George Hilton (All the Colors of the Dark) stars as Mainardi, an unhappily married man eager to break free from his wife Nora (Teresa Velasquez). One night while making a telephone call, Mainardi spies a most curious event: a shadowy figure (The Beyond’s Michel Antoine) dumping his car into a nearby lake. Instead of notifying the police, Mainardi boldly confronts the man and blackmails him into killing his wife, threatening that he will go to the police and turn Antoine in for murder if he doesn’t. Begrudgingly Antoine accepts, a monetary sum is offered, and the deal is done. Nora’s murder comes off admirably, albeit with one bit of ill luck: Antoine’s car-with Nora’s body secured in the trunk-is stolen by a thrill-seeking teenage couple, Laura and Luca (Lisa and the Devil’s Alessio Orano and Christina Galbo). This development provides the film a lasting conflict as the young unwitting couple is soon tangled in two murderous men’s unsavory games, climaxing in a fight to the death in an abandoned beach house between the murderer and the innocents.

Directed with panache by frequent Argento collaborator Luigi Cozzi, The Dark is Death’s Friend qualifies as one of the genre’s brightest representatives. The film succeeds on many grounds, but ranking at the top is its deviations from the giallo formula. Wherein most gialli coagulate shock and suspense scenes with long, boring police interrogation sequences, Cozzi’s film refreshingly all but drops this stipulation, resulting in a buoyant, energetic scare piece. Undoubtedly such sequences exist in the film, but they are handled so deftly that they suit their purpose (plot cohesion) admirably and succinctly. Another intriguing modification is the absolute omission of a mystery element, often the key characteristic in these films. From the film’s beginning to conclusion the viewer is always privy to the killer’s identity and no such red herrings or complications are in existence. Cozzi compensates for this exclusion by increasing the film’s sense of bitter irony and genuinely surprising twists. Because the viewer is acutely omniscient of the inner working of the killer and his identity, we the collective audience share Antoine’s dismay when his well-laid plan goes south and his car is unexpectedly stolen. The genre’s membrane is further permeated by the vacancy of other conventions such as the killer’s black gloves or other fetishistic garments. Antoine, like the film itself, plays by (and kills by) his own rules, as evidenced by his barehanded strangulation of Nora. Nora’s murder is so unorthodox and unusually fabricated that even the police detective (Eduardo Fajardo) remarks that it is quite strange. Finally, the film benefits from yet another omission: a protagonist doubling as a "do it yourself" amateur investigator. While this mechanic occasionally works and bears dramatic fruit (such as David Hemmings’ character in Argento’s Profondo Rosso) by engaging the viewer in the character’s difficulties and setbacks, it is often a source of unfortunate contrivance. Even a film as sound as Profondo Rosso suffers slightly because of this aforementioned device’s proclivity for contrivance and incredibility. In fact, Cozzi’s film has no true protagonist, an admirable feat that Cozzi pulls off quite well, for a variety of reasons.

Cozzi is able to maintain interest in a film bereft of a protagonist mainly because of his terrific sense of pacing and plotting; rarely does the film capitulate to idleness. Often the film oscillates between subplots: Laura and Luca’s forbidden romps with Antoine’s car, Antoine himself frantically searching for his car, and of course the ongoing investigation with Mainardi and Mainardi’s increasing tension as his plan continually snowballs to disaster. Cozzi deftly shifts between these narrative strands and lends a sense of continuity to them by suggesting that Laura and Luca’s single felony was the sole spark that caused the current destructive domino effect in the otherwise perfect crime. The narrative stitches are further sutured by an old convention of the thriller- the cat and mouse chase. Cozzi keeps things pulsing by constructing Antoine as a predator hunting his prey and then switching to the innocent couple ignorantly frolicking on the beach. Thus a cause-effect relationship bubbles up from the narrative, evidenced by Antoine’s increasing desperation and fear of being apprehended as the couple drives further and further away from his clutches.

