Director(s)	Dario Argento
Principal Cast	Jessica Harper as Suzy Bannion Stefania Casini as Sarah Alida Valli as Miss Tanner Joan Bennett as Madame Blanc Flavio Bucci as Daniel Barbara Magnolfi as Olga Udo Kier as Dr. Frank Mandel Rudolf Schündler as Professor Milius Eva Axén as Pat
Release Date	1977
Language(s)	Italian
Running Time	99 minutes

The sound of drums progresses into a hypnotic rock lullaby, punctuated with whispers, screeches, and ominous ad libs. As the opening credits continue and the title track, aptly titled “Suspiria”, continues to play, narration suddenly cuts over the same, an indication to the audience that the following story will operate more as a poetic fairy tale than a straightforward tale consistent with a logic we normally expect. The narrator explains that a young American woman, Suzy Bannion, has decided to perfect her ballet skills at a prestigious dance academy in Freiburg, Germany and has flown out to attend it. As the narration ends the score becomes more violent and cuts out. The opening credits give way to Suzy entering the Freiburg airport. Everything seems normal – that is until the door leading out of the airport opens up. As they open, “Suspiria” plays once again. However, as soon as the doors close, the score disappears. This sequence repeats itself – the score playing while the doors open and disappearing when the close again – signals to the audience that outside the world of the airport the rules of reality no longer apply. Suzy exits the airport and the score suddenly bursts through the reality of the world culminating in a crescendo with a burst of rain to visually signify the torrential chaos to come.

Suzy desperately tries to flag down a cab, eventually finding one but becoming soaked in the process. As she gets in the vehicle to dry herself, the lighting in the movie reminds the audience that this is now a world of fantasy, as the screen is tinged with neon blues and reds, interrupted by bits of yellow periodically. The reds become an orange while the blues become a green, creating an everchanging color palette which keeps the eyes fully engaged with the screen. Harper’s face becomes the canvas upon which the colors dance making Suzy appear as though she’s being interpellated by and into this new phantasmal world.

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Her cab makes its way through an ominous forest filled with a plethora of tall and imposing trees, as Goblin hisses “Witch” in an eerie and disorienting way as the score still rages on. The cab pulls up to the school, an imposing building with a red exterior as the score comes to a close. She exits the cab and sees a girl, Pat, muttering nonsensical worlds by the entranceway and running away in a hurry. Suzy attempts to get into the school but is told to go away by someone on the other side. Desperate to get out of the rain, she gets back in the cab and looks for a place to stay until she can solve the issue the next day. As the car drives back through the woods, she sees Pat running through the woods. A new song starts to play – “Witch” which replaces the melodic “Suspiria” with a more intense and aggressive beat that conveys an immediate sense of danger as opposed to wonder. The movie switches from Suzy in the car to Pat as she she enters a dormitory whose architecture radiates an absolute aesthetic beauty, with pleasing geometric compositions littering every part of the room. The walls are bathed in in a blood red. However, the real oddity with this entrance room is its size, which feels exceptionally large when compared to Pat’s small frame, highlighting how tiny and powerless she is compared to the threat that she’s trying to get away from. The room threatens to swallow her up whole.

She hurriedly rushes up the ornately decorated elevator to visit and stay with a friend of hers for the night. Obviously perturbed, even the smallest disturbance sets her off. She’s worried, but we still don’t know what it is that’s tormenting her. The camera switches to a view of her from outside the building, slowly zooming in like a typical POV shot in Argento’s other giallo movies. As she continues to look out, she happens upon a dimly lit set of yellow eyes and is immediately accosted by a pair of arms which break through the window, dragging her out of the living unit. She’s brutally murdered along with her friend, and the movie returns to Suzy, finally ready to start after giving the audience a preview of everything they should be expecting.

This is Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria, a fairy tale from hell born straight from German Expressionism given life through immaculate sets, gorgeous neon lighting, a bombastic score that never lets up, and compositions that make the piece feel more like a set of paintings than an actual movie.

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The plot is sparse and as the narration at the beginning informs us, is more a throughline by which a series of nightmarish images and ideas are allowed to come to life. The story loosely involves Suzy experiencing a strange series of events while attending the supposedly prestigious dance academy. Pat’s death is merely the domino that sets the series of unexplainable happenings in motion. Who or what is the killer and what is their actual motivation? Certain scenes in the movie hearken back to traditional giallo images (ex: a POV shot of the killer looking at Pat and her subsequent brutal and gory murder), while other shots invoke a supernatural feeling that can’t be explained. The contrast helps drive the mystery and Suzy’s journey forward.

At a higher level , the movie is a coming of age story, about a young girl trying to find her place in a new and alienating world. One of Suzy’s first tasks is even getting to the school, because her accent makes it hard for the German driver to understand what she’s actually saying. Once she gets to the school she’s denied entrance. Once she’s allowed into the school, she’s immediately bombarded with requests to pay money for various services and items. It’s like a nightmare of what a kid has to look forward to as an adult, and this idea is reflected in every aspect of the set. The rooms are large and seem to swallow up the characters’ agency. Doors are slightly out of reach and make her and her classmates seem infantile. She’s constantly put in a position where her decisions are ignored in favor of instructors at the school who seem to have their own priorities. This larger thematic schema gives the horror a new dimension. It’s scary enough to navigate an alien world, but doing that as a younger person broaching into adulthood and being thrust into a new dimension of responsibility is something else all together. Combined with the supernatural happenings and bouts of violence that surround her, the world of Suspiria feels more like a gorgeous hellscape.

This is reflected in the genius visual design of the movie, which might be one of the best uses of color in cinema – full stop. Almost every scene is draped in a neon blue or red – the former representing an impending doom and the latter representing violence and death. At every turn these colors are transformed by the presence of a yellow, which transforms passive moments into active moments of tension. As red turns to orange, the characters and audience are lulled into a false sense of security that quickly evaporates as it becomes obvious that the characters are doomed. Likewise, as blue turns to green the danger that’s targeting the characters becomes active and threatens to fully envelop them in its violence. Luciano Tovoli works an ethereal magic in every scene in this way, by pushing colors to their absolute limits. There are dozens of shots which can be printed and framed as works of arts. A movie is lucky if it gets a few, but Tovoli makes Suspiria a buffet filled with them.

This combined with the score transforms the movie from a simple murder mystery into cinematic poetry, as every moment is punctuated with Goblin’s score. No piece of music ever feels like it overstays its welcome and each of them immediately tell the audience what they need to know – a character is being observed by the killer, a character is in danger, things are going absolutely off the walls. It’s hard to watch the movie and not be moved along by the score which is not only effective, but genuinely catchy. From the sharp and loud pounding noises in “Witch” that get the heart rate pumping to the whispery and otherworldly “Suspiria” the soundscape of the movie feels like a whole other character.

Keeping all the pieces of the movie moving together is Argento’s trademark pacing and macabre sensibilities. Just because he’s tackling a different horror sub-genre doesn’t mean that his usual bag of tricks won’t work. In fact I’d argue that the supernatural sensibilities of the story (due in part to the wonderful work of his undermentioned fellow screenwriter, Daria Nicolodi) let him push his ideas to their absolute extreme. Whereas his previous movies, like Deep Red or The Bird With the Crystal Plumage , had to obey some level of logistics when it came to killing victims and solving the mystery, Suspiria is allowed to explore sequences that would otherwise be impossible. Characters die in ways that you’d never be able to predict which helps sustain a palpable sense of tension throughout the movie. It’s impossible to know how violence will happen , but because the colors and music tell you something is going to happen, every moment is injected with a dread that only continues to build one bloody death at a time. The first 9 minutes of the movie starts the tension off right and the movie never lets up until the end credit sequence starts up again.

Many people place this as one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Many others go one step further and rank Suspiria as one of the most important cinematic achievements to date (given how many movies have been influenced by its visual style, I’d say that’s probably accurate) . I consider myself firmly in both of these camps. I’m someone who usually loves a good, layered, and intricate plot that ties into a nuanced set of themes. However, when it comes to Suspiria, all those inhibitions seem to float away because the magic of the movie, the poetic way it moves through its score and visual style, speaks to something more important than a need for logic and precision. This is a cinema in the purest sense of the word. It’s a piece of art that must be experienced and not explained. If you haven’t yet had the chance to see this masterpiece, I urge you to give it a chance. Let Argento take you to a world of nightmares.

Report Card

TLDR	Suspiria is a masterpiece that has to be seen to be understood. Its sensuous compositions are visually arresting at all times, with many stills from the movie being good enough to be framed as wall art. The score by Goblin keeps the tension high, turning the barebones story into a audiovisual poem that operates on the logic of a nightmare. The supernatural leanings of the story give Argento ample room to explore his macabre tendencies and help create some of the most striking displays of violence
Rating	10/10
Grade	A+

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