Suspiria (1977)
Dario Argento
"Bad luck isn't brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds."
On Saturday night, I went with my wife and some friends to see Blade Runner 2049. It's a great film, and takes the universe developed by the original and improves upon it with a more interesting story. That's not to say I have problems with the first one, because Blade Runner has always been a film that is more about the world and the philosophy than the plot or protagonists. The future of Blade Runner is filthy and teeming, darkness seems to ooze out of Los Angeles like sweat, the sun never shines, and rain falls endlessly. It's gorgeous like a Hieronymus Bosch painting: there's a strange and alluring universe in the details, even if there's no singular focal point.
Suspiria feels the same way.
Dario Argento is not the world's most talented writer. I've seen a handful of his films, and they all have a rough around the edges quality when it comes to screenplay and dialogue. In Suspiria for example, the original script had child actors playing the various ballerinas, but when Argento was informed that this wouldn't be possible, he didn't bother modifying the script. You can imagine how dialogue written for a child might sound a little weird coming out of an adult.
Argento also made the decision to dub all of the dialogue and foley audio in after shooting, so there are stories from the actors about how difficult it was to concentrate while people were hammering together sets all around them. And since this was a multinational team of actors working on an Italian film in the middle of Germany, nobody could understand each other. Jessica Harper (who plays our protagonist Suzy) said she'd have to bite her lip to keep from laughing as actors would speak to her in German, and she'd have to feign understanding.
None of this mattered to Dario Argento. These are minor hiccups that can be covered up with cinematography, set design, lighting, shock, horror, and a thrumming soundtrack. It reminds me of Blade Runner, yes, but also of films from John Carpenter (Escape from New York in particular), and Nicolas Winding Refn (namely The Neon Demon); films where the world around the characters-the sets, the music, the lights-may mean more than the specifics of the story.
Some might call this style over substance, and I'm inclined to agree. But this term is used pejoratively against films and I'm not sure why. Certainly there are lots of films that are flashy nonsense without any real meat on their bones, but what about something that is evocative, haunting, beautiful, or moving outside of the script? Is Blade Runner a bad film because the script lacks a traditional narrative? Is 2001 boring because we're not clued in on every plot point by dialogue? What about Wall-E? That robot doesn't say anything for the first 30 minutes.
Horror is dominated by films that work because of specific villains or monsters, relatable characters, familiar settings, and buckets of blood to develop the mortal suspense that defines the genre. Suspiria works because it eschews these rules and develops its tension from the sets, the lighting, and the music. Argento has a Hitchcockian understanding of light, angle, and color, and elevated the giallo genre into something spectacular.
So not everybody is going to love Suspiria, and that's ok. It's definitely not a film for everyone or every situation (don't show it to your friends at 2 am after a night of drinking, for example), but it's still a dazzling film to watch and listen to. And definitely one worth talking about.
Suspiria (which means "whispers") is the story of a young woman (Suzy) from America who has matriculated into a German ballet school. When she arrives (on a dark and stormy night, naturally) a girl screaming nonsense runs from the school and into the night. Nobody will let Suzy in the front door, which is probably just as well. The school looks terrifying and imposing, like a demonic ballet school in Hell:
And the interiors are no more comforting:
Just look at these shots. Argento uses light and color like paint, and just splashes it on to the point where it looks like it could start dripping. At certain times, it appears as if characters are walking in and out of abstract paintings simply because of how the sets were designed and shots were set up.
The girl who flees the school at the beginning of the movie becomes our focus for a few minutes. She runs to a nearby town and asks to stay with a friend, claiming that she'll never return to school, but doesn't reveal why.
And she's not wrong:
This is the perfect Argento giallo-style murder. It's mysterious, vicious, and gory. It's also funny in a twisted sort of way. But what really elevates it above the kills in Bay of Blood, or Don't Torture a Duckling is the grinding soundtrack and the set where the girl meets her untimely end.
It's hard not to appreciate the beauty of this shot in particular:
The bizarre broken glass pattern on the floor, the stairs at the top of the shot, and the angle make it seem like she's being murdered in an Escher painting. The way it's lit, the height of the camera, and the design of the skylight she crashes through lend a dreamlike quality to the murder. It's hyper-real, like a vivid nightmare. This is a constant refrain throughout Suspiria, the whole school feels like a place you'd run through during a nightmare, constantly turning the corner to discover you're in the exact same room you just left.
And I think this is a good time to discuss the music. Argento collaborated with Italian prog-rock band Goblin to do the soundtrack for Suspiria, and worked closely with them to get exactly what he wanted to fit the mood of the film. He partnered with Goblin a few times throughout his career, and all the soundtracks great. They're basically soundtracks to Halloween, and make excellent study music (Goblin used to be my music of choice while I was writing papers in college, and is what I listened to while writing this review).
They're so great in fact, that George Romero asked Argento to work with Goblin to develop a soundtrack for 1978's Dawn of the Dead. The title track is easily one of Goblin's best, and also one of the best opening songs in film history:
Just listening to 20 seconds of this song always puts me in the mood for the shambling undead. When that spooky synth kicks in, I get chills. It's a masterpiece.
