Marval Movie

Dario Argento's Suspiria is like a pure experience of cinema. It does not operate on logic or as a grand character arc, but as something to see, hear and get absorbed into. Constantly throughout the movie, you will see that practicality and most true forms of reason has been abandoned for instinct and memorabilia. There is very little that can be explained as the exact reasons for why they are in the movie, but they are instantly striking. These are images that leave practicality behind and become vivid expressions.

Like Cocteau's Beauty & The Beast, this is lyrical. It is an original fairy tale, but not like the sweet, child-friendly ones, this is one that the Brothers Grimm could have made their name on, one that is about mood and the unexplained and brutality. But do not go into either movie to think so hard, you must feel.

Opening the movie is white text over a black background, we hear rumbling that rises and rises and suddenly cuts out, we then get a quick voiceover that tells us that Suzy Banyard will be attending the prestigious dance academy in Freiberg Germany. Then we are at the airport where Suzy lands and departs and enters as a stranger to a strange land. She heads for the door and as she does a tune kicks in only when it's in her point of view. She walks through the automatic doors and there's a startling effect used by cutting to the inner working of the doors as they open and close. When she steps out of the airport and into the strange land it greets her with a big gust of wind, rain and the music is now played entirely over the scene. She gets into a taxi, with no help from its driver and asks to be taken to the academy. She's driven through a dark forest where things can be seen and not at the same time. She arrives, at the same time a girl rushes out the door saying something, but the rain and thunder drowns it out. Suzy tries to get in but someone on the com turns her away, she'll have to come back tomorrow.
Jessica Harper (who plays Suzy) has one of the most unique filmographies of any actor. She got her first starring role in Brian DePalma's Phantom of the Paradise, her next big starring role was here in Suspiria then went on to star in the spiritual sequel to Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shock Treatment. Starring in one cult classic is enough for any actor but she has a place in nearly everyone's heart for three of them. For her performance she very well portrays the audience point-of-view, that is the say, unsure of everything. She is like Alice roaming Wonderland, odd things happen and through her expressions, you can see that she is becoming curiouser and curiouser.

We then follow that girl who ran out of the school. She is staying at a friends house for the night. She dries off and when asked to explain what has her so scared she can't because "It's useless to try and explain it to you. You wouldn't understand. It all seems so absurd, so fantastic!" an apt description of the movie before us. While in the bathroom she looks out the window, into the rain and wind and two eyes staring back at her, followed by a long hairy arm that grabs her head through the window. Her friend hears the distress and cannot get in, she runs to the hallway and from the ceiling window, her friends hung body is dropped and the shattered glass kills her too.

The next day the sun is out and Suzy is back at the school. Inside is Miss Tanner (Alida Valli) and headmistress Madame Blanc (Joan Bennet) is there to greet her. We move through another wildly designed set and are introduced to a few staff and also told that one student is missing, she ran off in the middle of the night.

The sets are some of the wildest and memorable you will ever see in movies. I don't believe they serve and symbolic purpose, apart from color choices, they were really just Argento and his design team wanting to create some of the most memorable environments for their scenarios. They succeed obviously.

Continuing to leave practicality behind is the color. The movie uses strong, vivid reds and blues, but also other times greens and at one main point gold. At some points its the background, others it saturates the whole screen. It's not hard to analyze, blue is passive, red is threatening, so when something is in blue its a victim, when something is red it is the oppressor or if it fills the scene it means that danger is everywhere. This is extremely simple honestly, these are the color cues they teach children, but what makes it so distinct is the lack of both subtlety and explanation. Years before this movie filmmakers have obviously used color to tell the story, but always with an explanation within the world as to why that color is there i.e. fire, street lights. Here the color changes with the mood of the scene, where does the change in lighting come from? I don't know, but I know why it happens.

There is a terrible mentality of the modern movie audience these days. They believe that they are in competition with the movie, they are compelled to watch it and if the slightest flaw comes up they need to find and point it out and they believe as though they've beaten the movie. They have won nothing and have probably gained little to no understanding. All movies have a flaw, this one does, but this movie also operates differently from a standard mystery movie, it's a fairy tale where details are to be forgotten and it neither has to or does make literal sense, but rather lyrical. A scene happens or there is a certain mood and so that is what follows or how it is displayed.

