Tenebrae

Plot

Peter Neal, an American writer of violent horror and thriller novels, visits Italy to promote his latest book, Tenebrae. He is accompanied by his literary agent, Bullmer, and his assistant, Anne. Neal is unaware that his embittered ex-fiancée, Jane, has also followed him to Rome. Just before Neal arrives in Rome, Elsa, a young kleptomaniac, is murdered with a razor by an unseen assailant. The murderer sends Neal a letter informing him that his works have inspired him to go on a killing spree. Neal is soon contacted by Police Captain Germani – a fan of his novels – and his partner, Inspector Altieri.

More killings take place. Tilde, a lesbian journalist and friend of Neal's who nonetheless considers his novels sexist, is murdered at her home along with her lover Marion. Maria, the young daughter of the owner of Neal's hotel, is hacked to death with an axe after discovering the killer's lair. Neal notices that TV interviewer Cristiano Berti has an unusually intense interest in his work. That night, Neal and Bullmer's assistant, Gianni, go to watch Berti's house. Gianni approaches the home alone to get a better view and witnesses Berti getting hacked to death with an axe. However, Gianni is unable to see the murderer's face and returns to Neal, only to find the novelist unconscious on the lawn.

Germani discovers that Berti was obsessed with Neal's novels and believes the killings will stop now that Berti is dead. However, Bullmer, who is having an affair with Jane, is stabbed to death while waiting for his lover in a public square. Gianni is haunted by the thought that he missed the importance of something he saw at Berti's house. He returns to the house and suddenly remembers that he had heard Berti confessing to his attacker: "I killed them all, I killed them all!" Before Gianni can share this detail with anyone, he is strangled to death in the back seat of his car.

Jane sits at her kitchen table with a pistol when a figure leaps through her window and hacks her to death. Altieri arrives at the house and is killed with an axe to the back. Germani and Anne arrive soon afterward and confront the murderer, who is revealed to be Neal. Upon learning the details of Berti's sadistic murder spree, Neal recalled a previously repressed memory involving his murder of a girl who had sexually humiliated him when he was a youth in Rhode Island. The memory tormented Neal and inflamed his previously repressed lust for blood, driving him insane.

Analysis

Influences

According to the film historian and critic Bill Warren, Tenebrae is a typical example of the giallo film genre: "visually extremely stylish, with imaginative, sometimes stunning cinematography", it presents "mysterious, gruesome murders, often in picturesque locations; at the end, the identity of the murderer is disclosed in a scene destined to terrify and surprise." These narrative and visual strategies had been introduced years before Argento made his first thriller, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)—most critics point to Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) as the original giallo.

By the time Argento made Tenebrae, he had become the acknowledged master of the genre, to the point where he felt confident enough to be openly self-referential to his own past, referencing the "reckless driving humor" from The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971) and the hero from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The scene in which Veronica Lario's character, Jane, returns home directly references The Bird with the Crystal Plumage with its large sculpture in the entrance hallway.

Warren and Alan Jones cite a scene where a character is killed in a public square as evoking the work of Alfred Hitchcock; Thomas Rostock agrees that the editing of the sequence is in a Hitchcockian vein, while the lighting is more influenced by Michelangelo Antonioni. The film critic and author Maitland McDonagh argues that Argento's influences for Tenebrae were far broader than just his own films or previous Italian thrillers. She refers to the strong narrative in the film as an example of "the most paranoid excesses of film noir." McDonagh suggests that Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) ("in which a man convicted of murder on false evidence ... is in fact guilty of the murder") and Roy William Neill's Black Angel (1946) ("in which a man who tries to clear a murder suspect does so at the cost of learning that he himself is the killer") both use such a similar plot twist to Tenebrae that Argento may have used them as partial models for his story.

Kim Newman and Alan Jones suggest that the mysteries of Arthur Conan Doyle, Rex Stout and Agatha Christie were all obvious influences on Tenebrae, and there are many references to these authors throughout the film. One example is the use of a quote from Sherlock Holmes in Conan Doyle's novel The Sign of Four (1890): "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" A variation of this quote is delivered many times in Tenebrae. Another reference is the dog attack: as something of a non sequitur, the scene is thought by Newman to be a likely nod to Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–1902). Neal is seen to be reading this novel in an early scene. The imagery in the beach flashback references the American mystery film Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), especially the scene of Eva Robin's wearing white while kneeling in the sand, which is a direct reference to Elizabeth Taylor in that film.

