All that plot happens in the first twenty minutes of this film that is often derided as a plotless exercise in style over substance. Of course, if you do see it there's every chance you might agree. The richness of the visuals, bludgeoning of the score and the intensity of the violence really can distract folk from what is a pretty eventful ride along the darker side of Supernature Strasse. Director and co-writer Dario Argento, having made the monumental giallo movie Deep Red broke from his string of bloody thrillers to venture into horror. But due to a few twists and turns and telephone game developments he made Suspiria which, while it often looks like all out horror, forges its own path beside the genre.
Argento began with De Quincey's essay on European occultism Suspiria de Profundis about a network of powerful witches. Daria Nicolodi added a lot of folklore and one of her own dreams that informed the finale of the film. She also wrote the characters of the students, as violent as it always was, as children. Put all that together and you will have a densely structured mystical epic with unwatchable violence against children. So take some stuff away, bit by bit, but keep everything that still stands pushed forward and you get this film: a sleepwalking sprint through a nightmare.
So when Sarah is trying to escape from the shadowy assailant in the back corridors and stops to build a staircase to the window with old travel trunks while the latch is being caressed teasingly with a cut throat razor, it feels like a dream where the threat could be something innocuous by day, and barriers to action can be gratingly stubborn. The town square scene's alternating pace adds anxiety to the thick eeriness. To any who complain that there's not a lot of witchiness on display for a witchy movie but that scene, the opening murder extravaganza and all of the other kills take on a queasy feel when considered as acts of the witches. The one time we do see anything like a ritual it is set in the tense climactic finale and its calmness feels very ugly. Monsters can look like anyone on the electoral roll in a dream. Argento wanted an intense colour pallet dominated by blue and red. Intentional use of old filmstock and the soon to be outmoded Technicolor process he sought a oversaturated look like a live action Disney animation. The near-psychedelic effect of this drives the nightmare.
Argento again paired up with Claudio Simonetti's Goblin for the score. Their music for Deep Red had already added power to an already charged film. Here it ranges from the fragile but insistent short modal melody on a celesta so perfectly sealed it can be repeated at length without exhausting its listeners. Under its medieval delicacy a raft of other voices waft or rasp or thud or groan as synthesisers, tom toms, harsh voiced whispers and wails can build to a cyclonic roar or fall to a tiny jangle. If Deep Red's music had boldly gone prog baroque this one seems to grow from the visuals like a fungus. I was lucky enough to witness a live performance of it by Goblin to a projection of the film at ACMI a decade ago which was a hell of a thrill.
The end credits make a big statement out of how this film was shot in English. This really means that the Europudding cast had to learn their lines phonetically which can give their performances a stilted quality that in turn can leave the impression that no one in the movie can act a single line. Well, all dialogue in Italian films at this time and many years afterwards was post synch. Even the native or fluent Anglophones like star Jessica Harper or Udo Kier recorded their lines post production. But for me this really just feeds the dream logic tone by keeping the action a step shy of realism.
That said, Jessica Harper's Suzy is an unexpected centre of gravity, a foot on the floor while trying to sleep drunk. She undercuts her childlike doe eyed beauty with New York smarts, giving us an effortlessly assured guiding presence, even in peril (and peril in Suspiria is hard edged and bloody) We watch her and think she'd make a great lifelong friend.
That's another thing; friend, not lover. For all the potential sexiness in the setting of leotard nirvana sex is the one thing that does not visit the screen. Like the too high door handles and puerility of some of the spatting dialogue, this is the original intent of casting children showing through. The problems of presenting children under such attack and then possibly worsened by erotic suggestion pretty much forbade that approach before it could take wing. What remains is more unreality, more nightmare.
Joan Bennett shows as a Mme Blanc as porcelain white as her name with a pair of sapphire eyes that attack. Udo Kier as Mr Exposition keeps to himself in a thankless role (which I use to call the infomercial scene), needing only a little gravitas to augment his prettiness. But it is Alida Valli who really shines here, barnstorming as the strutting Miss Tanner, as gleefully Teutonic as close to a Swastika-ed camp guard as you'd expect in a serious teacher of dance. While she does take pains to add a little range to her character, she leans on her sheer magnetic force, the perfect nemesis for Harper's affable modern woman.
I first saw this as a rented VHS. It's a very different experience from the wide screen spectacle of seeing it at a venue like Melbourne's Astor picture palace. In 4X3 the academy looms out as a great red wall, offering no relief. The pool scene is far more intimate and the murder scenes pop from being magnified. A little while after, I bought the Anchor Bay triple DVD set with extras and a soundtrack CD. The remastering job was stellar with intense colour, crystal audio and a big washy surround mix. From there the presentations only improved right up to the stellar Synapse 4K that I watched for this article. If I miss the look of it on video tape it has more to do with the thrill of the first viewing of a favourite than the medium but the memory of the claustrophobic version remains.
A friend of mine remarked, as I was running the 4K, that he doesn't think he even sees the film anymore when it's on. It is so eminently rewatchable that many full or partial views later the violence, once confronting and merciless, now feels safely familiar and the slight feel of the plotting lets it down. But last night I watched it without distraction or breaks with the Dolby Atmos on high, enveloping me in its restless energy, and just let the force of it in. One complaint I recall, especially when people were comparing it to the pointless reimagining from 2018, that this dance movie has no dancing but that's all I can call the Sarah chase scene. People who direct fight scenes in films are credited as choreographers for good reason. Even the first eyepoppingly violent murder scene has a balletic sense of movement. I suppose that's the trouble with some viewers and this movie. The ballet looks like murder and the horror looks like a dream. Well, works for me.
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