Inside Dario Argento’s dungeon-like museum of horror memorabilia, Profondo Rosso

In 1989, Italian horror maestro Dario Argento founded his own horror memorabilia shop and museum, Profondo Rosso. Named after his brilliant 1975 film starring David Hemmings, the shop is an unusual cross between a Forbidden Planet emporium, a battered copy of the Fortean Times and a gloriously lurid giallo film. Situated in Rome on the luscious Via Dei Gracchi – appropriately just around the corner from a statue commemorating another great of Italian cinema, Totò – Profondo Rosso has drawn film fans for more than three decades.

I first learned of Profondo Rosso when Mark Gatiss visited it in his 2012 BBC documentary Horror Europa. Gatiss described walking around its dungeon-like museum as feeling “a bit like walking around inside Dario’s head”. But I forgot all about it until it was mentioned in passing over a decade later at a dinner held at the Italian Embassy in honour of Argento, coinciding with his 2023 season at BFI Southbank.

Argento was held in awe at this dinner, and I remember the guests waiting for the elderly director to move into the lounge after the meal before anyone else dared follow. Guests such as Edgar Wright, Peter Capaldi and Alice Lowe watched as the director slowly walked out of the room before sitting himself on the embassy couch with the ambassador and lighting up a cigarette next to a priceless painting. A fellow guest mentioned the Profondo Rosso museum and recommended I visit if ever I was in Rome. And so I did.

Even from the outside, Profondo Rosso seems an unusual place. Its bright red doors and windows stand out a mile on the street, setting the tone for the blood-red theme of the furnishings inside. Its windows showcase a range of items on offer, from artworks of Argento himself to masks, toys and rare horror comics. This barely covers the sheer range of unusual items for sale in the main shop, however. Profondo Rosso is also the base for the publishing venture of the same name. The shop is brimming with enjoyably specific monographs, mostly on Argento’s films as well as Italian genre cinema as a whole. There’s even a vast array of books on esoteric, forteana and conspiracies.

The shop’s specificity is what makes it so fun to look around. Putting aside its sideline in fancy dress costumes, its selection of memorabilia verges on the surreal. Shoppers can choose between thick wads of original film scores by Goblin, Dario Argento ashtrays, Suspiria t-shirts, a huge array of DVDs, and even a toby jug of the unforgettably creepy doll from Deep Red. It’s difficult to imagine any other director inspiring this amount of memorabilia – except perhaps one of Argento’s own favourites, Alfred Hitchcock.

When you first enter the shop, you’re greeted by photos of its manager, Luigi Cozzi, with an array of stars. Cozzi himself is no stranger to Italian genre cinema, having scripted Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), as well as directing numerous genre films, such as Starcrash (1978) and Contamination (1980). Sun-faded photos show Cozzi with everyone from Argento himself to Robert Bloch, Tim Burton and Alice Cooper – all previous customers.

But the shop is not the main draw. Down some suitably gothic spiral stairs is ‘Dario Argento’s Museum of Horrors’. Cozzi was manning the shop’s counter on my visit. It was early, so he had to switch on the power for the museum. Sounds of a thunderstorm sparked up from the basement, along with a typically creepy giallo-esque soundtrack.

The museum is built into some dungeon-like alcoves underneath the shop, all of which house a variety of objects: original posters, props and some incredibly random horror-inflected artefacts, all sprinkled with dismembered limbs. Next to an unnerving Sergio Stivaletti demon from Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985) sits a poster from Cozzi’s The Killer Must Kill Again (1975). The creepy child from Argento’s Phenomena (1985) is surrounded by props from the same film (the exhibit’s narration makes a point of highlighting the child’s bike from the film), while the severed torso of a woman seen in Argento’s George A. Romero collaboration Two Evil Eyes (1990) is the exhibition’s dénouement, alongside a whole torture cell dedicated to recreating Michele Soavi’s The Church (1989).

The back of another cell is dedicated to Argento’s Opera (1987), with a mock back-screen creating the impression that there’s an opera house situated just behind the gap in the brick wall. This is probably the Argento film that gets the most attention in the exhibition. In fact, when I interviewed him after the embassy dinner, he suggested this was really the film he is most proud of. “It’s an explosion of invention,” he told me, “many ideas and sensations and feelings all at once. It was a very hard job for me. I took many elements into Opera, and I really think that film is the one that absolutely needs to be seen on the big screen.”

As I headed back out into the sunlight, the shop and exhibition left me with a sense of the genuine affection for Argento’s work in Italy and internationally. But Profondo Rosso is also a surreal and entertaining testament to Italian genre cinema as a whole; a kind of loving postcard to the past and its artistically adventurous genre cinema. And yes, I did end up buying an Argento ashtray.