The Films of Dario Argento: Suspiria

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I’m using this October’s horrorthon as an excuse to take rewatch and review all of Dario Argento’s films! Today, we take a look at one of Argento’s best known and most popular films, 1977’s Suspiria!

I’m going to start things out by admitting that this is an intimidating review to write. I once had a discussion with fellow TSL contributor Leonard Wilson about why it’s always so much easier to write about films that we hate than it is to write about films that we love. That’s certainly something that I’m thinking about right now, as I try to think of where to begin with Suspiria.

It’s not just that I like Suspiria. Anyone who has ever visited this site before knows how much I appreciate Italian horror in general and Argento in specific.

No, it’s that I absolutely love this film. I was sixteen the first time that I saw it and I’ve loved it ever since. To me, Suspiria is not just one of the best horror films ever made. It is truly one of the best films period. And I know that I’m not alone in feeling like that. Suspiria is a classic in every sense of the word.

Compared to almost every other film that Argento has made, the plot of Suspiria is remarkably straight forward. Suzy Banyon, an American ballet student, enrolls at the prestigious Tanz Dance Academy in Frieburg, Germany. From the minute she arrives, she gets the feeling that there is something strange happening behind the garish walls of the school and she’s right. While the film may be best known for Argento’s directorial flourishes and Goblin’s classic score, the story itself unfolds with the simplicity of a fairy tale.

The film even opens with a narrator who informs us, “Suzy Banyon decided to perfect her ballet studies in the most famous school of dance in Europe. She chose the celebrated academy of Freiburg. One day, at nine in the morning, she left Kennedy airport, New York, and arrived in Germany at 10:40 p.m. local time.” It’s the film’s equivalent of starting things off with, “Once upon a time…” Having let us know that we’re about to watch a fairy tale and therefore having served his purpose, the narrator isn’t heard for the rest of the film.

Instead, we watch as Suzy first arrives in Germany:

As played by Jessica Harper, Suzy Banyon is yet another neurotic but brave Argento protagonist who has found herself in a strange land. One of the things that I love about Suspiria is that Suzy is such an ordinary and relatable character. She’s not “the chosen one.” She’s not a witch or an aspiring witch or the daughter of a witch or the reincarnation of a witch. She’s not desperately looking for a husband or dealing with a family tragedy or any of that other BS that we have to deal with in today’s cinema.. She doesn’t have any dark secrets or untapped magical powers. She’s not seeking vengeance. She has no trendy agenda. She’s not the protagonist of the latest YA novel. Instead, she’s a dancer. She is someone who is attempting to pursue something that she is good at and that she loves. In short, she is the viewer. Suzy Banyon is us and we are Suzy Banyon. Like us, she’s sometimes scared. Like us, she’s sometimes brave. And, like us, it’s just not in her nature to leave a mystery unsolved.

It’s obvious, from the moment that Suzy arrives, that there’s something strange happening at the school. We, of course, already know that it involves witchcraft. This is largely because we’ve been listening to the film’s score and we’ve heard Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti chanting “WITCH! WITCH!” as Suzy’s taxi drives through the woods and arrives at the school. (The journey through the woods adds to Suspiria‘s fairy tale atmosphere.)

However, for Suzy, her initial concern is that everyone at the school appears to be trying to cheat her out of her money. Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett) has arranged for Suzy to stay in an apartment on which she’ll have to pay rent. When Miss Tanner (Alida Valli, a force of pure nature in this film) finds out that Suzy’s bags have yet to arrive and Suzy doesn’t have any ballet shoes, she tells her to borrow a pair from another student. The student immediately offers to sell them to Suzy and is visibly deflated when Suzy says that she’s just needs to borrow them for a day.

And, of course, there’s Olga (Barbara Magnolfi), a student who thinks that names that start with S are the names of snakes.

(I have to admit that, as a former dance student, that scene brought back a lot of memories.)

But it’s not just money that Suzy has to worry about. There are also maggots that fall from the ceiling, the result of a shipment of spoiled meat. There’s the strange and labored breathing that Suzy occasionally hears behind the walls. There’s the fact that her new roommate, Sarah (Stefania Casini), is convinced that the teachers are hiding a secret. Sarah’s therapist, Dr. Frank Mandel (Udo Kier, playing an oddly respectable role) thinks that Sarah is suffering from delusions but is she?

And, of course, there’s all the mysterious deaths.

For instance, Daniel, a blind piano player, has his throat ripped by his seeing eye dog. Interestingly enough, Daniel is played by Flavio Bucci who, in The Night Train Murders, played a murderer. One of his Night Train victims was played by Irene Miracle, who would later have an important role in Suspiria‘s semi-sequel, Inferno.

