"When I go away on location, I have the [camera] operator give me the camera to keep in my room overnight."
Eagerly awaited by fans for a generation, Tears completes Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy that has taken him 31 years to complete, beginning with Suspiria (1977) and continuing with Inferno (1980).
Argento says the apocalyptic trilogy, in which a trio of demonic witches try to enter and lay waste to our dimension, was inspired by Thomas De Quincey's Suspiria de Profundis, in which the British author imagines that the three Graces who bring joy to humans in Greek mythology are countered by "three ladies of sorrow," who give birth to tragedy, rage and chaos.
The film stars Argento's daughter, Asia, 33, as Sarah Mandy, an American art history student in Rome who inadvertently helps the Mother of Tears escape from her tomb. In scenes inspired by Francisco Goya's famous prints of life in a mental asylum, Argento shows the descent of Rome into violence and chaos.
Argento says the long wait for Tears was not planned. "I spent five years altogether" on the first two films, he says, "and it was just too much for me." Soon, he said, he was engrossed in other projects.
Beginning with The Bird With the Crystal Plumage in 1970, Argento established himself as a master of the mystery/thriller subgenre known as giallo. (Italian for yellow, it refers to the genre's origins in a series of paperback potboilers with yellow covers.)
Dubbed by critics the "Italian Hitchcock," Argento directed such classics as The Cat o' Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (both from 1971). The 1975 masterpiece Deep Red, which stars David Hemmings and Argento's former long-term girlfriend, actress and writer Daria Nicolodi, is considered by film scholars to be the best giallo ever made.
In 1977 Argento turned to horror with the violent supernatural yarn Suspiria, which gave him an international following.
