Suspiria (1977)

Dario Argento

Italy

98 min, color, English

Review © 2005 Branislav L. Slantchev

Although it is almost universally acclaimed as one of Argento's best films, I tend to regard Suspiria as the lesser of the other entry in the yet unfinished Three Mothers trilogy, Inferno. The film has not aged all that well, and even though it is still definitely in the top five in Argento's oeuvre, some of the scenes are more apt to provoke unintentional mirth than scares today. And it's not just because audiences now tend to cast a rather jaundiced eye at horror films, having been primed by explicit gore that makes this film look like a fairy tale. Some of the very techniques used to heighten tension have now been so much overused that their potential to do their job has been exhausted. This is not Argento's fault, of course. If anything, the wide copying of his approach that has lessened its impact is a testament to its original power.

Promising arrival in Germany	Eva Axen being axed out of the script

Even though the film is now regarded as part of a trilogy, this seems to be a later invention, and the tying of the two films only came with Inferno, and even then it is quite loose. The opening story about the three mothers does mention Freiburg in Germany as the location of the Mother of Sighs (Mater Susperiorum), and Suspiria does take place in that town, but that's about it. The Mother is not even called by that name here. Instead, they claim that she is of Greek descent and is a witch. This probably marks the largest break between the two films: Suspiria is about witches doing, well, bad things for personal gain (although it is not quite clear what it is that they do apart from teaching ballet, which I admit is pure evil). Inferno is more global in scale, with the Three Mothers said to "control the world" and in the end they are revealed to be manifestations of Death itself.

Susanna Javicoli gets a split personality	Welcome to the "Tanz Akademie," where you either graduate or DIE

Dario co-wrote the script with his one-time partner Daria Nicolodi, whose touching obsession with witches is only matched by her less touching obsession with herself. It is claimed that the story is based on some stories that her grandmother (I think) told her, and she appears completely serious in some interviews I have seen where she lends credence to the existence of witches. Now, these witches are not of the latter-day tree-hugging, earth-worshipping, mother-goddess wiccan variety. No, these are the smelly, scheming, depraved consorts of Satan that frightened people during the Middle Ages enough to inspire them to hunt down and exterminate a goodly number of them.

Gratuitous psychedelic shot of Jessica Harper	On the left: Aristotelian scholastic, on the right: Augustinian theologian

Whatever the real reason behind the historical witch-hunts, in Argento's world, these medieval hunters would have been entirely justified, for Suspiria's witches are bad. Real bad. I mean, they sick a German shepherd on a blind man, for Pete's sake. And they run a dance academy. And they employ Russian cooks. (This may have been for dramatic reasons, old Russian babushkas look pretty menacing under any light. If anyone wonders about the untranslated dialogue between the two cooks, one of them is boasting that some guy kissed her even though she is so fat.) Despite some really serious logical problems with the plot, the film feels like a good old scary story that one would tell to small children while sitting around a crackling fire on a stormy winter night. This is how they told me the story of The Omen once, and it was more frightful than the film itself when I saw it years later. The verbal narrative will also have the advantage of not lingering on those gruesome shots of bodily harm that upset the strange melancholy of the film to its detriment.

If the witches don't get you, the wallpaper sure will	Just a beautiful shot in the red hallway

Susy Banyon (the perpetually wide-eyed and freaky Jessica Harper) arrives in Freiburg to study dance at the renowned Tanz Akademie, but weird things start happening almost as soon as the landing gear of her plane touches the tarmac. She is greeted by a torrential downpour and when she finally makes it to the academy, she witnesses a girl frantically trying to tell something to an unseen someone before running off in the rain. Susy herself is turned away when that someone inside refuses to open the door. On her way to a hotel, she sees the same girl running through the dark woods. Not an auspicious beginning.

