Suspiria (1977)

directed by Dario Argento
Italy
98 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

I first tried to watch this several years ago, before I started regularly watching and reviewing horror movies, and my immediate impression was just "this is bad". I got through about fifteen minutes and then fell asleep. I don't know why it's taken me this long to get around to watching it through, but to no one's surprise, my opinion on it has done a complete 180 to the point where I think this is one of the best movies I've ever seen. It's just bonkers for so many reasons.

Suspiria is nothing if not excessive. Saying that it goes all-out is doing it an injustice; it goes beyond all-out and into the territory of ridiculousness. Nobody ever told Dario Argento to chill out a single time in his life. There's essentially no plot-relevant reason why anything in this movie has to look the way it does: it's all colored, lit, shot, and constructed purely according to what looks good, and now that I can appreciate that fact, I admire it more than anything. There's no reason for one side of the curtains to be lit blue and the other side lit red, or for neon green lighting to fall onto the back of one girl's head without illuminating the girl she's talking to, or any number of other instances where neon overtakes the frame, other than "it looks cool and we can do it". Sheer aesthetic insanity start to finish.

I guess the reason why I thought this was bad at first is because it can be jarring if you're not prepared for how off-the-rails the dialogue and acting is, and for giallo's infamous problem with horrendous dubbing. Some of the script is The Room-level bad. "I once read that names, which begin with the letter S, are the names of.... ssssNAKES!" isn't even the worst of it. Bless Jessica Harper for delivering these awful lines with a modicum of seriousness, because nobody else did.

I don't really think Suspiria goes in for symbolism- it's such a purely aesthetic movie that nothing exists much further than the surface. But if you look at it the right way, it can be an interesting depiction of the misogyny behind why men make up stories of witches. I don't think the film is aware it's depicting this, and in fact it seems itself to be contributing to the evil witch trope, but nonetheless, the thing intended to be frightening is the suggestion of the witch- literally the shadows on the wall, the conception of a feminine evil operating clandestinely beneath the noses of men. I would argue that the majority of men are not physically intimidated by women, having been conditioned to confidence in their own power over them, and so the only way men can fear women is if they conceive of them as endowed with magical power and the ability to convert innocent girls to their coven of evil.

It will be interesting to see how the remake addresses these issues of misogyny given how ham-fisted the original is. So much of it is so clearly intended for nothing but eye candy. I laughed out loud at a scene where a nameless girl bounds downstairs in a tight shirt with her robe open and then immediately closes her robe at the bottom of the stairs, because it's incredibly obvious we were only meant to look at her chest. It's hard to express in words why this is such a compelling movie, because to describe it straight-on sounds too absurd to be good. But believe the hype: it is amazing. The soundtrack is something you feel in your blood. It is a full sensory experience for 98 minutes that feels like it lasts for several hours. There's giallo and then there's Suspiria.