Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
“Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
But the iris is the flower
THAT WILL BE THE END OF YOU!”
Even in the annals of Italian horror films, notorious for their extreme gore and hallucinogenic imagery (pioneered by the likes of Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci), Dario Argento’s Suspiria stands out.
Conceived as horror’s answer to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and The Wizard of Oz, Suspiria finds a young American ballet student, Suzy, (Two Cents alum Jessica Harper, The Phantom of the Paradise) arriving at a prestigious academy in Germany. If the dark and stormy night didn’t tip you off that something was wrong, the iconic sonic nightmare that is Goblin’s score should do the trick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pins1y0XAa0
Immediately after Suzy arrives, the bodies start piling up, with all the operatic flair that only Argento could conjure up, leaving it up to this outsider to find out the truth about these killings, this school, and the mysterious goings-ons.
Things get weird.
Suspiria has long proved to be a contentious title in the horror classic canon, with some upholding its stunning visual design and imagery as a high water mark for the genre, while others denounce the film’s nonsensical narrative.
With the film’s recent news of a rediscovered uncut Italian 35mm print, upcoming Blu-ray, and availability via Amazon Prime, we decided to put it to the team and our guests. Is Suspiria one of the classics of the genre, or is this one lullaby that has played itself out?
Did you get a chance to watch along with us this week? Want to recommend a great (or not so great) film for the whole gang to cover? Comment below or post on our Facebook or hit us up on Twitter!
Next Week’s Pick:
We lost an icon this week with the passing of George Romero. Romero changed the genre, the medium, and the world when he created Night of the Living Dead on a shoestring budget in 1968, and so we can think of no better tribute than to add one more appreciation. It’s available on Amazon Prime but also public domain —HERE is the best transfer we’ve found.
We’re coming to get you, Barbara.
Submissions are welcome anytime before midnight on Thursday. They can be sent to [email protected]
Our Guests
Lauren Humphries-Brooks
I first saw Suspiria with college friends on a Halloween night. That morning, not a single one of us had slept well, our dreams haunted by endless corridors and evil lurking beyond the wall of sleep. Not since childhood had I experienced a film that haunted me for days afterwards.
It’s a mistake to approach Suspiria as a structured, narrative film. Suspiria isn’t a film — it’s a fever dream, a nightmare, a movie just barely standing on the edge of reality. I’ve seen it five times and always forget that there’s a plot, involving a young woman entering a ballet school and discovering a coven of witches. The plot doesn’t matter. The characters barely matter. What matters is the experience.
And what an experience it is. The haunting, throbbing soundtrack. The metallic tinkle as a girl falls into piano wires. The flashes of lightning, the blood red against stark white, the up-close visions of murdered girls. Suspiria gets under your skin, awakening half forgotten terrors from the depths of your poor, tortured psyche. Suspiria is the one Argento film that has kept me awake at night. On dark and stormy nights, I can hear the Goblin soundtrack in my sleep. (@lhbizness)
Michael Fitzgerald
Yes, it looks beautiful, but the story made no sense. Hell, if they just let the girl live off campus there would have been nothing to worry about.
And how did they get that room filled with razor wire?
Fade In:
Outside a dance academy in Freiburg, a delivery guy knocks on the door. The door is opened by Madame Blanc.
Madame Blanc: Hello.
Delivery Guy: Good morning Madame. I hate to bother you so early in the morning but I could use your help.
Madame Blanc: How so young man?
Delivery Guy: Well you see, I am supposed to deliver one-hundred and twenty-nine meters of razor wire to this address.
The Delivery Guy hands Madame Blanc his invoice.
Delivery Guy: But all that’s here is your dance academy. I must have the wrong address.
Madame Blanc: No, this is the right address.
Delivery Guy: Really.
Madame Blanc: Yes, really.
Delivery Guy: Are you having fun with me Madame?
Madame Blanc: No, I placed the order.
Delivery Guy: Seriously?
Madame Blanc: Seriously.
Delivery Guy: Pardon me Madame but I must ask, why does a dance academy need one-hundred and twenty-nine meters of razor wire.
Madame Blanc: The Academy intends to put on a production of Swan Lake.
Delivery Guy: Swan Lake… with razor wire.
Madame Blanc: It is a new interpretation, very avant-garde.
Delivery Guy: Okay.
After a short awkward pause.
Delivery Guy: So where do you want the wire?
