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 realize 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.