Another former student, Pat Hingle (Eva Axen) is brutally stabbed to death and, after her body falls through a skylight, the shattered glass kills her best friend as well. Of course, the killer wears gloves. It wouldn’t be an Argento film otherwise. (Pat’s murder is one of Suspiria‘s best known set pieces, one that is so brutal and violent that it retains its power to shock even after you’ve seen it a few times. For the most part, if someone is going to stop watching or walk out on Suspiria, it’s going to happen during Pat’s murder.)

And through it all, you have Goblin playing on the soundtrack. The film’s score is so important and so relentless that, in its way, it becomes just as important a character as Suzy, Sarah, Madame Blanc, Miss Tanner, or even Udo Kier! The score is relentless and, depending on how loudly you play the film, almost deafening. I saw an interview with Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti where he said that he wanted the score to be “almost annoying” in its relentlessness. The score overpowers you, in much the same way that the witches of Suspiria overpower their victims.

Suspiria was co-written by Daria Nicolodi, Dario Argento’s girlfriend and the mother of Asia Argento. Nicolodi has long claimed that Suspiria is based on something that happened to her grandmother. Argento, meanwhile, has said that nothing in the film was based on fact. Reportedly, Nicolodi wanted to play the role of Suzy and was so offended with Argento instead offered her the role of Sarah that she went off and made Mario Bava’s Shock instead.

(Suspiria is often cited as the start of the long and acrimonious process that would eventually end with Argento and Nicolodi ending their relationship 8 years later.)

Personally, I think that Nicolodi would have been wasted in the role of Sarah but, at the same time, it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Jessica Harper as Suzy Banyon. For that matter, it’s also impossible to imagine anyone other than Dario Argento directing Suspiria. Suspiria is Argento’s masterpiece, taking all of his frequent and familiar motifs (bloody murders, artistic protagonists, the constantly roaming camera, the use of primary colors) and pushing them to their natural extreme. It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Argento telling Suspiria’s story.

Dario Argento on the set of Suspiria

And yet, that is exactly what is about to happen. For years, of course, I’ve heard rumors of a remake and, perhaps naively, I’ve dismissed them. I took some comfort in the fact that even Dario Argento himself came out and forcefully denounced the idea of anyone remaking his masterpiece. Remake Suspiria? I would think to myself, Surely no one is that stupid.

Well, it’s happening and if that doesn’t outrage you, perhaps you should leave right now. Reportedly, the remake is set to be released in 2017. It’ll be directed by Luca Guadagnino and it’ll star Dakota Johnson, Chloe Grace Moretz, and Tilda Swinton. Guadagnino says that his remake will be all about the “power of motherhood.”

Whatever, Luca. Suspiria doesn’t need you and it doesn’t need to be remade.

Suspiria is perfect just the way it is.

The Films of Dario Argento: Deep Red

Posted on October 4, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I’ve been using this year’s horrorthon as an excuse to watch and review all (well, almost all) of Dario Argento’s films! Today, I take a look at one of Argento’s best — 1975’s Deep Red!

After the successful release of Four Flies on Grey Velvet in 1971, Dario Argento announced his retirement from the giallo genre. His next film was 1973’s The Five Days of Milan, a historical comedy-drama with a political subtext. The Five Days of Milan was a huge box office flop in Italy and, to the best of my knowledge, it was never even released in the United States. To date, it is Argento’s most obscure film and one that is almost impossible to see. In fact, it’s so obscure that, in two of my previous posts, I accidentally called the film The Four Days of Milan and apparently, no one noticed.

Forgotten Argento

After the failure of Five Days, Argento returned to the giallo genre. And while he was undoubtedly stunned by the failure of his previous film, Argento ended up directing one of the greatest Italian films of all time. If The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and Four Flies on Grey Velvet were both great giallo films, Deep Red is a great film period. It is Argento at his over the top best.

Now, before I go any further, I should point out that there are many different versions of Deep Red floating around. For instance, it was released in the United States under the title The Hatchet Murders and with 26 minutes of footage cut from the film. For this review, I watched the original 126-minute Italian version. I’ve always preferred the original to the shorter version that was released in America. Oddly enough, Argento has said that he prefers the shorter version.