Madame Blanc: There is a small room on the third floor with a window near ceiling that opens on to another room for no particular reason.
Delivery Guy: You know, traditionally people keep their razor wire outside the house.
Madame Blanc: JUST DO AS I SAY!
Delivery Guy: Whatever.
The Delivery Guy walks back to his truck to retrieve the razor wire.
Madame Blanc (whispers to herself): Tonight your dog will kill you.
Delivery Guy: What did you say?
Madame Blanc: What?
Delivery Guy: I thought I heard you say something.
Madame Blanc: No. No, it was nothing.
Delivery Guy: Okay.
Madame Blanc: Do you have a dog?
Delivery Guy: A what?
Madame Blanc: A dog. Do you have a dog?
Delivery Guy: No Madame.
Madame Blanc: Well, you should get one. This afternoon in fact. Right after you place the razor wire in the small third floor room. That way you will have a dog tonight.
Delivery Guy: Why should I get a dog?
Madame Blanc: Dogs help us fill our time in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with the stories of our lives.
Delivery Guy: I’m more of a cat person.
Madame Blanc: Get a dog.
Delivery Guy: I think I may be allergic to dogs.
Madame Blanc: GET A DOG!
Delivery Guy: Okay, I’ll get a dog.
Madame Blanc: Today.
Delivery Guy: Today?
Madame Blanc: Yes, today, so that it is with you tonight.
Delivery Guy: Okay, I’ll get a dog today.
Later that evening the Delivery Guy’s new dog Pepe, a Pomeranian, nuzzled him viciously until he gave him a belly rub and Snausage.
The End. @MikeAFitzgerald)
Suspiria is a nightmare. It’s a cinematic fever-dream whose effects lurk in the back of your mind, subtly chipping away at your unconscious. At least, that is my experience of the film. From a purely narrative level, the film is perhaps nothing new (especially if you have seen any other Italian horror films from the same time) — girl’s arrival at a ballet school coincides with a series of strange events and grisly murders. The plot is not the draw here (although Jessica Harper is quite good as the new student), nor is the film as gratuitous in terms of sex or gore as one might expect (even though there are some memorably intense sequences). Suspiria succeeds most on the level of atmosphere, tone, and style. There is a level of dread and surreality established in the opening scene that builds incrementally throughout the film, all the way up to the its hallucinatory climax. This feeling is created through performance, cinematography, mise-en-scene, and sound. The Technicolor process used on the film, combined with the lighting choices, make Suspiria one of the prettiest (for want of a better word) color horror films ever. Goblin’s soundtrack for the film is one of the all-time great horror scores. If you’re new to Argento (or Italian horror in general), this is a great place to start. Suspiria is a film one doesn’t so much watch as experience, and with that in mind it remains one of my favorite cinematic experiences. (Trey Lawson)
Luke Tipton
Maybe it was a case of sky high expectations, but Suspiria left me scratching my head a little. It’s a film that’s I’ve been wanting to see for years, and one who’s reputation as one of the Greatest Horror Movies precedes it. I wanted to love this, and was thoroughly expecting to love this. But I don’t think I did.
The movie had a lot going for it. It was definitely pushing my favorite horror buttons; I loved the Goblin score; I loved the atmosphere and colors; the impressionistic dreamlike quality; the artificiality; the baroque set designs; the elaborate set pieces and the gruesome kills; the maggots falling from the ceiling and the occult hokum. The problem was none of it gelled for me. It wound up a very pretty mess, with a senseless, hopelessly convoluted plot, flat, uninteresting characters and distracting overdubbed dialogue. Like, I get it; the movie’s all about the atmosphere, the feeling. That feeling never overtook me though.
And I know it was standard practice in the Italian film industry to overdub dialogue in that era, but there’s never a time when I haven’t found it a major distraction from the action onscreen. This is especially true when the dialogue is coming from a known American actress (star of the Brian De Palma’s fever-pitched cult favorite Phantom of the Paradise no less), and the audio does not sync with the mouth movements on screen.
But I’m not writing Suspiria off yet. I want to give the film a second chance when that newly discovered 35mm Italian print comes through my town this fall. I suspect seeing it in a dark theater with a large crowd will alter the effect considerably. There’s definitely a feeling in there I wouldn’t mind catching. (@stipton82)
Nick Spacek:
There’s a lot made of the concept that Italian horror and gialli are all visual, no plot, but Dario Argento’s Suspiria easily gives lie to that statement. Something of an intriguingly supernatural giallo, Suspiria is so visually stunning, one could watch it with the volume muted and still enjoy the hell out of it.
