The crane, the cat and the housefly: Animals and meaning-making in Dario Argento’s Animal Trilogy

Abstract

Dario Argento’s L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) (1970), Il gatto a nove code (The Cat O’ Nine Tails) (1971) and 4 mosche di velluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet) (1971) comprised his Animal Trilogy. The films were not about animals, though they did play roles, and in Argento scholarship, animals are noted tangentially, but emphasis is always on the human. Meanwhile, anthrozoological film analyses usually examine movies with foregrounded animal protagonists. This article remedies those absences by making an anthrozoological analysis of Argento’s Animal Trilogy, demonstrating that Argento’s presentation of non-human animals is conflicted in the same way that the broader human relationship with animals is conflicted. Animals are both depicted realistically in the various forms of human contact with them and presented in bizarre, outsized ways fitting the pulp giallo form.