While this month’s action-horror-comedy They Will Kill You 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’s Hollywood debut—which, to be honest, skimps on showing its audience the various themed floors of its sin-based establishment—it 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’s most arresting ideas, Dario Argento’s 1980 head trip Inferno engulfs those who view it in its hallucinogenic flames.
The second entry in the giallo master’s Three Mothers trilogy, Inferno takes place in what Keith Phipps described as “a suspiciously Italian-looking version of New York City,” 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.
If They Will Kill You brings the “everyone is 12” theory of modern life to cinema—where 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—Inferno tackles similar material using the far more engaging “everyone is a very strange Italian” approach. The film is a glob of raw imagination, scooped out of Argento’s psyche with a metaphysical melon baller. Though loosely inspired by Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria De Profundis (as was Argento’s better-known Suspiria and lesser-known 2007 Mother Of Tears), it’s how this opiate-addled text is filtered through the filmmaker’s predilections that make it so tantalizing. De Quincey wasn’t 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).
All of this contributes to an atmosphere not just of dread or tension, but of something truly malevolent. There’s 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’s 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—only 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’s building. Or maybe this is just Argento’s way of warning his audience not to trust anyone on the mean streets of NYC.
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’s film applies action-movie air vent logic to these spaces, as well as an ambulatory eyeball that’s easily the best part of the movie, Argento makes them into architectural veins that pump Mark to the witchy heart of the building. Inferno‘s crawlspaces are also lit like a haunted nightclub, the debris cast in reds and blues and soundtracked to Keith Emerson’s 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.
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-’em-ups, while Inferno followed up on the surprising success of Suspiria. But if you’re comparing them on Zillow, it’s 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—of meddling with things beyond comprehension, where you’re fully out of your depth—to be anything more than another John Wick riff.