The Time ‘The Sopranos’ Became a Horror Show

The Big Picture

• Death and guilt haunt Tony Soprano in
  The Sopranos
  , transforming his inner turmoil into frightening nightmares and ghostly encounters.
• Season 4’s “Calling All Cars” is the most intense episode with chilling dreams, horrifying imagery, and haunting symbolism.
• The combination of psychological horror and mob drama in
  The Sopranos
  makes Tony’s deepest fears and anxieties come to life.

The Sopranos, which ran on HBO from 1999-2007, is one of the darkest dramas ever made, but while the tales of Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and company are riveting, it’s not a horror series per se. Still, it’s impossible for this mob show to not have horror elements as death is at the center of The Sopranos. If someone’s not getting whacked, the characters are preparing themselves for the possibility. Heck, seventeen years after it aired, we’re still debating whether Tony died or not when everything suddenly went to black during the divisive finale. The Sopranos has some scary moments, but none of them match the frightening intensity of Season 4’s “Calling All Cars”, when Tony has a dream that leaves not only him but the audience shaken.

There Are Many Nods to Horror in ‘The Sopranos’

With death being so engrained in The Sopranos, it’s going to effect how its characters and the series itself broaches the subject of guilt and the feeling of impending doom. The death of Tony’s Mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand), in Season 3 provides some of those terrifying glimpses into the unknown. Livia was a domineering woman, but her passing brings no reprieve. Following her death, her grandson, A.J. (Robert Iler), is home all alone, when he thinks he hears his grandmother and calls out to her. In another episode, when Tony Soprano is in a coma, he sees the shadow of his mother in a doorway in a chilling image. When Big Pussy (Vincent Pastore) is whacked, we later see his reflection ever so briefly at Livia’s wake.

Livia’s death is not the only one that haunts The Sopranos. Christopher Moltisani (Michael Imperioli) has a recurring nightmare where he’s visited by the ghost of a man he killed. It’s Tony, however, who is tormented the most by his dark and violent life. The Sopranos is not just a clone of other mob movies and shows, but one where inner turmoil is at its center. That clever premise, of a powerful man in the mob having panic attacks that force him to see a therapist is what drew viewers in to begin with, making our bad guy hero someone we could sympathize with and come to love.

During Season 1, Tony is so afraid that the people in his life will find out that he’s seeing a therapist that he dreams of them watching him during a session. That same season, Tony, a man who has often cheated on his wife, Carmela (Edie Falco), dreams of having an affair with his therapist, Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). After killing Christopher in Season 6, Tony’s sleeping mind has him confessing all to her. In Season 2, he dreams of killing his close associate, Paulie (Tony Sirco). When Tony finds out that Big Pussy is an FBI informant, he dreams of a fish talking to him in his betraying friend’s voice. It’s Tony’s side relationships with other women who always haunt him the most. When a mistress, Gloria (Annabella Sciorra), falls for him, Tony angrily tells her to stay away from him. She is so broken by this that Gloria ends up taking her own life, leading to another nightmare to taunt our hero. All of these ghosts and dreams are tense and sometimes frightening, but none of them can match the dream Tony has in Season 4’s “Calling All Cars”, when those he killed, those he feels guilt over, and his mother all come to haunt him at once.

In “Calling All Cars”, Tony Soprano Is Forced To Confront His Ghosts

“Calling All Cars” starts out in Tony’s dream. In it, he’s a backseat passenger in his father’s Cadillac. A rosary bead is wrapped around the rearview mirror and Ralphie (Joe Pantialano), who Tony had to kill, sits in the passenger seat, a caterpillar crawling across his bald head. He turns on the radio, where the news is playing, but it’s nothing more than a cacophony of screams, gunshots, and sirens. Ralphie leans over and whispers something unheard to Carmela, who is behind the wheel, while Tony looks on, his face drained of emotion. A voice calls out, asking “You wanna take it for a test drive?” Tony looks over beside him to see Gloria, the car saleswoman mistress Tony drove to suicide when he rejected her. As the caterpillar on Ralphie’s head turns into a butterfly, he and Carmela turn to look at Tony wordlessly. Beside him, Gloria is gone, replaced by Svetlana (Alla Kliouka Schaffer), another former mistress who Carmela left him over. As she smiles at him, Tony wakes up in bed next to his wife.

“Calling All Cars” is bookended by dreams, ending with Tony following Ralphie, who says nothing to him, through a grassy field. Suddenly, Ralphie is gone and Tony is dressed in a dirty, sweaty shirt and suspenders. He knocks on the door of a large house and calls out in the voice of an Italian immigrant, saying, “Hello, I’m here for the masonry job.” As he looks through the screen door into the dark home, a figure enveloped in shadows, who looks very much like his mother, walks down the steps and stops halfway. He speaks to her, and when she doesn’t move or answer, he opens the door and walks inside, before waking up gasping for air.

Dr. Melfi Interprets What Tony Soprano’s Dream Means

When Tony sees Dr. Melfi after the first dream, he tells her about it. He says, “I don’t know where we were going, because we didn’t seem to get anywhere, kind of like this therapy.” Dr. Melfi sees Carmela being in control during the dream, with Tony wanting to square things up with her over Ralphie and Gloria. Tony responds in defensive anger, attacking the therapy, rather than trying to find solutions. We know how much deeper the story is for those too than Melfi does, so is Tony wanting to tell his wife what happened to them, and to make peace with her? His anger certainly shows that he is far from any peace, and the ravages of guilt over Ralphie and other women, along with insecurities brought by a mother who couldn’t love him properly, are destroying him.

Where other genres feel compelled to tell us more about why something is happening, the best horror uses haunting and shocking imagery through paralyzing dreams, where we are completely vulnerable and lacking any control, to say so much. The more unsettling, the better, for imagery that we can’t comprehend will always put us on edge. The presence of Ralphie and Gloria are like ghosts, with Tony’s own mind as the haunted house where they shake their chains and go bump in the night. The transformation on Ralphie’s bald head, the bad toupee removed, shows how he has been transformed by death, with creepy crawly bugs, which elicit fear in so many horror movies, more effective than the sight of a rotting corpse. The scariest moment of all is the appearance of Livia on the steps, an apparition who does not move or speak. Is her presence there to heal, or is to hurt, like a demon possessing her broken son’s soul? Death and horror go hand in hand, as does death and The Sopranos. No moment shows it better than this one.

All episodes of The Sopranos are available to stream on Max in the U.S.

WATCH ON MAX