Themes

Critics have identified various major themes in Tenebrae. In interviews conducted during the film's production, the usually somewhat reticent Argento offered his candid views on its thematic content. As biographer Maitland McDonagh noted in Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, "Argento has never been more articulate and/or analytical than he was on the subject of Tenebrae." Film scholar William Hope considers the film to be devoid of classical narrative progression and states that the characters "lack a narrative function or purpose, existing only to be killed in a spectacular fashion, their death hardly moving the narrative on at all. Traditional cause and effect are seemingly forgotten or actively ignored". According to James Gracey, author of a book about Argento's work, with Tenebrae Argento "explores some of his most reoccurring themes and preoccupations, such as Freudian psychology, sexual deviancy, repressed trauma, voyeurism, audience spectatorship, and the fetishisation of violence and death." Water is often associated visually with Neal. In almost all his scenes, his appearance is followed or accompanied by a shot of water. Later, this device is used repeatedly as a clue to the ultimate killer's identity – Neal himself.

According to Thomas Rostock, "Tenebrae" is filled with rhyming imagery that relates to the film's exploration of "the dual nature of [the] two active murderers" through doubles, inversions, reflections, and "re-reflections". Every major character has at least one double, and the theme extends to objects, locations, actions, and events – major and minor. The doubling or mirroring of incidents and objects includes telephone booths, aircraft, homeless men, otherwise-meaningless public brawls in the background, car accidents, typewriters (literally side-by-side), keys, handkerchiefs, hands caught in doors, and the characters themselves. Rostock cites several scenes where characters are set up in the frame with their doppelgängers – one such is the first meeting of Peter Neal and Anne with Detectives Germani and Altieri.

McDonagh notes that Argento emphasizes the doubling between Neal and Germani: "Germani ... is made to reflect Neal even as Neal appropriates his role as investigator ... the detective/writer and the writer/detective each belittles his other half, as though by being demeaned this inverted reflection could be made to go away." McDonagh also observes that, in what is arguably the film's most potent shock, Neal at one point really does make Germani "go away", virtually replacing him on screen "in a shot that is as schematically logical as it is logically outrageous." Earlier, Neal killed a woman who – to his and the audience's surprise – was not Anne, but Altieri. Tenebrae itself is split almost exactly into two parts. The first half belongs to the murders of Berti; the second to those of Neal. The two are set up as mirrors of one another. Berti's killings with a razor are clinical, with "lingering sexualized aggressiveness", whereas Neal's (with an axe) are crimes of passion committed for personal reasons or out of necessity; they are swift and to the point.

Production

Background

After completing Inferno (1980), the second in his planned Three Mothers trilogy of supernatural horror films, Argento was expected to move straight into production of its concluding chapter. The first in the trilogy, Suspiria (1977), had turned the director into what Alan Jones called "a horror superstar", but Inferno had proven a difficult follow-up. Argento had become unwell while writing the film, and his ill health continued into filming. In addition, Argento's relationship with Inferno's co-producer 20th Century Fox had soured the director on "Hollywood politics", so when Inferno was not well-received upon release, Argento put the Three Mothers trilogy on hold. Inferno also flopped commercially. According to James Gracey, Argento – under pressure and feeling "the need to once again defy expectations" – returned to the giallo genre and began work on Tenebrae. Argento later stated that he wanted to "put on film a gory roller-coaster ride packed with fast and furious murders" and that he "shouldn't resist what [his] hardcore audience wanted". He added that he had also become irritated that in the years since his last giallo so many other directors had made films derivative of his own genre-defining works.

Argento said that Tenebrae was directly influenced by two distressing incidents that occurred in 1980. On a break from filmmaking after Suspiria's surprise success, Argento was spending time in Los Angeles, where an obsessed fan telephoned him repeatedly, to talk about Suspiria's influence on him. According to Argento, the calls began pleasantly enough but before long became more insistent, eventually menacing. The fan claimed that he wanted "to harm Argento in a way that reflected how much the director's work had affected him", and that because the director had "ruined his life", he in turn wanted to ruin Argento's. Although no violence came of the threat, Argento said he found the experience understandably terrifying and felt unable to write. At the advice of his producers, Argento fled to the coastal city of Santa Monica, where he felt safe enough to resume writing. However, after a few weeks, the fan found Argento and resumed his calls, issuing more threats. The director decided to return to Italy. Argento felt the escalating nature of the fan's threats was "symptomatic of that city of broken dreams" with its "celebrity stalkers and senseless crime". The second incident occurred during Argento's stay at The Beverly Hilton, where a Japanese tourist was shot dead in the hotel lobby. Later hearing of a drive-by shooting outside a local cinema, Argento reflected on the senselessness of the killings: "To kill for nothing, that is the true horror of today... when that gesture has no meaning whatsoever it's completely repugnant, and that's the sort of atmosphere I wanted to put across in Tenebrae."

