Fear: The Autobiography of Dario Argento
Published by FAB Press, 2019. 288 pages.
By Dario Argento

No matter what you have to say about Dario Argento, he is a powerful voice in cinema, with a staggering amount of pictures that will be discussed at length, at movie conventions and film schools alike, for many years to come. So when news of his autobiography, which was first published in Italy in 2014, was going to see its first English version thanks to FAB Press, I immediately pre-ordered a copy.

Autobiographies can be a bit tricky, especially coming from someone as high up as Argento is. Sometimes they can be very self-indulgent, filled with self-praise, or even though while entertaining, you question the legitimacy of some, if not all of the stories. So I went into this volume with a slight trepidation as to what I was going to get. What I did get was something that felt completely honest and written from the heart. If there is one thing that is filled within each and every page, it is passion. Even in the opening chapter, when he touches on his thoughts of suicide, you can tell he is not holding back with his stories.

It doesn’t take long to see just how much of a real cinephile Argento is, really putting him in the same category as most of us. He quickly points out how much of an effect cinema had on him, stating “Sitting on a seat and being completely immersed in the dark, watching the images on the big screen, was an emotional experience that felt like nothing else to me. It was if I had dived into a magic dimension: I lived for going to the cinema. It became a ritual. Going to the cinema was like entering a sacred place.”

Sure, there will always be those arguments on the quality of his films, especially when discussing the ones of the more recent years. But the one thing that I have to give him so much credit for is that he continues to make the films the way he wants to. He doesn’t care what people want, or what might be the right way to do something. His fight to have his vision on the screen, no matter what…no matter if it made sense or not, it was his vision that he wanted. For that, I applaud him.

He does seem to go into more details on his earlier films, discussing less and less with each new film. I guess that would be my only complaint, wanting to hear more about some of these later day projects, like the Demons films, or the films he produced for Soavi, but this is a minor complaint.

The limited edition hardcover was released last month by FAB Press with a regular paperback edition coming out Feb. in 2020, priced at $30. I couldn’t recommend this book enough. I pretty much tore through it inside of a week once I started. A very easy read, full of great stories, and getting to hear how some of my favorite films got started.

Let me end this review with another quote from Argento that I think really sums up a lot of us film lovers, and shows how truly passionate he is as well.

“Cinema was a need I didn’t know I had, and this need remains within me, as strong as ever. Without cinema my world seems empty, people seem empty. I will stop making films when I have nothing more to say, but that moment is still far away.”