It’s impressive how much Lee is able to convey rage and pain when the only parts of him that are visible are his eyes. It benefitted-as many Hammer productions did-from Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, with Lee playing the silent creature just as he had done previously in The Curse of Frankenstein. This new take felt very much like a precursor to the modern slasher movie. It’s fitting that it would be Nicolodi’s final film role (she would pass away in 2020), for what better way to exit a career than by working with your family, passing the torch from one Italian cinema stalwart to another.It was revived only four years later with Hammer’s The Mummy. While the finale isn’t as great as the first two in the trio of films, with this one set back by script issues and delayed multiple times, it’s a bit too campy, but it’s also a lot of fun. Asia gets the lead, playing a student named Sarah Mandy, who must fight to defeat a witch (it’s the last of Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy following Suspiria and Inferno). Now, mother, father, and daughter were all together. In previous years, Nicolodi had acted in a few films with her daughter, Asia Argento. Twenty year later, in 2007, Argento and Nicolodi would reunite one last time for Mother of Tears. While you’re not sure if Mira is going to make it to the end, it’s a jaw dropping surprise to watch her die so early and in such an awful fashion. It was a way to subvert expectations and go against what she had always done. Now she had the chance, based on her reputation, to play the shock value. She had played the final girl, she had played the victim, and she had even played the killer. Nicolodi plays Betty’s agent, Mira, and in a shocking moment, is shot dead by the killer in brutal fashion.
Two years after Nicolodi had ended her relationship with Dario Argento, she came back for 1987’s Opera, a Giallo about a killer who abducts an actress named Betty ( Cristina Marsillach) and forces her to watch him slay his victims. It’s one of her best and maybe the most fun, for this time, she got to play the killer.
Though her relationship with Argento was coming to an end, you would have never guessed it by the performance Nicolodi gave. In 1985, Argento and Nicolodi came back together for Phenomena, starring a fourteen-year-old Jennifer Connelly and Donald Pleasence. She is given very little to do, but still, it showed how integral she had become to Giallo and to Argento’s films, that even Nicolodi in a small role meant the world for how one of Argento’s films was perceived. It’s not much of a role and definitely not one of her most memorable.
Nicolodi did not write the screenplay and only agreed to a very small role, but when the original actress for Anne, the author’s assistant, exited the film, Nicolodi took over. She had already proved that besides being a scream queen, she could be a scream creator as well.Īrgento and Nicolodi collaborated again in 1982 for Tenebrae, another black gloved killer Giallo slasher, where someone, influenced by an American author’s book, goes on a murderous crime spree. Nicolodi was to be in the film as well, but an injury prevented her from appearing in nothing more than a cameo. With Nicolodi’s imagination and Argento’s ability to make the scariest film beautiful with his hypnotic use of vibrant colors, the duo created a film that broke through to American audiences, even leading to a well-received remake starring Dakota Johnson in 2018. Set in Germany, Suspiria tells the tale of an American student ( Jessica Harper) who travels to Europe to train at a dance academy that just so happens to be run by a coven of witches. Their collaboration would become Argento’s masterpiece. Much of the story idea and themes came from Nicolodi, as well as the ending, which was based on a dream she had. With Argento she co-wrote his next film, Suspiria. Two years after Deep Red in 1975, Nicolodi showed that she had another skill besides acting.
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