 Warren and Alan Jones cite a scene where a character is killed in a public square as evoking the work of Alfred Hitchcock ; Rostock agrees that the editing of the sequence is in a Hitchcockian vein , while the lighting is more influenced by Michelangelo Antonioni . The film critic and author Maitland McDonagh argues that Argento 's influences for Tenebrae were far broader than just his own films or previous Italian thrillers . She refers to the strong narrative in the film as an example of " the most paranoid excesses of film noir . " McDonagh suggests that Fritz Lang 's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt ( 1956 ) ( " in which a man convicted of murder on false evidence ... is in fact guilty of the murder " ) and Roy William Neill 's Black Angel ( 1946 ) ( " in which a man who tries to clear a murder suspect does so at the cost of learning that he himself is the killer " ) both use such a similar plot twist to Tenebrae that Argento may have used them as partial models for his story . 
