While Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof was inspired by '70s car chase movies like Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, it also drew heavily from a Dario Argento Italian horror movie. Death Proof was a love letter to the "all or nothing days" of practical special effects and dangerous car stunts. Kurt Russel's villainous Stuntman Mike pines for the days in which "real cars smashed into real cars," taking his love for old Hollywood to a deadly extreme. Death Proof was described as a slasher movie in which the killer uses a car instead of a machete, but the film's horror influences are easy to miss.

Quentin Tarantino is a fan of horror, and he has dabbled in the genre on more than one occasion, writing the Robert Rodriguez-directed From Dusk Till Dawn and putting a The Thing-inspired flavor on The Hateful Eight. However, Death Proof might be his only movie that has been specifically labeled by Tarantino as horror. The film played as a part of Grindhouse with Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror and was meant to be a sendup of low-budget B-movies of the '70s, delivering on the thrills that those films often did not. To accomplish the grubby feeling of a grindhouse film, Tarantino turned to many films for inspiration.

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The theatrical cut of Death Proof leaves out some references to Italian horror, but the extended cut released on home video draws a direct line to Italian horror director Dario Argento's The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. In an extended sequence, Stuntman Mike stalks his next victims, a group of women working on a film in the area. He takes voyeuristic pictures of them while a song from Plumage plays on the soundtrack, paralleling the opening scene of Argento's film. This eerie and ethereal song helps give the film a creepy atmosphere and shows how obsessed Stuntman Mike is with his victims. There is even a brief Giallo-style inclusion of authorities played by Michael and James Parks trying to unravel the mystery, which is a staple of Argento's work.

How Death Proof Honors Dario Argento's Filming Style

Kurt Russell in his car in Death Proof.

The weathered visual elements of Death Proof also mirror the style of Dario Argento's early films. The majority of the film has naturalistic lighting and color grading thanks to Tarantino taking on the responsibilities of being his own director of photography, giving the film an appropriately grimy '70s vibe. In the extended cut, there is a black and white sequence that jarringly turns to color. The colors in this scene are vibrant and saturated, bringing to mind the bold colors of Argento's Suspiria.

On the surface, Death Proof was seemingly horror-adjacent, as it's mostly inspired by car chase movies of the '70s. However, Tarantino put some undeniable horror movie touches on the film. Old Hollywood-obsessed Stuntman Mike is one of the most sinister characters Tarantino has created, and the extended cut of the film fleshes him out as a fragile, unpredictable villain who would fit right in an Argento film. The theatrical version of the film kept some of the scary atmosphere, but the extended version solidified it as a horror film only Tarantino could make, with heavy references to the horror movies of Dario Argento mixed with the thrills of '70s exploitation.

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