Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)

[Jem]

Come on! He helped write Once Upon a Time in the West!

With Bertolucci and Leone, what a combination!


This puts Argento in a whole new light for me.

[Dylan]

That was indeed a fascinating trio, and an interesting page for Bertolucci in particular, who had made some New Wave-inspired films at that point (including the brilliant "Before the Revolution"), but here he is in the epic territory, where he would return solo for his ambitious, interesting 1900 ten years later.

[Jem]

Suspiria review at Not Coming

[Floyd]

I first caught this on IFC and was really overwhelmed automatically with the use of colors in this starting with the waterfall and cab scene. I definately agree with those talking of how the film is somewhat camp and has terrible dialogue (especially camp is that terrible scene with the blind man and the dog, real awful). The barbed wire room is great though and it makes up for a lot of things to go along with the style. The perfect score is unmatched (just turn the volume up real high!).

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Suspiria -- the bubble gum cards.... Ah, if only...

http://bubblegumfink.blogspot.com/2006/ ... html#links

http://bubblegumfink.blogspot.com/2006/ ... html#links

http://bubblegumfink.blogspot.com/2006/ ... html#links

http://bubblegumfink.blogspot.com/2006/ ... html#links

http://bubblegumfink.blogspot.com/2006/ ... html#links

[Jem]

(especially camp is that terrible scene with the blind man and the dog, real awful)

I thought this scene was particularly brilliant, very Goyaesque.
http://www.wga.hu/art/g/goya/4/404goya.jpg

[Dylan]

Which DVD release of "Suspiria" offers English subtitles for the Italian track?

Thanks in advance.

[Michael]

I thought they spoke English in Suspiria (?).

[Dylan]

Most of the cast is Italian and it is dubbed into English, and for me the dubbing isn't good. But I feel this way about almost every Italian film made with an international cast: nine times out of ten the film works infinitely better in the director's native language (I think Bertolucci's "1900" is the greatest example of this). Don't get me wrong "Suspiria" is great (and great fun!) no matter what, but I prefer the Italian dub.

Does the three disc SE from Anchor Bay have English subs?

[Michael]

That's interesting. I've seen this film more than 50 times (not kidding) and everyone - Jessica, Joan, Alida, Stefania, Udo, Miguel - appeared to speak in English. I could be wrong though. All I know that the Anchor Bay DVD is captioned in English. The 3-disc set has English, Italian and French tracks. It also offers Italian subtitles. No English subtitles but it has English closed captioning.

[Simon]

Well most languages will feel dubbed anyway as there was no direct sound. But I just looked at it quickly in Italian and Valli, even though she was Italian, was out of sync in it, so she was speaking english when shooting, in addition to Harper of course and probably other non italians like Kier. So it's probably over 50% english.

[domino harvey]

I just watched this for the 70s project and almost two years later from the question at hand, let me jump in to say that the end credits state "Shot in English," followed by the name of the engineer who assisted in the dubbing. English appears to be the intended way to see this. I checked a few times and the lips were following exactly with the dialog, so I'm sure the Italian actors spoke in badly accented English with the intention of hiring someone to loop the lines.

The use of color in this film is among the best I've ever seen. How can a film be so beautifully shot and lit, yet so braindead when it comes to what these things serve? No payoffs, no real interest beyond the immediate aesthetic pleasure-- It's a testament to how good those visual pleasures are that it's still a good movie despite everything.

Barb wire room got me though.

[luridedith]

To me the "bad" acting/dubbing/dialogue really works within the context of the film (in most Argento films in fact). With the exception of Jessica Harper as the lead, all the characters/actors in the film are so unnatural and bizarre and the dubbing at times is so ridiculously out of sync that it heightens the dream-like reality. If it was all Hollywoodized and refined with Oscar-worthy performances (ala The Exorcist/The Shining/Hitchcock in general), it wouldn't be have as enjoyable/terrifying for me. The batshit-insane artificiality in every aspect of Suspiria is why I love this film and similar "out-of-this-world" Euro-cult films (like Jess Franco).

[Barmy]

I wish I had a barb wire room.

