It’s the film every Dario Argento fan has been waiting to see for over 25 years now. And LA TERZA MADRE/THE THIRD MOTHER (a.k.a. MOTHER OF TEARS; see more photos below), the highly anticipated completion of his supernatural trilogy begun by SUSPRIA and continued in INFERNO, finally went before the cameras late October on location in Rome and Turin. Based once more on Thomas De Quincey’s “Confessions of an Opium Eater” legend of three evil mothers, the Medusa Film stars Asia Argento (top photo below) as art restorer Sarah Mandy, who must stop the violent havoc caused when the cruel Mother of Tears is revived by demonic blood sacrifice.

At the Andezeno cemetery location, where the urn containing the Mother of Tears’ ashes is discovered, Dario answers the burning question: Why now, after all these years? “Because my fantasies have never been freer than in the past four years of my thinking about the second sequel,” he says. “I had a great experience on the MASTERS OF HORROR series [for which he helmed the first season’s JENIFER and this year’s PELTS]. They let me do whatever I wanted, and that creative freedom allowed my imagination to bubble over like sparkling champagne. I rediscovered the fury in my soul, the feelings I had as a young man directing SUSPIRIA. That drive, my dreams and a stream of obscene consciousness led me to visualize a modern fairy tale for our confusing times, full of sadomasochistic sex and shocking violence.”

It was also thanks to MASTERS OF HORROR that Dario encountered TOOLBOX MURDERS writers Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch (second photo below, with MOTHER co-star Coralina Cataldi Tassoni at right), whom he brought on to marshal his outrageous ideas into script form. “A friend was assistant editor on the series,” Gierasch recalls, “so I angled a meet with Dario to get some stuff signed. We walked into the editing suite and the first thing Dario said was, ‘I’m trying to find writers for THE THIRD MOTHER—interested?’ ”

Anderson adds, “We couldn’t believe what had just happened. So we returned the next day with a script sample, and before we knew it we were living in Rome visiting locations. ‘You are my slaves—write, write,’ he’d say. It was important to Dario that the script connected to SUSPIRIA and INFERNO in meaningful ways, and we helped him achieve that.”

Asia, who has become a director in her own right, was so impressed by the script she asked her father for a role in it. “I was shattered after working two years nonstop,” she explains. “But there was no way I was going to miss being a part of my family, and Italian horror-movie, history. I don’t believe the script could be any better, going further into dark, surrealistic horror than Dario ever has before. One scene I know will cause major ratings headaches! The expectation for this is enormous, but fans won’t be let down by what is a brilliant and worthy sequel.” Look for a MOTHER lode of further coverage on this site and in FANGORIA’s pages soon. —Alan Jones