Rome from New York to promote his new best-selling mystery novel, Tenebrae, only to be 
informed by the police that a copycat killer is bumping off Italian citizens with a straight razor in the same manner portrayed in the book. Among the victims are a shoplifter (House by the Cemetery's Ania Pieroni) and two lesbians (including Caligula's Mirella D'Angelo), but threatening letters also target Neal as the final corpse-to-be. Along with his secretary, Anne (Nicolodi, dubbed by Teresa Russell!), and a dogged police inspector (spaghetti western regular Gemma), Neal attempts to uncover the killer's identity as the bodies begin to pile up.
TV interviewer), Lara Wendel 
(from the notorious Maladolescenza) in one of the longest, craziest chase scenes in the Argento canon, and Christian Borromeo (House on the Edge of the Park) as an assistant playing amateur detective. 
from Luigi Cozzi's Dario Argento: Master of Horror. The reissue added a very substantial making-of featurette, "Voices of the Unsane" (17m13s), with Argento, Nicolodi, and Tovoli. The Sazuma disc boasts optional English subtitles for its Italian track and also cobbles together the missing fragments of footage as a supplement, while the French DVD offers the full cut (with non-removable subs) and the lackluster Nouveaux disc has been censored for violence. The Italian DVD offers the English track as well as the Italian one in Dolby Digital 5.1 or mono with optional English subtitles, a nice viewing option; colors are vivid (perhaps too much so) but detail is softened considerably by rampant noise reduction. If 
you watch the Italian version, stick with the mono track as the 5.1 version omits or muffles an alarming number of sound effects, most notably the screams during the T-shirt slashing. 
video piece about the film by Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds author Maitland McDonagh. 
along with the Goblin concert footage and English theatrical trailer. New and exclusive to this release is the 9-minute "John Steiner's Adventures in Italy," a hilarious companion piece of sorts to his featurette on the Caligula special edition in which he shares his wild acting stories ranging from prestigious stage work in London to crazed Nazisploitation films in Italy, with fun little bits about directors including Argento, Tinto Brass, Mario Bava, and Lucio Fulci. Sadly not English-friendly but really surprising is another new interview, the 9-minute "Girl on the Beach," with Robins covering her casting in her silent but pivotal (and ultimately iconic) role as well as brief mentions of other early films like Eva Man. The third exclusive featurette, the 9-minute "Assisting Tenebrae," is also Italian only (with Japanese subs) with Lamberto Bava cheerfully recounting his time working on the film just after Inferno and before he directing his own Tenebrae-inspired giallo, A Blade in the Dark. Finally "The Look of Tenebrae" (10 mins.), also in Italian with Japanese subs, features ace cinematographer Luciano Tovoli talking about how the film was intended to counter the established look of Argento's '70s gialli with a more bright, antiseptic, chilly look to support the bourgeois urban nightmare of its story. The disc closes out with the alternate English text opening and closing credits (but with Italian audio, weirdly enough) and the superb Japanese trailer under the title Shadow (beautifully cut to "Take Me Tonight"), sourced from the same VHS copy that made the rounds on the fan trading circuit back in the '80s.
of the English-language insert shots (some of them very rarely seen) in the film from a fresh HD scan as well. That means you can watch it with the opening and closing titles in English along with shots of the killer's threatening notes and other bits of text, such as the material Wendel discovers while looking through the killer's house. This footage looks great as well but features a slight bit of jittering, which is presumably why it isn't the main default option. 
audio commentary by McDonagh, who expands considerably on her piece from the prior DVD as she pulls apart the film's many themes, its manipulations of murder mystery conventions, its censorship history, and plenty more. It's great to hear her offer a long-form study of one of Argento's films at last, and it's easily up to the standard set by her book. The 89-minute Yellow Fever: The Rise and Fall of the Giallo takes a look at the beloved subgenre with participants including Argento, McDonagh, Luigi Cozzi, Umberto Lenzi, Ruggero Deodato, Barbara Bouchet (who has one of the best moments explaining why loves playing a "bitch"), Dardano Sacchetti, writers Kim Newman, Alan Jones, Shelagh Rowan-Legg and Mikel Koven, directors Richard Stanley and Bruno Forzani, and others talking about the early days inspired by mystery novels and films through the height of the craze with new titles pouring into theaters almost every week well into the late '70s. It's a pretty good primer for someone curious about the conventions and appeal of the films with quite a bit of context for their placement in the history of Italian cinema, with time given to some of the major highlights like Blood and Black Lace, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Torso, etc. It's very Argento-centric for the majority of the running time, however, so if you're trying to put together a viewing list, there are some more thorough film-by-film breakdowns out there. The familiar English trailer and the Japanese Shadow one (from the same VHS source) are here along with the alternate "Take Me Tonight" closing credits, a rougher alternate 35mm version of the English opening credits. Also included is a liner notes booklet featuring a new essay by The Argento Syndrome author Derek Botelho, plus the aforementioned detailed tech notes by Don May, Jr. and Vincent Periera. The track listing of the enclosed CD is identical to the two Cinevox releases in terms of both LP cues and bonus tracks.
In 2022, following the pattern of Phenomena, Synapse Films and Arrow Video debuted Tenebrae on UHD in the U.S. and U.K. respectively, with the 4K presentation and extras identical either way with only the company logos at the beginning changing out. The Synapse one was first a limited three-disc set with a couple of different packaging options, featuring two UHDs and a Blu-ray. The second UHD, only in the limited edition, 
features the U.S. Unsane edit, taken from the same superb 4K restoration as the main feature, with either the original soundtrack (complete with jarring cuts in the music) or a more seamless, smoothed-out audio option. That disc also features the stereo presentation of Wilde's "Take Me Tonight." The main UHD and Blu-ray, which are the same in the limited edition or the 2023 retail option, bring together the extras from previous Arrow and Synapse releases, and the film itself is a stunner with the option to view the English and Italian-language versions with the English footage now looking absolutely seamless and pristine as well. As usual, you get DTS-HD MA 2.0 English or Italian audio options with translated or SDH English subs. The Jones-Newman, McDonagh, and Rostock commentaries all accompany the feature, and Yellow Fever is repeated here, with the English opening and closing credits as extras along with many of the previous featurettes ("Voices of the Unsane," "Out of the Shadows," the Nicolodi intro, "Screaming Queen," "The Unsane World of Tenebrae," and "A Composition for Carnage"). A promotional section includes the English and Japanese trailer and six galleries including promotional materials (Italian German, Spanish, Japanese, U.S.) and miscellaneous images. In the newly edited "Being the Villain" (16m22s), an expanded version of the featurette from the Japanese release, Steiner (who sadly passed away in 2022) looks back at his entire career starting with his role in Marat/Sade and going through his Italian highlights including Argento and Bava. SYNAPSE (UHD)
ARROW (2015 Blu-ray)
ANCHOR BAY (2008 DVD)