Casting

Argento reportedly offered the lead role of Peter Neal to Christopher Walken, but eventually, it went to Anthony Franciosa. Kim Newman felt that Franciosa's casting was fortunate, as he was capable of bringing more to the role than the script asked of him. He also believed that if Walken had been cast, it would have been more obvious that he was the killer. According to Jones and Daria Nicolodi, the relationship between Franciosa and Argento was a fractious one. In addition, Nicolodi and Argento were romantically involved at the time, but their relationship had suffered over a disputed story credit during the filming of Suspiria. Nicolodi therefore only agreed to a brief appearance in Tenebrae. By her own account, she originally asked for the small role of Jane McKerrow; which ultimately went to Veronica Lario. Nicolodi was, according to Alan Jones, cast as the woman on the beach in Neal's flashback. Conversely, Thomas Rostock states that Nicolodi was never intended for that role, only that of Jane. Transgender actress Eva Robin's was later hired to play the woman on the beach.

When the American actress hired to play Anne dropped out just before principal photography began, Argento convinced Nicolodi to take on the larger role. Nicolodi found Anne to have a different personality than her own, and much preferred the characters she had played for Argento previously, who she said had much more personality than Anne. She said the role required little energy or imagination, but she liked the novelty of playing neither killer nor victim. Newman and Alan Jones agreed that Nicolodi had very little character to play, as written. Newman added that this lack of character stretched to all the Italians in the film, and that only the American characters had discernible personalities. Nicolodi later claimed that although filming began well enough, Argento became angry when she and Franciosa bonded over playwright Tennessee Williams and their experience in theatre, leading the director to make sure their shared scenes "were an ordeal to endure". The charged atmosphere culminated with Argento reportedly telling Franciosa, "leave my woman alone!" Nicolodi said she channelled her frustrations with the situation into her character's last scene in the film, where Anne stands in the rain and screams repeatedly, continuing over the film's end credits. She had been directed to scream only a little, but knowing it was the last day of filming and her last scene to complete, Nicolodi screamed loudly and for a long time, much to Argento's and the crew's surprise. Nicolodi said the scene was her "cathartic release from the whole nightmare".

Although Tenebrae was an Italian production, most of the cast spoke their dialogue in English to increase the film's chances of success in the United States. For domestic audiences, the film was dubbed into Italian. The English-language dub retained Franciosa's, Saxon's, and Steiner's natural voices. However, Nicolodi's voice was dubbed by Theresa Russell, Giuliano Gemma's was dubbed by David Graham, and most of the female voices were dubbed by Adrienne Posta. Michele Soavi – frequent Argento collaborator, second assistant director on Tenebrae and later a noted director in his own right – acted alongside Robin's in the second flashback scene. Another of Argento's collaborators, Fulvio Mingozzi cameoed as a hotel porter. In common with several other Argento films, close-ups of the killer's gloved hands were Argento's own. In the film's Italian-language dub, Argento also provided the opening voice-over, reading aloud descriptions of murderous actions from Neal's fictitious novel, Tenebrae.

Filming

Filming began on 3 May 1982 and took 10 weeks; it was shot mostly on location in Rome. Kim Newman described the Rome of Tenebrae as unlike the one shown on TV and in films, with none of the usual historical landmarks. Newman and Alan Jones agreed that this was a deliberate choice made by Argento, as some of his previous films had utilized so much of recognisable Italy. Argento himself said he had wanted to show Italy was not just a museum piece; Newman said it was Argento's way of saying, "Rome is a vibrant city. It is modern." Most of Tenebrae's location shooting was carried out in Rome's EUR business and residential district. The first flashback scene was filmed at the Capocotta beach, south of the city near Ostia. The shoplifting scene was filmed on location at department store La Rinascente, off Piazza Fiume. Bullmer's death in a public square was shot at a shopping precinct called "Le Terrazze" in Rome's Casal Palocco residential neighbourhood. The scene in which Neal's landlord's daughter is killed was filmed outside the home of an architect – and friend of Argento – Sandro Petti, switching to studio shots for her initial entrance into the house and back to Petti's house for the confrontation with the killer. The scene where Neal boards his flight to Rome was filmed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

