"If you make a film normally it's all right, the distributors are helpful and cooperative. But if you make a film that's a little stange, a little bizarre, then all the time it's a struggle with them"

The statement distills a perennial truth about film culture: the people who move movies to audiences favor predictability. Distributors are the industry’s risk managers; they translate a film into marketing plans, exhibition slots, ratings, territories, and formats. When a work fits established categories, familiar genre beats, recognizable narrative arcs, conventional pacing, its audience is legible and the sales pitch is simple. Cooperation flows because the path to profit looks clear.

Introduce strangeness, formal experimentation, ambiguous storytelling, unsettling tone, and the machinery seizes up. Such films resist easy tags and comps, making posters, trailers, and loglines harder to craft. They may face regional sensitivities, censorship boards, and exhibitors wary of walkouts. The “struggle” is a series of frictions: pressure to trim scenes that disrupt rhythm, to clarify meanings, to tone down violence or surrealism; demands for alternate cuts, new titles, or misleading marketing that misrepresents the experience to broaden appeal. Support turns conditional, schedules shrink, and releases become fragmented or delayed.

For an auteur like Dario Argento, whose giallo and horror cinema leans into operatic excess, chromatic boldness, and sensory assault, the conflict is baked in. These films prioritize mood and image over plot logic, and their dreamlike ferocity defies the tidy arcs distributors expect. The very qualities that make them singular also render them commercially opaque in mainstream channels.

Yet the struggle can birth alternative lifelines: midnight screenings, festival circuits, cult fandoms, boutique labels, and, today, niche streamers. While gatekeepers often punish deviation, history shows that the peculiar and the daring can accrue long-tail value, seeding influence across generations of filmmakers and viewers. Argento’s observation is both practical and philosophical: conformity greases the rails; innovation pays in friction. Artists who choose the bizarre accept a harder road not as a miscalculation but as the price of genuine discovery, trusting that the audience for the unusual may be slower to gather, but deeper in its devotion.