The cat and mouse tactic is only one source of tension in the film. There are some wonderfully suspenseful sequences in the film, most notably Laura’s uneasy exploration of the decrepit beach house’s bowels while her boyfriend is gone. In this sequence Cozzi flexes his directorial skills, evidenced in a remarkable lighting set-up where an already frightened Laura encounters the unsettling sight of a collection of human skulls and taxidermy. The sequence of Laura’s investigation of the old house is largely bereft of dialogue, allowing Cozzi to beautifully underline cinema’s inherent visual capabilities and the medium’s voyeuristic power. Interestingly, the central role of the seaside house in the film recalls the Italian telefilm Il Vicino di Casa, directed by Cozzi and presented by Argento in 1973. Cozzi again displays visual fluidity during a lovemaking scene between Mainardi and Nora. Cinematographer Riccardo Pallotini treats the scene with fragmented kaleidoscopic imagery and melds it with Mainardi’s flashbacks of his immoral meeting with Antoine, suggesting his divided consciousness and his detachment from his wife. Another sparkling exercise in tension occurs immediately before Nora’s demise. Her nightly walk home is palpably tense as footsteps are heard behind her. Cozzi’s decision to let the proverbial cat out of the bag works well here because again the audience knows full well what will happen to her, and tension arises from the anticipation of the kill. This device is so successful, in fact, that the audience actually feels Antoine’s nervousness as he is about to kill. Thus the audience is, for at least one fleeting moment, in harmony with the film’s dark side and the killer’s psyche, a zenith rarely reached in the genre.

And indeed, the film is dark. In his exemplary giallo reference work Blood and Black Lace, Adrian Luther Smith makes a salient observation regarding the film: "Those who have only seen Luigi Cozzi’s entertaining but shallow sci-fi, fantasy and horror pics may find The Dark is Death’s Friend a genuine surprise…this downbeat thriller has a cynical tone." He is right. Nowhere else in the film is this central cynicism evident than in Laura’s rape scene. By portraying Laura as a naïve virgin, Cozzi grants the scene’s inherent unpleasantness with an increased intensity, no doubt largely due to casting the uniquely sinister Antoine as the killer and rapist. Laura’s violation is even more repellent because of Cozzi’s choice to juxtapose it with Luca’s breezy, sexual rendezvous with a cute blonde (Femi Benussi) he meets on the road. And even though the film may not have the superabundant amount of plasma as Landi’s or Argento’s later work, the scanty killings are indeed nasty. Antoine’s demise is a rebarbative stab in the gut, complete with a blood-splashed camera lens. Because of the dark nature of the film, jet-black humor figures into the film’s dark sentiment. One delicious morsel has Antoine brutally strangling Nora while the film plays tag with a sequence where Mainardi is laughing heartily at a party.

The black humor lends the film a certain Hitchockian atmosphere. The Hitchcock influence should come as no surprise, however, when one considers the film’s plot of two social aliens trading murders, which is the crux of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. The black irony peaks when Antoine’s car is returned to the scene of the crime and to Mainardi’s horror complete with Nora’s corpse! Mainardi hastily drives the car to the same lake from the beginning of the film and expeditiously attempts to dump the car in much the same fashion as Antoine. However, Cozzi shows the audience that crime doesn’t pay, and Mainardi is caught in the act by the authorities. The Hitchock influence continues when Cozzi decides to wink at the audience and manipulate the audience’s nerves. Such an instance occurs when Mainardi uses Antoine’s cigarette lighter in full view of the police inspector, which prompts some tension as the inspector realizes that the initials on the lighter aren’t Mainardi’s. Supplementing many similar scenes’ suspense is Nando de Luca’s excellent score. Although symptomatic of the period because of its wash of discordant guitar and experimental synthesizer, the score is tastefully applied at just the right moments, proving the old maxim of quality, not quantity.

But the greatest compliment paid to Cozzi is his close involvement with many aspects of the film. Cozzi wrote the screenplay, and it was he who constructed the film’s story. The dialogue is effective and tart and strong enough to prevent even the clumsiest of dubbing to corrode it. Through careful scriptwriting, pacing and innovation, Cozzi has avoided genre spoilage and produced a criterion not just in the gialli cycle, but in the entire realm of the suspense film and its offshoots.