Diabolik is a master criminal. He is young and cool and wears a black leather bodysuit – he hides his face behind a black rubber mask that only shows his eyes, and he drives a black E-type Jaguar. He’s a comic book villain and the mid-20th century son of Feuillade’s Fantômas and Fritz Lang’s Mabuse – amoral geniuses who live only for crime. But Fantômas and Mabuse belonged to the earliest generation of European film – they were two of its original silent shadows. Diabolik is a killer without a conscience. He needs his own soundtrack; and who else but Ennio Morricone could supply it?

Henri Langlois, the influential director of the Cinémathèque Français, once defined film as “the music of the future”. So where did that leave music itself? What kind of future would music have in a world that dreamed of existing only as a sequence of moving pictures? Born in 1914, Langlois was so firmly set in the 20th century that he was destined never to see the 21st. His idea of the future would therefore also be of its time. Born in 1928, not that many years after Langlois, Ennio Morricone would see things very differently. He was one of the few serious composers to realise that any relationship between music and film must change them both in radical, dangerous ways. As a result, Morricone didn’t write music for films – he wrote music in the age of film, where love and violence, sex and death were transformed into the glossiest of consumer items. When you hear a Morricone soundtrack from the 60s and 70s, at a time when he was scoring Italian horror and crime movies by the dozen, you just know someone’s going to die.

Take that power chord, played on a scratchy electric guitar when the nose of Diabolik’s E-type first glides into frame near the start of Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik, the 1968 film adaptation of this wildly popular Italian fumetti. It’s a signal that he’s about to risk a police trap and a hail of bullets to steal ten million dollars in cash, which was still a lot of money back then. One entire strand of Morricone’s soundtrack for Danger: Diabolik is pure psych rock – a minor freakout for fuzz boxes, wah-wah pedals and the occasional chiming 12-string that merges effortlessly with the sound of fast cars and machine guns. The raw freeform slither of this musical approach goes well with the film’s brash mix of pop sublime with noir ridiculous. Multiple organs chop and stab – wordless choruses chant – muted trumpets squeal. Behind them you can hear some of the experiments Morricone had been conducting throughout the 1960s as a member of Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Their subtle layering of freeform noise, percussion and electronics, as represented on the group’s 1970 album The Feedback, often finds echoes in Morricone’s soundtracks. Two significant examples emerged the following year. His score for Lucio Fulci’s 1971 hallucinogenic giallo, A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin ripples and roils with discordant piano and screaming strings, twisted around taut electric guitars, sustained feedback and electronic tones. Meanwhile, for Dario Argento’s Four Flies On Grey Velvet, a psychotic exercise in slash and stalk set around a recording studio, Morricone places a rock ensemble at the centre of his score – we see its members jamming together in the claustrophobic opening sequence.

Morricone was also capable of the most spacious and delicate soundtracks, for example the hypnotically repetitive weaving together of motifs in his score for Sergio Solimo’s Devil In The Brain. However, it’s the more cramped anomalous spaces that his music explores that remain the most interesting. These murderous alleyways and dark openings date back almost as far as cinema itself – the first Fantômas film dates from 1913, for example. Crime seems always to bring out the best in Morricone. It’s quite possible that this wasn’t exactly the future music Langlois had been expecting; but the psychological depths and distortions cinema helped to uncover remain with us today. On many of his soundtracks, Morricone manages to set aside some small corner for an aberrant piece of sound design: often quite cramped and compressed but with an advanced disregard for the broader conventions of film music. Even on the stark and expansive score for Michel Lupo’s Un Uomo Da Rispettare, filled with echoing fanfares and brooding keyboards, he finds time for the wiry desiccated loops of “Un Tempo Infinito”, a piece whose urgency stays with you long after you’ve heard it. Perhaps that’s what makes Morricone’s music so immediate, so technically advanced and challenging. His entire soundtrack for Argento’s Cat O’ Nine Tails seems to be composed of one creepy scrabbling moment after another – fractured melodies tumble over each other, while a woman’s ethereal crooning materialises from out of nowhere.

During the 1960s and 70s while Morricone was creating soundtracks for a world of broken mirrors and broken minds, he was connecting music to film in ways that offered bright flashes of what their relationship could become. That’s what makes Danger: Diabolik such a perfect film. Within this flamboyant cartoon strip directed by the man who brought you Planet Of The Vampires, everything is familiar but also slightly off. John Philip Law, who plays the title role, is better known as Pygar the angel from Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, released that same year. Adolfo Celi seems to be playing a cruder version of his role as Emilio Largo in the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball. Michel Piccoli looks as crumpled and as lost as he did in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 existential cinemascope drama Le Mépris. Meanwhile British character actor Terry-Thomas looks like he’s wandered in from some other much earlier film and nobody had the heart to tell him. Even the fantastic sets, pop art interiors, fetish costumes and night club happenings seem to have faded before they reach the screen. Then you hear that scratchy power chord marking Diabolik’s first appearance, and you’re instantly pulled into the present. And then you reflect that the future of music has always been to become a genre – but who would have guessed it would end up being such a crime spree.

Ennio Morricone (10 November 1928 – 6 July 2020)