Her only ally is paraplegic entymologist Dr John Macgregor (Donald Pleasence) whose expertise in insect behaviour is assisting the otherwise clueless police in their search for the killer. During one of her nocturnal wanderings, she witnesses the murder of another young girl but is unable to convince her sinister tutors of what she’s seen. Her unexplained sleepwalking doesn’t help much and the revelation that she enjoys telepathic communion with insects (Argento maintains that his research in this field has revealed that the phenomena is more common than we might expect…) more or less seals her fate. And she wasn’t the first victim as Jennifer soon discovers – other girls have gone missing from the school in the past, their decapitated bodies littering the countryside.īut Jennifer has other problems to contend with – the other girls (like the students of the Tanzakademie in Suspiria) are a bitchy lot and our heroine is the butt of their taunts and cruel jokes. Before her arrival, a young student (Argento’s elder daughter, Fiore) has been murdered in spectacular style by a subhuman creature that escapes its chains in a remote villa, stabs her in the hand with a pair of scissors, tries to strangle her and eventually pushes her backwards (in slow motion yet) through a plate glass window.
Like Suzy Banyon before her, Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly) is a young American immersed in a hostile world of European academia, enrolled by her actor father (“the great Paul Corvino”) in the prestigious Richard Wagner academy in a region ominously known as “the Swiss Transylvania”.
#Argento phenomena serial
Like that film it features a maniacal serial killer, but instead of the “hyper realism” (Argento’s words) of Tenebre, Phenomenon marks a return of sorts to the paranormal milieu of Suspiria and Inferno. In retrospect, this disapproval seems unjust for although Phenomena is a damn silly film, it’s also entirely consistent with Argento’s then current preoccupations and was, in many ways, a logical if rather hard to swallow extension of the work he’d begun with Tenebre. At the time of its release, Phenomena was greeted with a rousing chorus of disapproval, even from Argento’s most die hard supporters.
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