I’ve posted before about my long-ago career as a child actor in Italian horror movies, Beyond the Door and its (completely unrelated) sequel Beyond the Door II, better known as Shock.
The late, elegant Daria Nicolodi — true Italian horror film royalty — played my mother in the second film (I well remember how sweet she was to me on set).
Well, Ms. Nicolodi’s longtime companion was the famed horror director Dario Argento (with whom she had the beautiful Asia Argento). Mr. Argento directed the cult classic “giallo” (thriller) film Profondo Rosso (Deep Red), set in Rome and starring Ms. Nicolodi.
Which takes me to a unique store in Rome also called Profondo Rosso. The store was opened by Mr. Argento, and it is run by Luigi Cozzi, Mr. Argento’s long time friend and collaborator. The store is packed full of all things giallo and horror — books, DVDs, and masks galore. (The word giallo is Italian for yellow, whose origin typically is understood to be based on the color of a series of detective books from the early 20th Century.)
But, it’s the evil in the basement we went to see, in the spirit of Halloween. Indeed, the store’s basement is a museum of horror with vignettes based on some of Mr. Argento’s films — such as Phenomena, Suspiria, Opera, and, of course, Profondo Rosso.
A recorded voice (in English for us) lead us through the tiny museum, past the various scenes of horror. The basement has no exit, by the way, so the only way out is to turn around in the small, dark, and creepy space and walk the gantlet again.
Since it was a couple days before Halloween, the store was full of people (as many as the covid related safety measures would allow) shopping for paraphernalia. The place was open primarily for the shopping, not the museum, but Letizia at the door acknowledged how far we’d come and graciously let us in for the horror show downstairs.
We were very grateful she did, because we had a wonderful time being terrorized!
The Spanish Steps Apartment on Via della Mercede 