 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.