For Suspiria, Goblin and Argento crafted a far more hypnagogic work. Whereas the Dawn of the Dead soundtrack was heavy, almost industrial sounding, Suspiria's is more subtle and ephemeral. Voices of whispering or screaming are interwoven into the music, and a lot of the tracks have an unnerving syncopation. It's creepy, it's beautiful, it's totally 70's, and it's completely fucking awesome:
I love the way it starts like a song from a music box, before crashing headlong into nightmare-land.
The soundtrack is a little odd for a ballet school, but that's ok. Dancing is meaningless to this film specifically about a ballet school, and we see practically no ballet whatsoever. Unlike Black Swan which is heavy on plies and arabesques, the best we get in Suspiria is Suzy doing 20 seconds of a warmup exercise and then passing out from exhaustion. The rest of the film is solely focused on Suzy's experience living at the school and unraveling the mystery. Nobody even mentions dancing past the midpoint of the 2nd act. Just a funny little twist from Argento, I suppose.
There's no point in detailing the rest of the plot. I don't want to spoil the payoff, but I think it's also silly to try and describe something that is essentially a moving painting set to music.
I will say that there is a pretty gnarly death that made me squirm, and now I want you to squirm too:
Here's the real trouble with Suspiria: I have no easy way to tell you how to watch it legally. There's the copy I've been linking to on YouTube, which will do in a pinch. But this is a film to enjoy in high definition, on a big screen, with the lights turned low, and the volume turned up. There was a 4K restoration making its tour of art theaters a few months ago, so if you live in a cool city near a cool movie theater, you might still get lucky. The Blu Ray based on this restoration isn't due out until after Christmas (which, what?), and all other editions I've found online are either out of print or are only for European encoded Blu Ray players.
So your questionably legal options are as follows:
1) Wait patiently for the $45(!!) Blu Ray
2) Order a region-free Blu Ray from Korea on eBay
3) Set up a proxy to stream it on Amazon Prime UK
4) Watch the YouTube version on your laptop
I'm not going to tell you which one I did.
Oh wait, there is one other option: you can wait for the American remake which is scheduled for release sometime in 2018. There's absolutely no reason to try and remake Suspiria, but some guy named Luca Guadagnino is going to give it a whirl. It will be fucking terrible but there's a possibility the soundtrack won't completely suck, since they're hiring Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke to compose it.
I don't understand remakes most of the time, but trying to remake something that was fully conceptualized and then realized by a filmmaking master just seems dumb. There's nowhere for this to go but down.
There are no two ways about it: Suspiria is a weirdo Italian masterpiece that you're just going to have to see. I can't think of anything else to say about it, other than it's good in the ways other strange but wonderful movies made by weirdo geniuses are good.
Suspiria feels the same way.
Dario Argento is not the world's most talented writer. I've seen a handful of his films, and they all have a rough around the edges quality when it comes to screenplay and dialogue. In Suspiria for example, the original script had child actors playing the various ballerinas, but when Argento was informed that this wouldn't be possible, he didn't bother modifying the script. You can imagine how dialogue written for a child might sound a little weird coming out of an adult.
Argento also made the decision to dub all of the dialogue and foley audio in after shooting, so there are stories from the actors about how difficult it was to concentrate while people were hammering together sets all around them. And since this was a multinational team of actors working on an Italian film in the middle of Germany, nobody could understand each other. Jessica Harper (who plays our protagonist Suzy) said she'd have to bite her lip to keep from laughing as actors would speak to her in German, and she'd have to feign understanding.
None of this mattered to Dario Argento. These are minor hiccups that can be covered up with cinematography, set design, lighting, shock, horror, and a thrumming soundtrack. It reminds me of Blade Runner, yes, but also of films from John Carpenter (Escape from New York in particular), and Nicolas Winding Refn (namely The Neon Demon); films where the world around the characters-the sets, the music, the lights-may mean more than the specifics of the story.
Some might call this style over substance, and I'm inclined to agree. But this term is used pejoratively against films and I'm not sure why. Certainly there are lots of films that are flashy nonsense without any real meat on their bones, but what about something that is evocative, haunting, beautiful, or moving outside of the script? Is Blade Runner a bad film because the script lacks a traditional narrative? Is 2001 boring because we're not clued in on every plot point by dialogue? What about Wall-E? That robot doesn't say anything for the first 30 minutes.
Horror is dominated by films that work because of specific villains or monsters, relatable characters, familiar settings, and buckets of blood to develop the mortal suspense that defines the genre. Suspiria works because it eschews these rules and develops its tension from the sets, the lighting, and the music. Argento has a Hitchcockian understanding of light, angle, and color, and elevated the giallo genre into something spectacular.
So not everybody is going to love Suspiria, and that's ok. It's definitely not a film for everyone or every situation (don't show it to your friends at 2 am after a night of drinking, for example), but it's still a dazzling film to watch and listen to. And definitely one worth talking about.