[Floyd]

I just saw Inferno for the first time recently and while I don't think it is as good as Suspiria there were a lot of great moments and of course the lighting and technique is there. I haven't read much about how the film was made but it feels very much like a stage play setting on occasion. Around Kazanian's shop and the outside feels like its being done on a stage which could be just because of the lighting. It gave it a different feeling though than Suspiria. The music at times works but in other times it was really distracting. I think that may be its biggest downfall in comparison to Suspiria. The surreal aspects to Inferno and just how off-kilter it all is was its best aspect to me. Argento plays well with what the viewer wants or expects and what he chooses to give them in Inferno.

I followed it up by watching Mother of Tears which felt like a waste of time. It is clearly a different Argento. One seemingly transfixed in showing us his ways of making violent kills and mutilation depicted on screen rather than creating an atmosphere and a world for his horror like he did once before.

[Narshty]

Problem is, it's not barbed wire, it's piano wire. All the lighting, colour filters and screaming in the world can't hide that fact and is why the scene has always struck me as more than a little ludicrous.

If I'd seen Suspiria at 8 years old, I'd have been literally traumatised. At that stage, I found Jaws III vastly too intense for my comfort.

[HerrSchreck]

I've had Suspiria on the great anchor bay set for a couple of years now and each time I watch it I cant get thru the first half hour. I just cant get with this film.

[Narshty]

I've always found Argento ineffective as a horror director because his blocking and editing is so self-conscious and often clumsy it destroys any suspension of disbelief. The way in the opening murder that the arm holding the knife just shoots in and out of frame with that "ta-da!" motion looks daft. Ditto the extreme close-ups of the knife stabbing into her chest. It's meant to seem feral but it just looks awkwardly patched together.

[HerrSchreck]

If I could articulate it better I would-- but I can't.

It just all feels like a great dp is amping his work outa control to cover a terrible directorial mise en scene and acting direction.

And I usually "get" most horror films from this period and earlier... ie the flaws, the "cheepnis", the kultishness... but this doesnt even feel like a movie to me. The worst second string hammers, bava's great creeping camera & sense of ingenuity and invention, stuff like Castle of the Walking Dead (not the expressionist-tributing one, but the german one w Lee), even the tv movies like Crowhaven Farm, Night Cries etc. Suspiria I'm afraid will never work for me. Sometimes bad direction can be delightfully effective (in both directions... the ominous: Dwain Esper, JJ Parker; the amusing: Ed Wood), but other times bad direction just makes what to me reads as a pure bad film.

[colinr0380]

While I don't agree with you HS I think you are onto something with your comment about the photography being the primary, maybe even only, focus of Suspiria. I like Suspiria and the first section of Inferno very much and like the way they play as beautiful almost incoherent nightmares with a sliver of dream logic running through them to tie the set pieces loosely together.

In that sense a lot of the horror doesn't come from what is actually occuring on screen but from the feelings the situation creates. I wasn't really thinking about whether it was barbed wire or just a rather large slinky that Stefania Casini was wrestling around with in that room or even why the ballet school would have a wire room with only two high small windows! It was the film tapping into that frightening feeling of struggling and only getting more and more stuck, knowing that death is approaching but still futilely trying to escape that made the sequence so memorable for me. The film seemed more concerned with creating primal feelings of terror rather than situations from which the fear might naturally arise - in fact it felt as if coherence was consciously being dismissed as irrelevant. Similarly the blind man having his dog turn on him plays on fears of not even being able to trust your closest companion (Herr Schreck, have you tried any of Lucio Fulci's films yet? Fulci in a way managed to turn being a second-tier director into an art form - for example by cashing in on Dawn of The Dead with Zombi 2 - because he took second hand film concepts and set pieces and did them in his own style. The Beyond contains a similar 'blind person's dog turning on its owner' sequence and indeed contains a similar kind of nonsensical world as the Argento film, yet it is done with a relatively straight-ahead narrative, which strangely makes the film's set pieces when they come feel even more bizarre and off kilter than Suspiria! I'd certainly recommend checking out The Beyond though for some amazing sequences such as the main character replaying the footsteps of a person running out in their mind to realise they didn't make a sound and are therefore a ghost, or the final sequence. Plus it features the lovely Catriona MacColl which more than makes up for the set pieces that don't come off such as the drawn out spider attack and the various Fulci trademarked eye violence scenes!)

