By Tom Elce • Jun 9th, 2008 • Filed under: Author's Pick, Film Review, Highlights, Movies, featured

Tom Elce writes about his all time favourite film Dario Anrento’s Suspiria

Dario Argento’s films are always lurid nightmares gleefully exploiting artificiality in a canvas of eye-catching colours. His stained-glass cinema is a visual feast and a sensory delight as well, his entire filmography a self-aware mixture of gratuitous gore, intricate storytelling and sly satire. With Suspiria, all the most appealing traits of Argento’s filmmaking are stitched together and put on display for all dedicated horror fans to devour. Were it designed by anyone other than the Italian auteur, it simply wouldn’t work.

From a rain-drenched opening to the bloody - and mysterious - murder of a fleeing woman immediately thereafter, Suspiria announces its straight-down-to-business intentions from the offset, dropping Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) into a mesmeric, horrifying experience, shattering her expectations upon heading towards a prestigious ballet school in everything that is catastrophically wrong there. As the opening to the now-complete “Three Mothers” trilogy (the latter film in the trilogy yet to be seen by many international audiences), Suspiria is a timeless, rattling fantasy.

Argento makes films in his own vision, which immediately sets him apart from the majority working today in the horror genre. Inevitably, this proves divisive amongst viewers not conditioned to see such unconventional, scarcely realistic films. Their loss is the gain of others, and thankfully there’s a significant portion of people to take delight in his offbeat feats. Arriving on the back of the internationally successful Profondo Rosso/Deep Red, Suspiria is arguably an even better film. Either way, its one of my all-time favourites.

As the departure from the giallo films that until this point built up his resume, Suspiria is a venture into supernatural territory so masterfully achieved that you’d think it were by someone with decades of experience in the genre, not a director making a transition. Whatever the surprise in the skill with which the film is designed, the film can be appreciated as a magnificent film all on its own in Argento’s resume, and a prequel to his stylistically broad outings to come. Here’s a high-colour, extraordinary tale fascinatingly shot to be reminiscent of the colours you’d expect to find in an old Disney cartoon, Suspiria is anything but bland visually, much the same as the plot - emphatic on witchcraft and old-fashion haunting elements - is the polar opposite of dull.

Suzy’s story itself could be Argento’s own Alice in Wonderland concept, the American girl’s arrival in her new Freiburg environment a whole new world to her own. The horror she suffers is a torment either by the myriad bizarre happenings about her - the aforementioned student’s death immediately following her arrival or the influx of maggots seen thirty minutes in, for example - or by the ocassionally callous staff and students she meets there. Excellently portrayed by Jessica Harper, Suzy makes for a likeable enough heroine, thus making her unimaginable plight all the more effective.
Revisiting Suspiria in a day and age when too many horror movies fall into two categories (either the watered-down or the empty-headed), the film is a refreshing delight that doesn’t get pinned down as one discernible type of film but instead stands invigoratingly as its own decidedly singular entity - even if it is, as said before, part of a series.

What Argento’s faultless film is is a masterfully-crafted, visionary work for which all elements are in sync and perfectly executed. The visual aesthetic combines with the fantastical story that combines with the music score (credited to Argento and The Goblins) that combines with the fluid editing that combines with the on-the-spot acting performances. It’s a victorious coming-together of an unconventional Italian director’s best ideas and the pinnacle of his filmography. It is - in a word - magnificent.

At the very least, we can note with surprise that a horror film can exist as some beautiful work of art yet also include brutal deaths such as a hanging, a glass-metal impaling and a mauling, let alone the maggots. Argento should be considered one of the horror genre’s best directors and Suspiria is surely the most convincing piece of evidence for this.

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