 While rejecting this thematic concern as unrealized by Argento , McDonagh noted that the result of the director 's experiment is a strange " architectural landscape " that becomes the " key element in differentiating Tenebrae from Argento 's earlier gialli . " Argento 's use of unusual architectural space and so @-@ called visual " hyper @-@ realism " results in an enormously fake looking environment . Seizing on the director 's additional comment , " ... I dreamed an imaginary city in which the most amazing things happen " , she notes that the film 's " fictive space couldn 't be less ' real ' " , with its " vast unpopulated boulevards , piazzas that look like nothing more than suburban American malls , hard @-@ edged Bauhaus apartment buildings , anonymous clubs and parking garages . " The EUR district of Rome , where much of Tenebrae was filmed , was built in preparation for the 1942 World 's Fair , and intended by then @-@ Prime Minister of Italy Benito Mussolini to be a celebration of twenty years of fascism . Rostock believes that Argento used this location as an attempt to realise his theme of an imaginary city ; the district gives a glimpse of a future Rome that never was , showing the city how it might have looked had fascism not fallen . 