Deep Red opens with a blast of music that both announces Argento’s return to the giallo genre and also provides some hints to his future as a filmmaker. Whereas his previous films had all featured an excellent but rather serious score by Ennio Morricone, Deep Red was the first Argento film to be scored by Goblin. There’s a gothic, almost operatic playfulness to Goblin’s work on the film. (If the Phantom of the Opera had ended up working in Hollywood and writing film scores, the end result would have sounded a lot like Goblin.) Goblin’s deafening score works as the perfect sonic companion to Argento’s constantly roving camera and vibrantly colorful images. (The blood spilled in Deep Red is the reddest blood imaginable.)

Deep Red‘s protagonist is Marcus Daly (David Hemmings) and, like so many Argento protagonists, he’s both an artist and a man without a definite home. At one point, he explains that he was born in England, grew up in America, and now lives in Italy. He’s a jazz pianist but he supports himself by giving music lessons. In a scene excised from the American cut, Marcus tells his students that, while classical music should be respected and appreciated, it’s also necessary to be willing to embrace art that some critics would dismiss as being “trashy.” Marcus, of course, is talking about jazz but he could just as easily be Dario Argento, defending his decision to return to the giallo genre.

While Marcus plays piano and tries to help his alcoholic friend, Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), a German psychic named Helga Ulmann (Macha Meril) is giving a lecture when she suddenly announces that someone in the audience is a murderer. Later, Helga is brutally murdered by a gloved, hatchet-wielding attacker.

(Helga’s murder scene is always difficult for me to watch, even if Argento doesn’t — as Kim Newman pointed out in a review written for Monthly Film Bulletin — linger over the carnage in the way that certain other horror directors would have. I have to admit that I also always find it interesting that Helga is played by the same actress who, that same year, would play the evil Lady On The Train in Aldo Lado’s The Night Train Murders. Playing one of the Lady’s victims was Irene Miracle, who later co-starred in Argento’s Inferno.)

The only witness to Helga’s murder? Marcus Daly, of course. He’s standing out in the street, having just talked to Carlos, when he looks up and sees Helga being murdered in her apartment. Marcus runs up to the apartment to help, arriving just too late. And yet, Marcus is convinced that he saw something in the apartment that he can’t quite remember. Deep Red is yet another Argento film that deals with not only the power of memory but the difficulties of perception. Marcus knows that he saw something but what?

Well, I’m not going to spoil it for you! In this case, the mystery and its solution makes a bit more sense than the mysteries in Argento’s first three films. Argento isn’t forced to resort to debunked science, like he did in both Cat o’Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet. One reason why Deep Red is so compulsively watchable is because, for perhaps the first time, Argento plays fair with the mystery. After you watch the film the first time, go back and rewatch and you’ll discover that all the clues were there. You just had to know where to look.

That said, the way that Argento tells the story is still far more important than the story itself. Argento’s first three films may have been stylish but Deep Red finds Argento fully unleashed. The camera never stops moving, the visuals are never less than stunning with the screen often bathed in red, and Goblin’s propulsive score ties it all together. This is one of those films from which you can’t look away. It captures you from first scene and continues to hold you through the gory conclusion. Deep Red is an undeniably fun thrill ride and, even today, you can easily see why Argento frequently refers to it as being his personal favorite of his many films. In fact, Argento even owns a store in Rome that is called Profondo Rosso.

But you know why I really love Deep Red?

It’s all because of the relationship between David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi. Daria Nicolodi plays Gianna Brezzi, a reporter who helps Marcus with his investigation. After three films that featured women as either victims or killers, Gianna is the first truly strong and independent woman to show up in an Argento film. I know that some people have criticized the scenes between Hemmings and Nicolodi, feeling that they drag down the pace of the movie. I could not disagree more. Both Hemmings and Nicolodi give wonderful performances and their likable chemistry feels very real.

Gianna and Marcus arm westle. (Gianna wins. Twice.)

To me, that’s what sets Deep Red apart. You care about Marcus and you care about Gianna. Yes, the mystery is intriguing and the murder set pieces are brilliantly choreographed, and Deep Red is definitely Argento at his best. But for me, the heart and soul of the film will always belong to the characters of Marcus and Gianna and the performers who brought them to life.

Deep Red was the start of Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi’s long and often contentious relationship. (Dario and Daria’s daughter, Asia Argento, was born around the same time that Deep Red was released and has directed two films, Scarlet Diva and Misunderstood, that deal with her often chaotic childhood.) This relationship would play out over the course of six films and, as much as I love those six films, it’s always a little sad to consider that, when watched in order, the provide a portrait of a doomed and dying romance, one that did not particularly end well. (It is possibly not a coincidence that, with the exception of Deep Red and Tenebrae, Daria Nicolodi suffered some type of terrible death in every film she made with Argento.)

But, regardless of what may or may not have been going on behind the scenes, Deep Red remains a triumph for both its director and its stars.