Giuseppe Bassan – a frequent Argento collaborator – was the film's production designer. The surroundings are given a bleached, "merciless" look, made from marble and stone façades, shiny metallic sculptures, with steel, water, and glass surfaces. Some of the homes – specifically those of the lesbian couple and the first killer – are "cold, austere, brutalist" slabs of granite, and many interior shots feature plain white backgrounds, with characters wearing pale-coloured clothes against them – better, Newman felt, to contrast the blood once the violence started. The studio-set scenes were filmed at Elios Studios, unlike Argento's previous films in Rome, which he had filmed at Incir De Paolis. He was not able to use Elios, as the director Michelangelo Antonioni, of whom he was a huge fan, was using the studio to film Identification of a Woman (1982) at the time. Tenebrae's special effects were supervised by Giovanni Corridori, who – with his brother Tonino – had a near-monopoly on special effects in the Italian film industry at the time. The scene in which Jane is hacked to death after having her arm cut off was filmed about eight times. Argento was not satisfied with any of the takes he had, which used a type of bicycle pump to spray fake blood from the "wound" across the white wall, so the director had Corridori place an explosive squib in the prosthetic arm – a solution which apparently satisfied Argento.

Title

Some European publicity materials for the film, including posters and lobby card sets, advertised the film as Tenebre, and the 1999 Anchor Bay DVD release uses that same title. However, on the print itself, during the opening credits, the title is clearly Tenebrae. In addition, the title of Neal's latest book in the film is shown in close-up as being Tenebrae. In a lengthy interview with Argento conducted by Martin Coxhead that appeared in two issues of Fangoria in 1983 and 1984, the title was always referred to as "Tenebrae". Early on in production, the film was referred to as Under the Eyes of the Assassin, which was later used as one of the poster taglines. In Japan, the film was released as Shadows ; in the United States, it was titled Unsane in its initial – heavily edited – incarnation.

Soundtrack

Goblin had provided the scores for two of Argento's previous films, Deep Red (1975) and Suspiria (1977), but the director had employed English composer Keith Emerson for his foray outside of the giallo subgenre, 1980's Inferno. Goblin had disbanded that year, but in 1982 Argento asked three of the band's former members – Claudio Simonetti, Fabio Pignatelli, and Massimo Morante – to work on Tenebrae. Owing to their history together, Simonetti felt it appropriate that Argento's return to giallo films should use the core members of Goblin. The resulting synth-driven score was credited to "Simonetti-Pignatelli-Morante", as Goblin's former drummer owned the rights to use the band's name.

Tenebrae's score is very different from those the band had produced for Argento previously. In the early 1980s, Simonetti experimented with dance music, and he opted for a more electronic sound for Tenebrae. Simonetti described the score as an electronica/rock hybrid, with the main theme including disco elements. So it would not be difficult to accommodate Argento's preference for long takes, Simonetti, Pignatelli, and Morante made sure to play each song for 3–4 minutes. Recording the score, Simonetti used the Roland Jupiter-8, Roland Vocoder Plus and Minimoog synthesizers, as well as a piano, electric piano, the Oberheim DMX drum machine, the Roland TR-808 drum machine, and Roland MC-4 music sequencer. Pignatelli played bass and fretless guitar, while Morante played electric and acoustic guitar.

While the soundtrack is not as well regarded as Goblin's earlier scores for Deep Red, Suspiria, or Dawn of the Dead (1978), Tim Lucas felt it "... so fused to the fabric of the picture that Tenebrae might be termed ... a giallo musicale; that is, a giallo in which the soundtrack transcends mere accompaniment to occupy the same plane as the action and characters." Writers David Kerekes and David Slater were also favorable to the score; writing that the film "bristles with arresting imagery and a cracking musical score from ex-members of Goblin". Simonetti felt the score was good, but that it was only a "medium"-level success. However, it did enjoy a second wave of popularity being remixed in clubs. The album has had multiple reissues in numerous countries since its original release in 1982 on the Italian Cinevox label. The album was also released by Waxwork Records on a double LP that included the complete score by Goblin in 2018.

