Benz, Ernst.  “Color in Christian Visionary Experience.”  Color Symbolism: The Eranos Lectures.  Ed. Klaus Ottmann.  Putnam: Spring Publications, 2005. 155-214.

Color plays an important part in Don’t Look Now, especially the color red.  Roeg weaves red throughout the film, from Christine’s plastic raincoat to the Band-Aid on Johnnie’s finger, from the lettering of the “Venice in Peril” sign to the bathrobe of the sisters’ neighbor.  In Du Maurier’s story, the color red is not mentioned, so the use of the color is all Roeg’s doing.  Beyond merely linking Christine to the murderer, the color red also serves a more symbolic purpose.  Roeg ties the color red to the blind sister, Heather, and her psychic visions.  The fact that Heather can see Christine’s red jacket is not as mysterious as the fact that she knows what the color red is.  If she has been blind since childbirth, which her sister, Wendy, intimates to Laura and John, there is no way she would know what red looked like.  Heather is already semi-divine in her ability to see the future, but the presence of color in her prophetic visions ties her into the tradition of Christian visions.
Benz’s text was part of a 1972 conference in Switzerland call the Eranos conference.  Famous psychologists, theologists, phenomenologists, and other types of scholars from around the globe met to discuss “The Realms of Colour” (ix).  Benz, a well-known protestant theologian and church historian, focused his lecture on color and its relation to Christian visions, such as the prophecies of Revelations (170-171).  At times hard to follow, Benz basically explores the connection between the vivid colors and physical descriptions in Christian visions and their relation to God and mortality.
Benz explains that, “As a rule the eyes are closed in the visionary ecstatic state; the physical capacity for sight through the eye is eliminated” (159).  Heather’s visions definitely follow in this tradition, because, as a blind person, she does not have the capacity for sight.  The “ecstatic state,” which Benz references, is ambiguous, but could be interpreted as the epileptic-like trance that Heather falls into when experiencing her visions...