The house of the screaming child: ambivalence and the representation of children in 'Profondo Rosso' (Dario Argento 1975)

While broadly renowned for hyperactive visual spectacles of color and carnage over complex narratives, the plot of Dario Argento's Profondo rosso hinges upon an urban legend known as 'The House of the Screaming Child'. It concerns a derelict old house where the film's protagonist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings) is told, 'a strange thing happened. One night, a hunter woke up before dawn and heard a child singing in a shrill voice. Soon after, the voice stopped, and he heard shrieking, screams and weeping'. Throughout the film's investigation into a series of gruesome murders that provide the film's key visceral spectacles, the image of the traumatized 'screaming child' is a crucial motif. Argento's most admired giallo hinges on its construction of the child as evil even as it blurs its representation of children with the infantalization of eldery people as a method of misdirecting attention away from the identity of the killer. The mystery around which Profondo rosso's narrative is structured therefore relies on the conscious Othering of what we are calling 'non-adult' knowledge. As such, the ethical ambivalence of its representations of children and elderly people overlap in its structuring system of subterfuge and revelation. This paper explores Argento's ambivalent representations of children in Profondo rosso that deconstruct the mechanics underlying a number of assumptions about the ethical status of children in horror more broadly. Profondo rosso demonstrates the broader ambivalence of the giallo category in its ethical construction of childhood as it subverts and collapses these assumptions. The film offers three significant non-adult characters upon whom much of its narrative and thematic propulsion relies, despite the fact that the primary focus on the film is on the adult protagonist Marcus and his investigative quest. This paper explores the linkages and intersections that run across and beyond the privileged sphere of adult perception, flagging Profondo rosso not as a film that seeks to cast non-adults in a necessarily positive or negative light, but rather to destabilize the assumptions surrounding the dominance of adults as the site of normative subjectivity.