These notes on Dario Argento's Suspiria  were written by David Vanden Bossche, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. A recently restored 4K DCP of Suspiria will screen at the Cinematheque's regular venue (4070 Vilas Hall, 821 UniversityAve) on Saturday, October 29, at 7 p.m. Admission is Free!

By David Vanden Bossche

When asked about the names of horror ‘auteurs’ – the director as ‘auteur’ obviously being derived from texts in Les Cahiers du Cinéma and the channeling of the same ideas into American film criticism by Andrew Sarris – many a horror fan will passionately disagree with critics or scholars, which means that the list of names that most anyone can agree on is rather short. Jacques Tourneur would be there for sure and so would Sam Raimi. One name that would pop up on everyone’s shortlist would definitely be that of Italian horror maestro ‘par excellence’ Dario Argento. If you were to follow up with a question about which of Argento’s films people hold in highest regard, there’s little doubt that Suspiria (1977) would win out. Forget the truly dismal recent remake by Luca Guadagnino – a film that tried so hard to infuse the source material with some kind of misguided ‘gravitas’ that it completely destroyed what makes this original so great – and grab a chance to see on the big screen why Suspiria still packs quite a punch, almost half a century after its initial release.

Dario Argento started his directing career in 1970 with L’Ucello dalle Piume di Cristallo/The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, one of the key early films in a genre that would become known as ‘Giallo’ films. The literal translation of that term is ‘Yellow’ and it referred to the color of the pages used for printing sensationalist crime stories in Italy at the time. While many different directors would shape the ‘Giallo’ genre in the seventies, Argento remained one of the most prolific amongst them with such titles as Il Gatto a Nove Code/The Cat O’Nine Tails (1971) and Tenebre/Unsane (1982). With Suspiria, Argento started a very different project that was conceptualized as a series of films that would deal with ‘the three mothers’ - three modern-day witches. Inferno from 1980 was the second part of this triptych, but it would take the Italian filmmaker 27 years to finally complete the trilogy in 2007 with La Terza Madre/The Third Mother. Of these three films, Suspiria is without any doubt the best and still remains one of the towering achievements of the European horror scene of its decade.

Radiating an almost suffocating atmosphere of dread from its first images – the arrival of a young girl in Germany during an especially ominous stormy night – the film tells the story of Sarah, a ballerina (Jessica Harper) who comes to study at a renowned dancing academy located in the woods of Badem-Württemberg in Germany. The student she meets at the door – fleeing the school in terror and turning up brutally murdered mere hours later – is but the first sign that things are not all well at the prestigious ‘Tanz Akademie’. It isn’t before long that Sarah starts realizing that the school harbors very dark secrets that are related to an ancient convent of witches. Setting up a striking contrast between the seemingly perfectly organized world of the school and the festering evil lurking within its walls, Argento goes all out in the kind of extreme baroque imagery that would become his signature in years to come. The term ‘horror-opera’ comes to mind when watching some of the exuberant murder scenes in Suspiria, scenes that completely refuse to adhere to any kind of verisimilitude and instead stylize the happenings to a point that renders them as almost abstract uses of shape, color and light. The latter element is one of Suspiria’s most distinguishing features, making prominent use of colored filters and gels that bathe some of the movies’ most memorable moments – the unforgettable finale chief among them – in pools of colored light.

As Mark Cousins and Barry Salt point out, this tendency in European cinematography (the French coined as ‘le cinema du look’) would heavily influence Hollywood style in the next decade and in the work of Argento, it finds some of its most striking use. Dario Argento had already used colored lighting to great effect in his much-admired Profondo Rosso/Deep Red (1975) but the way in which he and director of photography Luciano Tovoli here use the light as a strictly formal element – the equivalent of striking patches of paint that shape the aesthetic of such artists as Francis Bacon or Barrett Newman – is breathtaking. Tovoli would later work with Michelangelo Antonioni and Maurice Pialat (and again with Argento) before moving on to a career in Hollywood that saw him lens films for the likes of Julie Taymor and Barbet Schroeder.

Nearly fifty years after it started building its reputation as one of the finest horror films to come out of its decade, Suspiria is still a film able to baffle its audience with the daring way in which it pushes the envelope of extreme stylization. Throughout the film, there is a true sense of dread and foreboding of doom, but in retrospect one sees that none of this comes from the use of (the now fashionable) jump scares or extreme use of gory imagery (in a way the actual killings are restrained in their execution, albeit imaginatively weird and baroque). The real feeling of unease and dread is derived from strictly visual elements that give the film its unique tone of voice and rethink the concept of a horror film from a purely aesthetic angle. A notion of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s take on ‘the sublime’ creeps in here in the way the use of aesthetic and beauty can harbor the truly awe-inspiring just as much as the frightening, mesmerizing the beholder. Schopenhauer never had the chance to test his ideas against the aesthetics of cinema, but Suspiria surely holds up as a vivid illustration of this idea and still stands as a masterpiece within its genre – or any genre.