Argento himself at this time had made a name for himself for creating visually striking Giallo movies. This was a genre which was essentially Italy's pulp genre. Giallo is the Italian word for yellow because that was always the color of the books, they were essentially mysteries with physiological thriller element's which would always lead to, or contain mass amounts of stabbing. He made a name for himself with his directorial debut with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and refined it to the point of Deep Red. For making this movie he decided that he'd leave the genre behind and delve completely into the realm of sequences and expressionism.

Originally Argento wanted to have children star as the students. Around twelve years old. But with the violence, lesbian undertones and prudishness of audience members at the time that was quickly shut down. So instead we have young women in their late teens and early twenties, but you can see that he still stuck to his intent. The girls are all fresh-faced, slim and flat chested plus whenever they open a door the handle is about an extra foot higher than it would really be making them seem smaller than they really are. This has the added benefit of making the school seem like a more looming, overpowering place.

Continuing with the Giallo is the method Argento portrays his murder scenes. His movies always have such creative ways to portray murder, whether they be build-ups and mislead or being shot in a unique way. With Giallo they come from a very stylized place, they are so fetishistic and overperformed that you very well could be entertained, find them funny, or genuinely horrifying, but it is impossible to be offended by them.

The musical score by the grup musik Goblin is one of the great and sadly overlooked, movie themes ever. It begins like a twinkling fairy-tale. But every time it's done with a verse another piece is added to it, making it build to a grand orchestral nightmare. Like the way the movie plays out, starting with one thing, but more and more is added which leads to the final, grand movement. One of the most interesting things about the main theme of the movie is that it gives away the mystery. The only spoken lyric in it is the word "Witch!"

A truly surreal scene in the movie is when we get a just about pointless scene where Suzy seeks the advice of a young doctor played by Udo Kier. Here they sit down and they talk about the history of the town and the school as well as witchcraft through the ages. A fun fact is that Kier knew virtually no English before he shot this scene and they had to have someone under the bench read his lines to him so he could speak them. The scene doesn't work because it's just heavy exposition for things that don't require an explanation, cut it and you would just have a more streamlined experience. As pointless though it does give us one of the best lines in the movie "Bad luck isn't brought by broken mirrors, but broken minds."

The most interesting talking point for the movie is the use of women for the cast. Usually, women are in horror movies to play to the male demographic or work-out some misogynistic kegiatan on the filmmaker's parts. It's sad that that's the majority interpretation of women in horror movies but there it is. Now this movie is covered with women, a tiny drop of the cast is men and the ones that are there are useless. There is a blind man, who certainly can't defend himself, a deformed, simple-minded servant, and about two men at the academy that are almost comically camp. This is a world of women where there are weak women and powerful ones.

Finally, we get under the school where no more words need be spoken and the scene is infused with gold and it becomes true cinema, where image, movement, and sound fuse together to create an experience that connects with you.

In another room a truly old witch lays, she disappears and Sara bursts through the door, knife-in-hand, laughing maniacally and with a nail in each eye. She approaches and gets closer and closer but Suzy notices that there is an obvious outline of the old witch, so she stabs it and gets her right in the neck. With her dead the ornaments start exploding, the house shakes, the walls begin cracking and then spontaneously combusts. Suzy has beaten the witches and leaves, nowhere to go, in the rain, with a smile on her face. And that's it, end of the movie!

In terms of the actual plot and the story, it runs very minimally. I can sum the movie up right now. When Suzy arrives at the school in the night during the rain and doesn't know what is going on, then after all is said and done she makes it out alive and leaves in the night during the rain, she might just have a little more grasp of what is going on but barely. So nothing was really accomplished. What was the point? Well, I guess it's like the old saying, it's not about the destination, but the journey.

There are those movies that are really good on the first viewing and on repeated viewing's wane gradually, others that are bad and stay that way. But a special few ferments, that only grow better in time and repeated viewings. The Bride of Frankenstein is one, Suspiria is another. Like a fairytale told to you at a young age, the ideas and images permeate inside your mind and drag you into the darkness.