MIND DE-CODER SUSPENDS INCREDULITY WITH SUSPIRIA

Spoiler alert!

Suzy, do you know anything about...witches?

 One is at a loss where to start really; what is there to say about Dario Argento’s SUSPIRIA? Well , first time I saw it, on video, late one Saturday night, snuggled up on the sofa back in the 80’s, I was reduced to a trembling wreck as I struggled in vain to process the episodes of mind-bending terror this film revels in. The second time I saw it, however, last year at the Auckland film festival, watching  a restored print, I may have guffawed unwillingly, and, possibly, once or twice, it may have actually been willingly. Despite the blood-curdling warning splashed across the poster – the only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film…are the first 92 minutes – this is not a film that has aged terribly well; but despite this, and like many of the films I’m enjoying at the moment, the film is noted for many of its stylistic flourishes and has much to recommend it.

Directed by Italian director of gore-drenched thrillers Dario Argento and released at the cinema in 1977, the film follows American ballet student Suzy Bannion, played by Jessica Harper, as she experiences terrifying goings-on at a prestigious dance company in Freiburg, Germany. As far as the plot goes, that’s more or less it, because very little of what comes next makes any sense – what you get instead is an eerily stylised, garishly realised, surreal, unrelenting blood-drenched horror film in which various young dancers are decapitated in increasingly unlikely ways, falling prey to Argento’s misogynistic delight in brutally dispatching his young actresses (a predilection that largely reached its apotheosis, or possibly its nadir, in his 1996 thriller The Stendhal Syndrome which features a graphic rape scene in which the unfortunate victim is played by his daughter Asia) until it is revealed that the dance studio is, in fact, controlled by a coven of witches up to no good with diabolic intentions.

Visually the film is stunning – apparently shot in technicolour with an anamorphic lenses (the cinematographic technique of shooting a wide screen picture on standard 35 mm film stock), the production design and cinematography emphasise vivid primary colours, particularly red, creating a deliberately unrealistic, nightmarish setting, emphasised by the use of imbibition Technicolor prints. Think of the kind of colour you got in films like The Wizard of Oz, Robin Hood (the version with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland and not Kevin Costner, or does that go without saying?) and Gone with the Wind, now imagine it turned up to 11, drenching the film in a palette of green and red, enhancing the nightmarish quality of the film. These visual flourishes are echoed elsewhere within the film, either intentionally or unintentionally, with the use of sound, the soundtrack in particular, and editing techniques, so that at times the film threatens to overwhelm the senses (always worth looking for in a film when you’re high, I think). Argento’s directing technique, throwing around shock cuts, coloured lights and peculiar camera angles are disorientating; the soundtrack, provided by cult Italian prog band Goblin, throbs with malign menace, and even the dialogue has ability to create a profound feeling of unease, following the practise common to Italian film making at the time of not properly recording the actor’s voices, but dubbing them in later, resulting in an unsettling sense of dislocation (apparently this was done because the international cast each spoke their lines in their native language – English, Italian or German - and responded to each other as if they’d understood what each other was saying). The overall effect of the film is one of having the senses battered on almost every level, amplified to an almost absurd, hallucinatory degree by the insanely violent deaths inflicted upon the cast in a sustained series of gloriously realised set-pieces.

A young lady peers out a window into the dark, only to suddenly realise that a pair of eyes are staring back. An arm smashes through one window pane, suffocates her against the other with a gloved hand and, with her friend drumming hysterically against the locked door, the owner of the gloved hand repeatedly stabs the girl in hyper-real close-up before graphically disemboweling her. He then ties her legs with rope and in the next shot we cut to the friend running into the lobby of the apartment building for help; she looks up towards a stained glass ceiling to see the victim's head crashes through it in a hail of glass shards followed by her body. We cut to the blood drenched corpse, suspended by the rope dripping blood onto the floor, finally Argento pans the camera to reveal his next horror. The falling glass has pinned the friend to the ground crucifix like, the largest sliver having split her face in half. 

