If sleep is a mimicry of death, then sleepwalking must be a mimicry of life after death.
Aside from her love of insects, Jennifer Corvino is a sleepwalker. So although Jennifer is one of only two characters spared from the uncanny valley effect of the film’s dubbing, she still provides plenty of uncanny moments. What’s familiar and even comforting to Jennifer-the bee in the taxi cab, the maggots on the sock, and the swarm of flies outside the school-are all frightening and unfamiliar to us in these contexts. So while the audience winces in disgust, Jennifer leans in for a closer look. But we remember this only after we’ve seen the maggots, a second after we’ve already recoiled. Any sane person’s response to an item crawling with maggots would be to scream or drop it, but Jennifer does neither of these because-of course-the maggots are her friends. Maggots and other insects continually form our understanding of the uncanny, like when Jennifer picks up an item of her roommate’s covered in them, but doesn’t react. It is practically a skull, so deeply decayed is its flesh, writhing with maggots, dead and yet teeming with life. Making it even more so is the head’s advanced state of decomposition. How strange and unfamiliar an ordinary head or any ordinary body part becomes out of the context of its body. So the familiar becomes unfamiliar once again: we saw the girl just moments ago, with her head on, and now here she is with it off. When Pleasence tears away the sheet covering the glass box containing the head, it’s one of the big reveal moments of the movie, as the audience realises that it belonged to the young girl we saw brutally murdered and decapitated in the opening scene.
John McGregor (Donald Pleasence), our other beacon of the real in this strange, uncanny world, who introduces us to our next example of the uncanny: a badly decomposed severed head. Their brief interactions exist in a kind of oasis of realism, making the scenes surrounding this oasis all the more unreal.Īnd it’s Dr. As a result, the scenes between them feel much more natural than scenes with other actors. We feel alienated, distant from what’s being said on screen because we’re that much more removed from it.īut Phenomena is unique among Argento’s films in that two of its stars are native English speakers: Jennifer Connelly and Donald Pleasence. The result is a strange, eerie disconnect, an unnameable coldness between speaker and what is spoken, and tangentially between actor and audience. We see the characters’ mouths moving, and we hear the sound coming from them, yet they never quite seem to match. This gives all of Argento’s movies an unintentional added layer of the uncanny. This is primarily because the cast and crew usually consisted of a mix of American and European actors, and having no common language between them, spoke whatever language they were most comfortable with during filming and had their lines dubbed over in English later. In nearly all of Argento’s movies, the dialogue has all been dubbed over.
#Jennifer connelly phenomena movie#
So what exactly makes this movie so uncanny? For starters, the dubbing.
This movie truly has it all: a mysterious killer, supernatural powers, murderous apes, and freaky mutant children. Giallos from this era exploded outward then imploded in on themselves like dying stars, each one crescendoing in wilder and more unbridled chaos than the one before. But with the genre’s waning popularity came the waxing of its absurdity. With the help of entomology professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasence), his elderly chimpanzee assistant Inga, and a swarm of insects, Jennifer sets out to discover the killer’s identity-before it’s too late.īy the 1980s, the popularity of the Giallo-a stylistic, often colorful Italian slasher- was beginning to wane.
The film stars Jennifer Connelly as Jennifer Corvino, a young woman with the ability to communicate with insects who arrives at an all-girls boarding school in Switzerland only to discover there’s a killer on the loose. And that’s exactly the feeling invoked by Dario Argento’s criminally underrated Phenomena (1985).Īs in Suspiria (1977) and Deep Red (1975) before it, Argento seamlessly blends supernatural elements into this 80s Giallo. It’s the feeling we get looking at dolls, masks, and mannequins-things that are almost familiar to us, but not quite. Sigmund Freud (I know, but bear with me) defines the uncanny as the strange, sinking feeling of the familiar suddenly becoming unfamiliar.
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