I also love the use of hyper closeups in Suspiria, sort of an Argento trademark, and love the opening sequence of Suzy Bannion in the airport (with the ominous approaching exit doors and a big close up of the automatic door opening mechanism illustrating the transition from the modern, ordered world into the dark, rainy night) and her taxi ride to the school (big close ups of storm drains). I thought it was a wonderfully frightening opening sequence, using just editing and sound to create fear. Even the amazing double murder that follows is notable for the way that more attention is paid to how the violence is staged and looks than for any realism. The sudden way the first girl's location changes from the bathroom to an attic space is unexplained but that jump creates tension. The way the knife comes in to stab her is absurd but it feels an illustration of the way death can suddenly come from any part of the frame. The cut from the hyper close up of the hole in the heart suddenly seeming to 'pop' larger to the girl's head smashing backwards through the stained glass window seems to create an aesthetic connection between the two images (and a victim's head smashing through glass as they die crops up again in Tenebrae and Phenomena). That whole sequence of course climaxes in the big pan across the two dead girls and it is almost as if the whole architecture of the space is completed by the tableau the scene ends with - it is a gory and nasty image but the bodies seem disturbingly posed and serene as if they were those tiny portions of food served in high class restaurants with the blood splattered around them like little drizzles of sauce a chef pours round the dish!

Similarly everyone else has a significant location for their deaths - the blind man in the darkened ampitheatre, the wire room, the bedchamer of the head witch. It is almost as if the characters would be completely safe if they could just have avoided that one 'death area'! - something that constantly crops up in Argento's films from the similarly structured Inferno, to the girl exploring the killer's house in Tenebrae, to the way locations are used as stages for death in Phenomena and Opera (with the development of another constant theme of the main characters either accidentally or being forced to witness the killer's acts rather than their just being played out for the audience - it starts as just witnessing by accident as in The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, moves to being forced to witness in a film like Opera and then to witnessing causing the character to take on some of the killer's characteristics in a film like The Stendahl Syndrome).

Even non violent locations are aestheticised - I'm thinking of that amazing outdoor sequence with Udo Kier explaining the plot to Jessica Harper. It is a rather mundane expository scene but the way it is filmed (love the extremely high top-down shot of the location with the characters looking like ants in the plaza below!) as well as the scene being one of the few shot in daylight helps it to stick in the memory. It could be seen as another example of the actual plot, action and dialogue coming a far distant second to the way in which the sequences are shot and edited.

As I said a few months ago in the Three Mothers thread, I feel that the first half hour or so of Inferno really picks up and runs with this beautifully staged horror concept, so much that when the actual killing and gore comes it is unwelcome as so much tension has been created just from detailed portrayals of falling beams, underwater rooms, dark libraries and Verdi!

Unfortunately the life seems to drain from Inferno once Mark becomes the main character, and even the set pieces seem lacklustre and not as illogically beautiful as those that came earlier (the cats and rats are particularly ho-hum and overly drawn out). I would generally agree with the thoughts expressed in this video on the film - though I quite liked the score!

Alan Jones commented during the Bird With Crystal Plumage commentary that when he was filming some interviews for the Eye For Horror documentary that the only real objections raised about the film was due to the choice of title, that many of the interviewees considered Argento much more of a thriller director but the success of Suspiria had the effect of 'blotting out' the rest of his filmography and making audiences feel that he was only a horror director.

Though I really like Suspiria and Inferno I love his more giallo oriented pieces the most (and get the purely personal impression that is more where Argento's interests lie) such as Deep Red and especially Tenebrae (I prefer the title spelt with the extra 'a'!) which to me seemed like a surprisingly logical murder mystery and combines a more 'naturalistic' setting with the set piece 'beauty of horror'-style moments in a masterful way.

[djali999]

I must admit that I very much love Suspiria but much of the reason is that I was pretty unprepared for it on the event of my first viewing experience and it really started to get to me. The completely senseless opening sequence where the main theme is battling a strange voice over narration which is not allowed to finish, and later the Goblin music is located outside the airport doors for no reason other than to build an interesting rhythm of silence and sound as Harper exits the building... The absurdly overdone streaks of light passing over faces in the taxi... I really was unable to process this stuff on first viewing, which I think is kind of Argento's intent; to beat the viewer into submission and present a lot of nonsense.

