter whether desire leads to horror or whether horror leads to desire in Argento's films as the conceptual centre of Argento's films, and Jenifer shows this with particular clarity, doesn't lie in a statement of causality, but rather in a statement concerning the duality of the innocent and the monstrous, of beauty and beast. Thus, the caring mother who is a murderer, the beautiful girl who is a monster, are characteristic Argentoesque character constructions. Argento himself seems both fascinated by and fearful of this duality. His filming style could be summed up as a process of aestheticizing the terrible act of massacre at the very same moment that it registers and recoils from its horror. And all this seems to suggest that the charge of eroticizing murder is far too tame for Argento. He seems to have travelled over a border and to inhabit far darker psychological territory. And in the final analysis, I think it is the psychological, and not the erotic element in Argento, that makes his horror so deeply disturbing and so successful. It is the ability of something to suddenly turn into its opposite – an experience that most people have only in dreams – that threatens and horrifies in an Argento film. It is a threat whose realization both undermines our faith in our own rational judgments and is typically used by Argento to turn his narratives in inexplicable, irrational and unexpected directions.

Jenifer follows what we could call an Argento circle: it returns in the last scene to the same point that it launched forth from in the first scene, and this circular return creates the feeling of a dream, or better still of a nightmare, that continually replays and repeats itself along old familiar terrible lines. Jenifer begins with a policeman shooting the man who is about to kill her and ends with that same policeman being shot by a hunter who comes upon him just as he is about to kill Jenifer. And the last word that both men utter to the person who shoots them is her name: "Jenifer". Indeed, she is both the cause as well as the object of their strange violent outbursts. She is the innocent-monster, the beautiful-beast, that inhabits the film's psyche. One way in which her duality is immediately made clear is through her appearance. Her face, which is at first partially hidden by her long blonde hair, is gnarled and deformed, her eyes are like two black pools, and one side of her mouth is pulled up in a permanent snarl revealing her sharp teeth, but her body, (as several characters in the film point out), is attractive and sexual. A deeper, more disturbing expression of her duality manifests itself in her behaviour which is simultaneously human and animal. Here's a scene. A nighttime interior. Jenifer has been brought home by the policeman while he tries to find a place for her to live. He and his wife are sleeping peacefully in their room. Jenifer is standing in the hallway. The family cat meows aggressively at her. Jenifer crouches, stares at the cat, and growls back. The cat, (an animal which seems as pervasive as violence and sexuality in Argento's films and seems always an object of hatred), turns tail and runs. In a later scene the family finds Jenifer locked in the bathroom. When they force the door open Jenifer is crouching over the cat which has been torn apart and is eating its insides raw. The innocence with which she holds up a handful of cat-insides for the policeman to eat underscores the duality of her character.

Although Jenifer does not stop with the family cat, but later cannibalizes a young child who befriends her, the film's horror is not essentially rooted in the audience's reaction to her cannibalism, but in the irrational fascination that the beautiful-beast Jenifer exerts on the policeman. Another scene. It's the night after the policeman has found Jenifer and shot her attacker. He lies in bed with his wife. As his wife begins to make love to him Argento intercuts images of the day's violence. At this point we have one of those strange shifts of direction that are so characteristic of Argento's work and equally, so suggestive of deeper psychological currents and their irrational, sometimes shocking, always-overwhelming, motive forces: instead of dousing the fire of his passion, the images of violence that return so vividly to the policeman's mind serve to inflame his desire. And the strangeness of this new direction is not lost on us because Argento's intercutting forces us to see, with considerable precision, what the policeman sees and exactly what aspects of the day's events are now inflaming his passions. In this scene the policeman is about to enter new psychological territory – the territory, it would seem, in which Argento himself stands when he creates his films. And from here on the increasingly intense sense that something is off-kilter is built by making us his companions as he moves further and further into a darkness that by the end of the film has, in fact, 'cannibalized' the policeman himself.

The manner in which a central protagonist is 'devoured by darkness' is so much a part of Argento's oeuvre that it is impossible not to make some comment on it. It seems to me that this devouring darkness or evil is a more deeply impressed, more pervasive, and a far more reliable identifying mark of Argento's work than any sexualized violence, or any supposed misogynistic tendencies. It seems that Argento's films arise from, to borrow a phrase from Jung, “gazing deep into the dark mirror”,(1) that they are narrativized projections of the “uncanny things that live in the depths of the psyche”(2). It is not difficult to see Jenifer as having been created out of the primal stuff of this “dark psyche”(3) as a living image of the primitive dangerous magnetic powers still latent in the unconscious strata of human nature just as it is not difficult to see the relation of Argento's protagonists to Jenifer who represents this darkness as the outward projection of an inner psychic drama which, (at least in Jung's understanding), is acted out again and again. There are, of course, quirks to Argento's projection: in Jung's writings the end point of this drama can be the emergence of a new psychic wholeness; in Argento's films the terrible and fascinating darkness always wins out and evil is always passed on.

Endnotes:

(1) p.11, C.J. Jung, The Collected Works. Volume 9, Part 1: Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd Edition, trans. from the German by R.F.C. Hull, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975)
(2) p.12, ibid.
(3) p.17, ibid.