Deep Red is a 1975 Italian giallo thriller directed by Dario Argento and starring David Hemmings as Marcus Daly, a jazz pianist who becomes obsessed with solving a brutal murder after witnessing the aftermath of the crime. As he digs deeper, the film unfolds into a hallucinatory mix of mystery, violence and psychological unease, with Argento pushing the giallo form toward something more stylised and nightmarish than a conventional whodunit. It is widely regarded as one of the defining films of the genre, and it was also the first major collaboration between Argento and Goblin, whose score became one of the film’s most famous elements.
Although the story is largely set in Rome, Deep Red was shot mainly in Turin, and the city is absolutely central to the film’s eerie identity. Argento chose Turin for its esoteric reputation, and the film uses its grand squares, theatres, churches and old villas to create a setting that feels elegant but deeply unsettling. Key locations include Teatro Carignano, used for the opening psychic sequence, Piazza C.L.N., one of the film’s most recognisable urban spaces, Santa Costanza Church, and Villa Scott in the Borgo Po district, which appears as the terrifying “House of the Screaming Child.” Additional scenes were also filmed in Rome and Perugia, but it is Turin that gives the film its strongest visual and emotional character, turning the city into something almost supernatural in its own right.
Piazza C.L.N.
Piazza C.L.N. in Turin is most famously known as a filming location for Dario Argento’s 1975 horror masterpiece Profondo Rosso (Deep Red).
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