Suspiria (1977)

Official trailer

Suspiria is Dario Argento’s 1977 Italian horror film about an American ballet student who arrives at a prestigious German dance academy and discovers the institution is run by a coven of witches.

Jessica Harper plays Suzy Bannion. Stefania Casini plays Sara. Flavio Bucci plays Daniel. Alida Valli plays Miss Tanner. Joan Bennett plays Madame Blanc. Udo Kier plays Dr. Frank Mandel. Argento and Daria Nicolodi wrote the screenplay, drawing on elements of Thomas De Quincey’s 1845 essay ‘Suspiria de Profundis’.

Produzioni Atlas Consorziate distributed the film for theatrical release in Italy in February 1977 and 20th Century Fox handled the American distribution through its International Classics label. Suspiria is the first entry in Argento’s loose Three Mothers trilogy, which continued through Inferno (1980) and Mother of Tears (2007).

If anybody thinks the genre can’t be art, Suspiria is the horror film I’d hand them. The plot barely holds together and I mostly let it go, because every frame looks painted in blood and stained glass, and Goblin’s score disturbs me within the first minute. My knocks are the dialogue, which is flat enough that the actors seem to be waiting for the next murder along with us, and a plot that sometimes exists only to move Suzy between rooms.

Argento made Suspiria a horror film with a visual style all its own and a foundational document of the Italian giallo tradition’s horror extension.

Argento’s commitment to extreme color saturation, baroque architectural settings, and sound-design pressure produces a horror experience closer to opera than to conventional horror filmmaking. The film works less through plot than through accumulating dread, with Argento’s camera and Goblin’s prog-rock score doing work that the screenplay doesn’t need to perform. The cumulative effect is a highly distinctive horror viewing experience.

The Color Saturation

Suspiria was printed with Technicolor’s three-strip dye-transfer process when it had been largely abandoned by 1977. Argento and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli pushed the color saturation to real extremes, with reds rendering as supernatural saturation and blues operating at almost cobalt intensity. The visual signature is fundamental to the film’s identity and has been considerably imitated without successful replication.

The opening murder of Pat Hingle, stabbed and sent crashing through a stained-glass skylight to hang above the lobby while the falling glass kills her friend below, is the film’s most visually elaborate single sequence. The blood is luminous red against deep blue lighting that no realistic horror production would attempt. The choice is operatic, and it gives Suspiria its tone. I think it’s the greatest opening murder in horror, gloriously over the top, and I’ve got a real weakness for excess staged this precisely.

Goblin’s Score

The Italian progressive-rock band Goblin composed the score, with Argento providing detailed direction about the music’s psychological function. The score includes whispered voices, repeated chime patterns and percussion mixed at real volume. The music runs alongside the images as a second source of horror. It’s my favorite horror score, and I think it does half the work of scaring you, because the whispering starts before anything on screen gives you a reason to be afraid.

The ‘Suspiria’ main title cue, with its repeated melody and whispered ‘witch’ incantations, has become a widely recognized horror score. Goblin’s collaboration with Argento extended across multiple later productions including Profondo Rosso and Tenebrae. The horror-score tradition that Goblin established has shaped later horror music for nearly five decades.

The Three Mothers Mythology

Argento’s screenplay draws on Thomas De Quincey’s 1845 ‘Suspiria de Profundis’ essay for the Three Mothers mythology: Mater Suspiriorum (Mother of Sighs), Mater Tenebrarum (Mother of Darkness), and Mater Lachrymarum (Mother of Tears). The film establishes Mater Suspiriorum as the witch operating through the dance academy, with the later Inferno and Mother of Tears developing the other two Mothers.

The mythological architecture gives the film thematic depth beyond a standard horror plot.

Suzy’s destruction of Mater Suspiriorum resolves her story and wins a cosmic victory at the same time, and it leaves the surviving Mothers waiting for the later films. I like the mythology more as atmosphere than as lore. The film is at its best when the witches are a rumor in the walls, and the lore matters less to me than the dread.

Does Suspiria still hold up?

Suspiria gets a 9 from me because nothing else in horror looks or sounds like it. Argento’s color, Goblin’s score and the Three Mothers mythology combine into a film that plays closer to opera than to conventional horror, and it deserves the comparison. The point I hold back is for the flat dialogue and a plot that sometimes seems to exist only to move Suzy from one gorgeous room to the next. Anyone who cares about horror history or Italian cinema should see it.

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