Dario Argento built a career on the idea that your eyes lie to you under stress. This episode traces the Italian director from his birth in Rome in 1940, with a pragmatic Sicilian producer father and a Brazilian fashion photographer mother, through his teenage years washing dishes in Paris, his stint as a genre-film columnist, and his surprising co-writing credit on Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. From there it follows his 1970 debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, the animal trilogy, and the 1975 giallo landmark Deep Red, including a breakdown of the famous mirror trick that hides the killer in plain sight.

The conversation then moves through Suspiria and the Three Mothers trilogy, Argento's recut of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead with a Goblin score, the troubled production of Opera, and his entangled collaborations w ...