This is Dario Argento's directorial debut and with it, he pretty much put giallo movies on the map. That's how potent and influential this movie turned out to be. The premise is nothing special: an American writer in Rome sees a murder attempt but is helpless to try and stop it, and so gets entangled in the investigation to stop the murderer. The premise is not so important as how everything plays out.

From his first movie, Mr. Argento showed he was a master of both atmosphere and suspense. One scene goes to show how he crafts a simple murder. A girl walks home alone. She enters her building and looks up at the stairs. The triangular-shaped stairwell rises, floor after floor, into the darkness. She walks up the stairs, moving in and out of shadows created by the oddly-shaped stairwell. Her own shadow moves across the wall, with simple shots creating eerie suspense where other directors would use music and slick editing to help raise the heartbeat.

Instead of these things, Mr. Argento uses point of view shots, limiting what we can see, only seeing through characters' eyes. We know someone is following this poor woman, but when we see through her eyes, we don't know where he is, or even if he's still peering around trees and walls.

Mention has to go to cinematographer extraordinaire Vittorio Storaro, who paints a wonderful vision. Dario Argento is, firstly, a visual director, but this would be nothing without a great cinematographer capable of filming what the director desires. Mr. Storaro is up to the challenge and helps create a visual feast of a story. Every scene is framed the way it should be to create maximum impact. The critical scene with Suzy Kendall alone in her apartment shows how the cinematography is used to create incredible suspense. With a just of a few shots of Mrs. Kendall's face, a knife and a small hole in a door, my heart was pounding.

This scene is also helped out with the pitch-perfect music and the razor-sharp editing. The pacing in that scene is spot-on to create enough tension so that the release is a definite catharsis of all the pent-up energy. Ennio Morricone's wonderful (though slightly dated) score, with its unorthodox use of voices, and Franco Fraticelli's tight editing combine with Mr. Argento's assured directing to create a great cinematic experience so perfect I don't remember a scene so wonderfully executed. Remember, this is Mr. Argento's directorial debut.

The plot is simple but, as I've said, the style is more important. This movie is a murder story, steeped in suspense, with a side of thriller. The comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock (and the name Mr. Argento acquired as The Italian Hitchcock) are justified. At a time when the US was retching out disposable titles like 'Carnival of Blood', 'Daughter of Satan' and 'The Wizard of Gore', the master, Dario Argento, was making a classic of the genre like 'The Bird with the Crystal Plumage'.