Granted, you wouldn’t want to — that Goblin score is just too amazing to keep silent — but you could, really. Suspiria has a supposedly convoluted plot, but when you boil it down to its essence, the film is basically about a young woman at a school trying to figure out what’s so strange about it. All of the acting is so expressive that one can readily infer emotions without hearing a word.
Add in blue and red and purple hues, and Suspiria is a film from which you can’t tear your gaze. (@nuthousepunks)
Brendan Agnew:
It’s a hell of a thing to go into a Dario Argento film cold. I’d known the film only by its director’s reputation and the most vague hints of its subject manner, but from that opening (the reprised Goblin cue that drifts in as the airport doors slide apart) I was transfixed. It doesn’t hurt that Suspiria has one of the best kick-to-the-seat-of-your-pants openings across the horror genre, but the overall surrealist vibe of the picture really stuck to the inside of my head. There were a few bits that stuck out, from the slightly awkward dubbing (as in, even moreso than a Leone western at times) to somewhat haphazard handling of the supporting cast. But the film also packs in some truly bonkers moments to sustain interest even if it didn’t have a number of other things to recommend. Which it does.
Possibly my favorite of which is a hard left turn in the third act once it’s time to find out what exactly is going on at the ballerina school, at which point the film turns into some kind of Technicolor dark fairy tale intent on going completely bananas. It’s a film that ends with almost as much of a brain smear as its opening, and that kind of takeoff and landing is usually enough for me to recommend a horror film.
But Suspiria has enough of a trip between that I’d do so regardless. Your mileage may vary, but this film very much worked its magic on me. (@BLCAgnew)
The Team
Bright colors, interesting sound design, gruesome visuals, great soundtrack… this all sounds captivating. Yet, after several years of consuming a good deal of non-linear theatre of cruelty ala Jodorowsky, Italian gialli, and many more films — both horror and non-horror — without clear narrative than ever before in my life, I still find the lack of a strong story here to be a real weakness.
To be clear, I liked Suspiria more than previously. On my second (or possibility third?) viewing, I definitely like this film far less than “the internet”. It still remains closer to the bottom of the Argento I’ve seen than the top, but I have hope that it may grow on me more in time.
Classic or not, I’m unwilling to accept this as Argento’s masterpiece. Give me Deep Red all day everyday and leave this one on the shelf, but at least it’s really pretty to look at. (@ThePaintedMan)
There are Argento films where the narrative hangs together and the story flows in a way that you expect, you know, a story to flow. Deep Red, for example, is a fairly tight slasher-mystery with a resolution that fits together and earns its big crazy payoffs and reveals.
But that’s not what Suspiria is interested in. At all. From the opening frames of the movie, with a car rushing through a darkened forest while rain falls, lightning crashes, and a terrified woman flees, we are in a realm of pure nightmare, and Argento feels no need to give you any ‘reality’ to hold onto as he plunges from one bravura sequence of magic and murder to another. To quibble over the ‘logic’ of how anything that happens in Suspiria is to miss the point, as the film never once professes to exist within our sane world.
Like Hausu or the original Evil Dead, Suspiria is aiming for something deeper, more primal, in its scares. It wants to return to the mindset you had as a child, when every dark space contained a monster waiting to spring, witches lurked behind every closed door, and the rules made no sense and could change at any moment. I can appreciate why this isn’t to all tastes, but Suspiria is a dream I love to drown in. (@TheTrueBrendanF)
I’ve seen a handful of Argento but this was a first time watch for me. At his best, he is a director who DEFINES “phantasmagoria” (we don’t need to go into his worst). He knows how to mix music, lighting, sound, and colorful crazyness into something surreal and horrifying.
I have to admit feeling slightly disappointed because I love Phenomena so much and Suspiria couldn’t quite match that high, but that said, Suspiria is pretty sensational in its own right. The tone is set pretty much immediately with Suzy’s rain-soaked arrival at the airport and only gets nuttier from there: inky black nights, crimson visuals, warranted paranoia, an operatic set design that evokes the grandest of guignol, and a killer finish. (@VforVashaw)
Watch it on Amazon Prime:
Next Week’s Pick:
Further Reading: