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The Appropriate Tune: 'Suspiria (Main Theme)' by Goblin
There’s probably a hard limit for how many times Dario Argento will keep showing up on this list. Not that we’re almost out of his films to cover, but despite giallo not being the most diverse subgenre in the world it still feels like a disservice to devote 90 percent of the attention towards only one artist. I’d feel the same way if the only westerns I covered were Sergio Leone or the only animated films I watched were Hayao Miyazaki, a man cannot survive on bread alone you understand. Fate willing we will eventually get through the entirety of his ‘classic’ period, but to use the vernacular of this blog Argento is not a Lynch or a Carpenter level director. And that’s fine, the opinion of this blog means jack shit anyway.
Released in 1977, Suspiria was directed by Dario Argento, written by Argento and Daria Nicolodi and produced by Claudio Argento through Seda Spettacoli, based on the novel “Suspiria de Profundis” by Thomas De Quincey. Jessica Harper stars as Suzy Bannion, an American girl invited to join the prestigious Tam Academy in German, a ballet dancer’s paradise. Unfortunately she arrived at the peak of plot convenience season, as the night Suzy arrives is also the night when a former student of the school is horrifically murdered. She tries to go about her day in peace, only more and more strange things start to happen. Maggots falling from the ceiling, bizarre noises at night, a slight bleeding from every orifice in the face. What is going on at the Tam Academy and what happened to the murdered girl that passed by Suzy in the night when she arrived? Are the faculty oblivious, or do they know more than they seem? Against her better judgment, Suzy decides to investigate.
Mysterious though it may seem don’t be fooled, as with the other Argento films we’ve covered on this blog the mystery is simply a smokescreen used to hide the juicy giallo core within. Gruesome, overwrought deaths, malicious, psychotic villains, virginal maidens, the works. Burgeoning cinephiles might be led into thinking that because these are foreign language films that they are more refined or thought-provoking, but that’s not really the case. Giallo scratches the same itch as a Texas Chainsaw Massacre or a Friday the 13th: pretty girls screaming while being murdered or trying to avoid being murdered. In the case of Suspiria it might even scratch harder; Argento sees a scene of a girl being stabbed to death and says ‘what if we had a part where the audience sees her heart beating in her mutilated chest cavity and then we see the killer stabbing the heart?’ It is the penny dreadful and the pulp novel set to motion, base entertainment that was later supplanted by the Jerry Springer Show and twitter drama wrapped up in a blanket of cinematography. Sometimes we want a steak, sometimes we want a burger, and in that case Suspiria is like one of those A-1 steak burgers.
Suspiria is also the film that firmly established Argento’s reputation as a visual storytelling. The first comparison that came to mind was Corman’s Masque of the Red Death with it’s technicolor rooms (Suspiria was also filmed in technicolor), but if you ran that film through a Stanley Kubrick filter. Good lord does this film look good, the lighting, the use of color and location, it’s rare to find a movie where almost every scene looks like it could be its own painting. Argento has given the Zack Snyder’s Watchmen treatment to a comic book that doesn’t actually exist, and all without blue CGI penises.
Music for Suspiria is provided by the band Goblin, which to me is a double-edged sword. I like Goblin, and I think at the right time their music combined with Argento’s visuals is a sensory overload akin to a bad acid trip, in a good way. Trouble is there are a lot of moments in this film where it’s not the right time. The soundtrack will make it sound like we’re in the middle of a chase scene, our protagonist only inches away from the killer, and yet on the screen it’s just a character walking slowly down a hallway. Which isn’t the band’s fault, fault lies with the filmmakers, and the filmmakers are very lucky they didn’t completely kill off the atmosphere they were trying to build by having Goblin full bore every five minutes or so.
Suspiria gets an easy recommendation. While it doesn’t do much to stretch the borders of giallo, it is a master class on shot composition that is worth it to watch for the technique of it as much as for the entertainment aspect. If the endless reboots of Halloween and Hellraiser looked like this then their franchises might have never gone on life support. Burn a witch, toast some marshmallows, and sit down with Suspiria this Halloween.
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