For I want to say my birthday, my mother-in-law pulled from my wishlist the 4K Blu-ray of Suspiria, a movie which I have somehow never seen, despite having felt its allure since at least as far back as when I bought The Sinful Nuns of St. Valentine[1]. I cannot even say what puts them, for me, in the same category. Objectively, they are not, but it’s the kind of thing where I just saw it in that period twenty years ago where I was buying up weird ’70s movies, so they are all jumbled together in my mind.
Learning that Suspiria existed was also my introduction to Dario Argento. I’ve seen a number of his movies since, but I always felt like this was his masterpiece. I do not especially know why that was my belief, only that it was. After the fact, I’m not so sure anymore, but there’s a lot to like here. This girl shows up in a weirdly Greek German city on a dark and stormy night to go to ballerina college, but they won’t let her in, and also this other girl is running away in terror.
Later, the other girl is dead, and they do let her in but everything is creepy all the time, and also they are just minimally pretending that learning how to dance is important, amidst all the food storage problems and exponentially amplified footfalls down the corridors outside the dormitories and weirdly vampiric Romanian handymen. This is not a giallo, and I think that is the single biggest departure from expectations. Because although they sort of acted like there was, this is not a movie that had a mystery to solve.
Instead, it has a series of vignettes happening to or near the American ballerina fish-out-of-water person, and they are all designed to be unsettling. The dog attack was not scary because it was gory, but because of the peculiar and shocking circumstances. The razorwire was not scary because it was razorwire, but because it was completely inexplicable, and because of how long the scene went on. And so forth. The entire movie was one long stretch after another of “this spooky and/or shocking scene is just going to keep going and going and going, long past the point of tolerability.”
My only real complaint is that it shared the Rosemary’s Baby problem of people in the 20th century never having heard of witches before. I just cannot wrap my head around who in the script room thought this kind of thing needed to be explained. What audience were they worried about leaving behind?
Before I go, I would be remiss to not mention the spectacular restoration this movie has undergone. The color palette is maybe the second most important character. The dance academy building is not red; it is drenched in red. The nighttime lighting is so far from today’s hyper-realistic “oh, is it dark in the story? then it’s by god dark on your screen” methodology as to basically be an inverse comparison to when people in 1939 discovered that color film existed while making The Wizard of Oz. No dim but serviceable lighting here; no, if it’s dark, it’s electric blue, or green, or whatever they felt like / had on hand in the moment. The important thing is, with every scene, you feel like Argento is throwing a bucket of paint at you, except beautifully instead of messily. …unless the scene calls for that, of course.
Last thing: that Goblin score? Maybe one step below being as iconic as your John Carpenters or your [guy who did Friday the 13th]s. Chef’s kiss.
[1] A movie which I may or may not have seen but definitely have not reviewed. Hmmm.