Release

Original reception and censorship

Tenebrae had a wide theatrical release throughout Italy and mainland Europe, something Argento very much needed after having suffered major distribution problems with his previous film, Inferno. Released on 27 October 1982, Tenebrae saw modest success at the box office in Italy and Europe, but it did not perform as well as some of Argento's previous films. In Italy, Tenebrae had been released with a VM18 rating, meaning it could not be seen legally by persons under the age of eighteen. Argento had desired a VM14 rating, both to attract a younger audience and to increase the film's chances of commercial success. Tenebrae features scenes of female homosexuality; attitudes towards homosexuality in Italy were fairly conservative at the time, and Argento said he wanted to "recount this subject freely and in an open manner, without interference or being ashamed". The VM18 rating upset him, as he believed it was a result of the sexual diversity on display rather than the film's violence.

One of the film's most excessively violent scenes features the death of Neal's ex-wife, Jane (played by Veronica Lario). This scene suffered the most from cuts when the film was first released in Italy. The original scene featured Jane's arm being cut off at the elbow; blood sprays from the wound onto white walls until the character falls to the floor. After a back-and-forth between Argento and Italian censors (at the time, a panel of judges), the scene was first trimmed from showing an "immense" spray to a small one, then a smaller one still. For TV broadcasts, the scene was cut to insignificance in the 1990s, when Lario married future Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. According to Alan Jones, Berlusconi "did not want the public seeing [Lario] so explicitly murdered, even if it was in a film by his country's premier horror expert".. For a few years, it was impossible to legally see the film's uncensored version in Italy, as prints were withdrawn altogether. A later DVD release did become available, with the scene restored.

Averaging a murder every 10 minutes, Tenebrae ranks as one of Argento's most violent films. In the UK, the film was shorn of five seconds from the arm severing scene by the British Board of Film Classification before its theatrical release, on 19 May 1983. The advertising campaign for Tenebrae featured posters and a soundtrack sleeve depicting a woman with her throat cut, blood dripping from the wound. According to Jones, who worked for Tenebrae's distributor at the time, in the UK the posters had to be recalled after the London Underground refused to run them. New posters were issued, replacing the image of the wound and blood with a red ribbon. A similar change was made to the soundtrack sleeve.

Home media and "video nasty" list

Tenebrae has been released on home media in various versions across numerous territories. In 1983, when the VHS edition was released in the UK, it was cut by about four seconds. However, the film soon found itself included in a list of 39 so-called "video nasties" that were successfully prosecuted and banned from sale in UK video stores under the Video Recordings Act 1984. Deemed harmful to audiences, "video nasties" were strongly criticized for their violent content by the press, social commentators and various religious organizations. Speculating in 2011, Thomas Rostock said that the higher-than-usual murder count for an Argento film was partially responsible, while James Gracey believed it was perhaps "the highly sexualized presentation of its violent content". He went on to say, "Of all the titles placed on the video nasty list, Tenebrae is perhaps the most misunderstood and undeserving of the grimy status it gained through its association with the whole debacle." Kim Newman agreed that Tenebrae's reputation as a "video nasty" was unwarranted, saying that none of the on-screen deaths are as gory or lingering as those in Argento's previous films. He also believed Tenebrae would eventually be remembered on its own merits, rather than as part of the "video nasties" list. Nevertheless, the ban lasted until 1999, when Tenebrae was legally released on videotape with one second of footage removed in addition to the previously censored five (the BBFC-censored footage was uploaded as a video file, viewable on the distributors (Nouveax Pictures) website, in a clear signal of changing times). In 2003, the BBFC reclassified the film and passed it without any cuts. In Germany, the release was strongly cut, and reportedly seized by the authorities.

The film has since been released on DVD in the US, mostly uncut save for approximately twenty seconds of extraneous material. Tenebrae received an initial DVD release in March 1999 from Anchor Bay Entertainment, with a re-release in May 2008. The Anchor Bay release, though presented as "uncut" was not the fully restored version of the film. A German DVD release by Raptor was also missing about one-and-a-half seconds of material. In June 2011, Arrow Films issued a special edition on DVD, but although the image quality was far better than in previous DVD releases, this version was "heavily lambasted" for carrying a transfer of the film that had visible noise and "distorted audio". In 2013, Arrow released a Blu-ray edition that corrected the audio and video problems. Additional corrections were made to the transfer and released by Synapse Films in 2016, as a steelbook edition limited to 3000 copies. The Arrow & Synapse DVD and Blu-ray releases are "completely uncut".