That’s the first 13 minutes of Suspiria, that is, and it kind of knocks you senseless.  Argento, however, is the master of sustained horror – this, it turns out, is just the warm up for what’s to follow. In a particularly sadistic sequence, Suzy’s scantily-clad room-mate Sarah is chased to the attic by an unseen pursuer; thinking to escape him by climbing through a window into another room, she falls into a huge pile of razor wire which entangles her in vicious coils from which she struggles in anguish to escape, working herself deeper and deeper into the seemingly endless barbs. From out of nowhere, the mysterious black-gloved hand of a dark figure appears and slits her throat. First time I saw this scene, I recoiled in horror at the images on the screen, unable to cope with the level of violence I was seeing (or, as we called it in those days, ‘I hid behind my hands’). Last time I saw it my thoughts ran more along the lines of: “Oh, no, she’s fallen into a room full of razor wire, how awful, just when she needed to escape…hang on, why is there a room full of razor wire in the attic of a dance academy and how comes she just fell into it? Surely, sir, you stretch my incredulity too far…and where’d that hand with the knife come from?”, and that was pretty much it as far as mind-bending terror went for the rest of the film. Indeed – the only thing more comical than the first 92 minutes of Suspiria…are the last twelve minutes; in which Suzy discovers a hidden passage; observes the staff of the school forming a ritual in which they plot her death, and discovers Sarah's body nailed to a coffin. You can imagine her fright when a little later the ghostly embodiment of the Black Witch Queen orders Sarah's corpse to rise from the dead to murder Suzy, resulting in Suzy having to stab her through the throat with something handy and sharp which luckily not only appears to kill her (what with her being disembodied and all, she nevertheless fades from view screaming) but also does for Sarah's reanimated corpse as well, while also causing the building to set alight, destroying the academy with the coven inside. And I haven’t even mentioned the academy’s blind pianist having his throat ripped out by his own guide dog (or sock puppet – at times it’s hard to tell), or the infamous scene with the maggots yet. The end. With no explanation or tying up of loose ends, although, in one of my favourite scenes earlier on in the film, Suzy meets one of Sarah's acquaintances, a dashing psychiatrist who explains in a frankly torturous bit of exposition that the academy was founded some 200 hundred ago by Helena Markos, a cruel Greek émigré who was widely believed to be a witch, although what with him being a believer in the material world, and a psychiatrist to boot, he really couldn’t be doing with that sort of thing at all. His companion, however, a white-haired professor of the Van Helsing school of ‘scepticism is the natural reaction to witchcraft these days, but magic is ever present’ variety, concludes with bit of exposition of his own regarding witchcraft and its unnatural goings-on before helpfully adding that a coven cannot survive without their queen. What makes the scene so striking is that it’s filmed outside on an incredibly bright (and seemingly breezy) day (their hair is all over the place but they struggle on bravely), on the plaza of an ultra-modern white office block that works in startling contrast to the lurid claustrophobia of the academy.

So – what’s good about it then? Well, all of the above actually, despite those observations that may have you think otherwise. I’m no fan of slasher movies, me, but in Suspiria, Argento’s use of bold, very fake-looking sets, stark lines, primary colours, distorted camera angles and freaked-out sound creates a world that is uniquely his own. And speaking of freaked-out sounds, no discussion of Suspiria is complete without mention of the soundtrack, created by Italian prog rock band Goblin in collaboration with Argento himself. As one commentator has noted, it sounds as though Hell's demons rented a studio and decided to jam. Screams, wailings, hissing steam and some kind of diabolical didgeridoo are punctuated with the occasional distorted shriek of "Witch!". It's enough to loosen the bowels on its own. It's reported that while filming, Argento blasted Goblin's supremely menacing score to create a feeling of unease in the actors that would ultimately carry over into the psyche of the audience. It’s a monument to tension and suspense, a near experimental collage of whispers, sighs, and various other sounds placed against the backdrop of shivering strings and throbbing bass; Goblin's contribution is as essential to the film's impact as Argento's stylistic and unflinching direction. In fact, Goblin-esque has become a by-word for a particular type of malignant, sinister orchestration. The titular theme, a melodic composition that recalls a childhood lullaby hummed along to by someone with a special fondness for sharp knives and knitting needles, is one of the most effective and unforgettable tunes in horror history. I think it was even released as a single in 1977 though unsurprisingly I’ve never been able to find a chart position for it, if, indeed it ever had one.

 Last year I was lucky enough to hear the reformed band perform the soundtrack live as they accompanied the film at the Auckland Film Festival – one of only three shows they performed that year. They captured the gleeful malevolence of the original score, complete with creepy whispered there’s-something-nasty-in-the-nursery la-la-la-ings, howling vocalisations, celesta and bells, ritualistic drumming, fat synthesisers and, it must be admitted, some fairly funky crazed prog-rock jazz noodlings, all of it entirely un-nerving. They received a standing ovation, of course; despite the disturbing subject matter, you could feel the love in the air, and everyone felt as if we’d just watched something special. The score is as enjoyable removed from the movie as it is attached. Suspiria is quite an achievement, as a scary soundtrack and as a vibe-heavy rock album. That being said, I’ve always been reluctant to include any of it in a Mind De-Coder radio show because the last thing I want to do for someone 'midst an otherwise enjoyable trip is to play something as downright creepy as this. God alone knows what you’d see creeping out of the shadows.

Finally, it’s a good name, isn’t it, SUSPIRIA,? It contains within its sound all the sibilant menace of ‘suspense’, ‘suspicion’, and ‘hysteria’ combined with an edge of raw terror. Strange, then, that it should merely be the Italian word for ‘sigh’. Strano, eh? Ma il film non avrebbe mai avuto la stessa emozione viscerale se fosse essere chiamato Sigh, don't you think? I heard somewhere that there was going to be a remake but thankfully common sense prevailed; this is not a film that can be topped - it is what it is, for good or bad, and you very much have to take it or leave it on its own terms. On a lighter note, I read how there's a Japanese restaurant called Cambiare inspired by Suspiria's art designs which would make for a fab night out. 

The trailer below is less the original trailer and more of a four-minute summation of the entire film. For some that may be enough, but for a film that engages all of the senses, SUSPIRIA works as a good night in snuggled up on the sofa (with the curtains drawn obviously) – and I will never forget that first time I saw it. What a difference 29 years makes though, eh?