Suspiria, I find, either works for viewers or it doesn't, and I'll be the first to admit that although it may not be great filmmaking it's an admirable effort to reduce the aesthetic mechanics of why things scare us on film to their very essentials. The gross-out stuff in the movie is the worst stuff in it, like the utterly forgettable maggot invasion. What I remember is that the scariest moments in the film suddenly become the moments where nothing is happening, and you become comfortable when the music again starts to blare, the camera tracks, the the gelled lights flash. But the true nightmare moments in Suspiria, for me, become the footfalls of the witches in the quiet corridors, the cleaning lady chopping meat, the discovery of the secret passage in the blue-curtained room, and entering the head Witch's parlor to find... dead quiet, and raspy breathing. I'm not sure this is intentional or not on Argento's part but it sure works, and his ending the film of a very ostentatious moment - the burning window blowing out - to me says that he has reversed our expectations of a horror film and has made the bloodshed the relief from the rest of the picture.

I think Argento achieves this very effectively in Deep Red as well, which to me is the most sinister of all Giallo pictures for its' many moments of quiet where there may or may not be danger. And, of course, for the mechanical doll, which is really upsetting. That room full of piano wire is also pretty scary, and I never saw it as anything but a particularly diabolical trap. Isn't there a horror film where a character is cut in half at the waist by falling on a wire?

I guess what I find valuable in Suspiria is its' utter departure of logic in a genre too bound up in arbitrary rules for its' own good - don't go in the basement, don't go in the attic, don't answer the phone, don't split up. None of these rules apply in Suspiria because there's not even logic to what's happening. For better or worse this reaches its' climax in the beautiful but very unfrightening Inferno, where characters are killed by cats thrown from offscreen and hot dog vendors. I find Suspiria most rewarding if I simply view the film as raw, unsorted data. It's as if Argento got fed up with trying to find plots to wrap around his set pieces and just said "screw it, anything goes". For the record I see the same tendency in Fulci but in the case of that director, with the exception of some inspired moments in The Beyond (SOME), it doesn't work at all.

I must admit that I find my affinity for the picture somewhat distressing because my artistic temperament is saying "if he wanted to actually reduce his craft down to it's bare essentials there should have been no characters, no sets, just music and color and shock cues", but in my heart of hearts I think it's a fun film to regard as existing ("Hey, look, Escher wallpaper - because it's there!") with some moments that really got me wound up on first viewing. And I'd sure sooner be stuck with it as my sole Euro-Horror than anything by Fulci (unless Hour of the Wolf counts).

[Michael]

Suspiria has been called "Snow White in Hell". I think all the cheesiness and the messiness are intended as they offer much surreal beauty to the fantastical ballet school world. Of course the acting from the cast except Jessica Harper is over-the-top cheesy while only Jessica is quite real and decent. Jessica is drugged and dances through the technicolor nightmare and of course everything's supposed to look way off, animated and messy. One of the most luxuriously photographed films ever made, how they shot the witches' shoes clapping on the wood floor through the red/blue glow. What about the swimming pool? The blood red-lit curtains in the gym?

Geez, Narshty and Schreck, lubricate your eyes!

[MichaelB]

Geez, Narshty and Schreck, lubricate your eyes!

They're not criticising the visuals - in fact Schreck has gone out of his way to exempt Luciano Tovoli's contribution.

And I do see where they're coming from: I like Suspiria more than they do (seeing it twice on the big screen helped), but Argento can be an appallingly clunky director, with a tin ear for music as well. Actually, Suspiria is one of his better efforts musically, but most Argento soundtracks from Tenebrae onwards are borderline unlistenable.

[colinr0380]

And I do see where they're coming from: I like Suspiria more than they do (seeing it twice on the big screen helped), but Argento can be an appallingly clunky director, with a tin ear for music as well. Actually, Suspiria is one of his better efforts musically, but most Argento soundtracks from Tenebrae onwards are borderline unlistenable.

I did like The Valley over the opening credits of Phenomena and love Tenebrae's soundtrack, but have to agree that I don't really like the move after that into using interchangeable heavy metal/rock in the later films!

[Morbii]

And I do see where they're coming from: I like Suspiria more than they do (seeing it twice on the big screen helped), but Argento can be an appallingly clunky director, with a tin ear for music as well. Actually, Suspiria is one of his better efforts musically, but most Argento soundtracks from Tenebrae onwards are borderline unlistenable.

I think Argento has a great ear for music in his films - particularly the early ones (and Tenebre is one of my favorites musically).