Suspiria (which means "whispers") is the story of a young woman (Suzy) from America who has matriculated into a German ballet school. When she arrives (on a dark and stormy night, naturally) a girl screaming nonsense runs from the school and into the night. Nobody will let Suzy in the front door, which is probably just as well. The school looks terrifying and imposing, like a demonic ballet school in Hell:
And the interiors are no more comforting:
Just look at these shots. Argento uses light and color like paint, and just splashes it on to the point where it looks like it could start dripping. At certain times, it appears as if characters are walking in and out of abstract paintings simply because of how the sets were designed and shots were set up.
The girl who flees the school at the beginning of the movie becomes our focus for a few minutes. She runs to a nearby town and asks to stay with a friend, claiming that she'll never return to school, but doesn't reveal why.
And she's not wrong:
Watch until about 14:12
This is the perfect Argento giallo-style murder. It's mysterious, vicious, and gory. It's also funny in a twisted sort of way. But what really elevates it above the kills in Bay of Blood, or Don't Torture a Duckling is the grinding soundtrack and the set where the girl meets her untimely end.
It's hard not to appreciate the beauty of this shot in particular:
The bizarre broken glass pattern on the floor, the stairs at the top of the shot, and the angle make it seem like she's being murdered in an Escher painting. The way it's lit, the height of the camera, and the design of the skylight she crashes through lend a dreamlike quality to the murder. It's hyper-real, like a vivid nightmare. This is a constant refrain throughout Suspiria, the whole school feels like a place you'd run through during a nightmare, constantly turning the corner to discover you're in the exact same room you just left.
And I think this is a good time to discuss the music. Argento collaborated with Italian prog-rock band Goblin to do the soundtrack for Suspiria, and worked closely with them to get exactly what he wanted to fit the mood of the film. He partnered with Goblin a few times throughout his career, and all the soundtracks great. They're basically soundtracks to Halloween, and make excellent study music (Goblin used to be my music of choice while I was writing papers in college, and is what I listened to while writing this review).
They're so great in fact, that George Romero asked Argento to work with Goblin to develop a soundtrack for 1978's Dawn of the Dead. The title track is easily one of Goblin's best, and also one of the best opening songs in film history:
Just listening to 20 seconds of this song always puts me in the mood for the shambling undead. When that spooky synth kicks in, I get chills. It's a masterpiece.
For Suspiria, Goblin and Argento crafted a far more hypnagogic work. Whereas the Dawn of the Dead soundtrack was heavy, almost industrial sounding, Suspiria's is more subtle and ephemeral. Voices of whispering or screaming are interwoven into the music, and a lot of the tracks have an unnerving syncopation. It's creepy, it's beautiful, it's totally 70's, and it's completely fucking awesome:
I love the way it starts like a song from a music box, before crashing headlong into nightmare-land.
The soundtrack is a little odd for a ballet school, but that's ok. Dancing is meaningless to this film specifically about a ballet school, and we see practically no ballet whatsoever. Unlike Black Swan which is heavy on plies and arabesques, the best we get in Suspiria is Suzy doing 20 seconds of a warmup exercise and then passing out from exhaustion. The rest of the film is solely focused on Suzy's experience living at the school and unraveling the mystery. Nobody even mentions dancing past the midpoint of the 2nd act. Just a funny little twist from Argento, I suppose.
There's no point in detailing the rest of the plot. I don't want to spoil the payoff, but I think it's also silly to try and describe something that is essentially a moving painting set to music.
I will say that there is a pretty gnarly death that made me squirm, and now I want you to squirm too:
Watch until 1:08:45
Here's the real trouble with Suspiria: I have no easy way to tell you how to watch it legally. There's the copy I've been linking to on YouTube, which will do in a pinch. But this is a film to enjoy in high definition, on a big screen, with the lights turned low, and the volume turned up. There was a 4K restoration making its tour of art theaters a few months ago, so if you live in a cool city near a cool movie theater, you might still get lucky. The Blu Ray based on this restoration isn't due out until after Christmas (which, what?), and all other editions I've found online are either out of print or are only for European encoded Blu Ray players.
So your questionably legal options are as follows:
1) Wait patiently for the $45(!!) Blu Ray
2) Order a region-free Blu Ray from Korea on eBay
3) Set up a proxy to stream it on Amazon Prime UK
4) Watch the YouTube version on your laptop
I'm not going to tell you which one I did.
Oh wait, there is one other option: you can wait for the American remake which is scheduled for release sometime in 2018. There's absolutely no reason to try and remake Suspiria, but some guy named Luca Guadagnino is going to give it a whirl. It will be fucking terrible but there's a possibility the soundtrack won't completely suck, since they're hiring Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke to compose it.
I don't understand remakes most of the time, but trying to remake something that was fully conceptualized and then realized by a filmmaking master just seems dumb. There's nowhere for this to go but down.
Summary:
There are no two ways about it: Suspiria is a weirdo Italian masterpiece that you're just going to have to see. I can't think of anything else to say about it, other than it's good in the ways other strange but wonderful movies made by weirdo geniuses are good.
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