Daily Inspiration Quote by Dario Argento

Censorship feels especially grotesque when it borrows the costume of care. Argento frames the gatekeepers not as bureaucrats or critics but as psychiatrists: people licensed to diagnose, to pathologize, to decide what counts as healthy. In that casting choice, the insult lands twice. First, it implies the artist is the patient, automatically suspect, forced to defend his interior life as if imagination were a symptom. Second, it suggests the audience is the vulnerable ward whose exposure must be managed, not a public capable of choosing what to watch.

The detail that they ask about your life and work is the tell. This is not content regulation in the narrow sense; its premise is biographical guilt. Horror becomes evidence. If you make disturbing images, the system wants to know what kind of person makes them, as if style were confession and mise-en-scene were a psychiatric file. Argento, a director whose films flirt with nightmare logic and operatic violence, is pointing at the old moral reflex: when art unsettles, authorities reach for a clinical explanation to domesticate it.

The line works because it’s experiential, not theoretical. He doesn’t argue for free expression in abstract terms; he describes the humiliation of being interviewed into compliance, the way power gets inside your story before it gets inside your film. Calling it “horrible” is blunt on purpose. Horror, in his universe, is supposed to be on the screen. Here it’s in the room, wearing a professional badge.