Some Russo-German witches	Susy's first encounter with lighting gone awry

It gets even worse when this girl (Eva Axen) is assaulted by a hairy hand that breaks through the window to grab her (she is on the third floor), and she is then repeatedly stabbed (once, in an excruciating closeup, through a gaping hole in her chest revealing her throbbing heart, directly into her heart), dragged to the stained glass ceiling on top of the building's rotunda, and then pushed through until she hangs by her neck covered in blood. As a "bonus," falling debris kill her friend (Susanna Javicoli): she is impaled on a piece of metal, and a plate of glass is embedded in her face. And this is within the first 15 minutes of the film. Pretty rough, even by horror film standards.

We totally did not trick you into staying here	The Red Lights hall at the dance academy

Susy makes it to the academy where she is greeted by Miss Tanner (Alida Valli) and Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett). Since her room is not ready yet, she has to board for a couple of days with another girl. Almost immediately, however, Susy has some unexplained experiences at the academy. She walks down a hallway when she sees one of those Russian maids cleaning a crystal. All of a sudden, the crystal is illuminated and Susy gets a temporary headache. So Susy is no regular dancer but has some supernatural abilities, or at least she can sense the presence of the supernatural. This, naturally, endangers the coven, setting in motion a series of events that would lead to its ultimate destruction.

The way to tell horror stories	Gratuitous abuse of a blind man

The first thing they try to do is lure her back into the dorm where they can monitor and control her. When Susy refuses to budge, they cause her to collapse during a session, and then use the medical emergency to move her stuff to the dorm under the pretext that she had been kicked out by her landlady. A sinister doctor prescribes a special diet which, oddly enough but perhaps not surprisingly, cause enough drowsiness to warrant a label warning users not to operate heavy machinery. Susy persists in not connecting the dots even though she seems quite befuddled by her sleepiness.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is gonna get the maul	Breathe. Put hand on latch. Push down firmly.

Soon, however, the witches are pushed into motion when Susy's American friend Sarah (Stefania Casini) goes missing after confiding in Susy that she was the murdered girl's confidante and there was some awful secret about the academy. Sarah is, of course, killed off rather gruesomely (this time the closeup involves a blade slicing through her throat) but it is not before she gets afflicted by the typical horror-film clumsiness that causes people to lose basic motor skills or elementary faculty of reasoning--- Sarah watches in agony as the unseen killer attempts to unlatch the door to enter the room she is in and it never once occurs to her to simply press down the latch to prevent it. Susy then quickly consults with some conveniently present professors of something (Udo Kier is one of them), learns about witches, and then stumbles across the hidden chamber where she gets to meet Mater Susperiorum.

In the flower room	Curiosity that killed the witch

The film packs a lot less punch than Inferno despite its spectacular death scenes and extreme color palette that suffuses each scene with vibrant color. I am a huge fan of this color flooding, and I much appreciated the Middle-Age-town feeling of the German academy. Yet I could not help but think that the trademark violence here was distracting, inappropriate for the mood of the film, and in the end gratuitous. Witches, even evil ones, should have better ways of dispatching their victims from this mortal coil. The Omen worked in part because there was really no killer doing mundane murders but supernatural events working the will of the devil. There was one excellent scene in which the blind man's (Flavio Bucci) dog turned on him but the others did not work that well. And the scene with the rubber bat was laughable.

In the chamber of the witch that's full of herself	To panic or to stab, that is the question

The 3-disc Limited Edition Set from Anchor Bay is exactly what the witch doctor ordered. The film is presented in its original 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio and is anamorphically enhanced. The quality of the print is amazing. There are too many audio options for anyone to care. I have listened to the Dolby Digital 5.1 EX and DTS English tracks, and they are superb. Since the film was post-dubbed in English, these may as well be considered the original language tracks. French and Italian stereo dubs are also available but without English subtitles. The set includes a documentary, talent files, music video (of Simonetti's Daemonia playing the title tune), and a full CD of the Goblin score, which is among their best. Definitely not to be missed.

December 28, 2005