Later reception

Tenebrae has since been regarded by many fans and critics as among Argento's best films, with some calling it his last great film. AllMovie refers to the film as "one of Dario Argento's best thrillers". In her 1994 book on the director, Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, Maitland McDonagh maintains that Tenebrae is "in many respects ... the finest film that Argento has ever made." Richard Dyer, writing for the Directory of World Cinema: Italy, describes the film as a "tease", one which is "perhaps the apotheosis of one of the core pleasures of detective fiction: being outwitted, wrong-footed, led up the garden path". Dyer believes that the degree of lighting used in the film is unsurpassed. Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine said that Tenebrae "is a riveting defense of auteur theory, ripe with self-reflexive discourse and various moral conflicts. It's both a riveting horror film and an architect's worst nightmare." Keith Phipps of The A.V. Club noted "... Argento makes some points about the intersection of art, reality, and personality, but the director's stunning trademark setpieces, presented here in a fully restored version, provide the real reason to watch." Almar Haflidason, in a review for BBC Online, opined, "Sadistically beautiful and viciously exciting, welcome to true terror with Dario Argento's shockingly relentless Tenebrae." Tim Lucas in Video Watchdog said, "Though it is in some ways as artificial and deliberate as a De Palma thriller, Tenebrae contains more likeable characters, believable relationships, and more emphasis on the erotic than can be found in any other Argento film." Gordon Sullivan of DVD Verdict wrote, "Tenebre is a straight-up giallo in the old-school tradition. It may have been filmed in 1982, but it comes straight out of the '70s tradition. We've got all the usual suspects, including a writer for a main character, lots of killer-cam point of view, some crazily over-the-top kills, and approximately seventy-two twists before all is revealed... For fans of Argento's earlier giallo, this is a must-see."

Not all the recent critical reaction to Tenebrae has been positive. Geoff Andrew of Time Out thought that the film was "unpleasant even by contemporary horror standards". John Kenneth Muir, author of Horror Films of the 1980s, considers the film to be far inferior to Suspiria, but acknowledges that it was so "unremittingly gory" that it justified its US title of "Unsane". John Wiley Martin, although evaluating the film as a "technically mesmeric" one, felt that thematically it was a "disappointingly retrograde step" for Argento. Christopher Null of Filmcritic.com called it a "gory but not particularly effective Argento horror flick." Gary Johnson, editor of Images, complained, "Not much of Tenebre makes much sense. The plot becomes little more than an excuse for Argento to stage the murder sequences. And these are some of the bloodiest murders of Argento's career." In 2004, Tim Lucas re-evaluated the film and found that some of his earlier enthusiasm had dimmed considerably, noting that, "Tenebre is beginning to suffer from the cheap 16 mm-like softness of Luciano Tovoli's cinematography, its sometimes over-storyboarded violence (the first two murders in particular look stilted), the many bewildering lapses in logic ... and the overdone performances of many of its female actors".

Legacy

Coming at the tail end of the giallo cycle, Tenebrae does not appear to have been as influential as Argento's earlier films. Douglas E. Winter, however, has commented that Tenebrae's Louma crane sequence has been stylistically influential, pointing to its use in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987). In addition, towards the end of the film, with Neal supposedly dead, the camera faces Detective Giermani directly. When he stoops to pick up some evidence from the floor, Neal is revealed to be standing behind him, their silhouettes having perfectly matched in the shot. Alan Jones cited Tenebrae as the first film to use this specific type of camera blocking, and believes it to have been copied and referenced deliberately by later filmmakers. One such example, discussed as an unacknowledged "steal" from Tenebrae, is De Palma's "surprise reveal" of John Lithgow standing behind a victim in Raising Cain (1992). Robert Zemeckis's What Lies Beneath (2000) also contains a similar moment, although Zemeckis has denied familiarity with Italian films.

The final death scene in Tenebrae – where Neal is accidentally impaled by a sculpture – is directly referenced in Kenneth Branagh's Hitchcockian murder mystery Dead Again (1991). Kim Newman maintains that Branagh's film imitates the sequence so entirely – with Derek Jacobi being pierced by the sculpture – that Branagh must have included the reference deliberately. The next moment, where Nicolodi screams repeatedly in the rain, was cited by Asia Argento (Nicolodi's daughter with Dario Argento) as the moment that inspired her to become an actress.