Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Two): Suspiria (1977)

(trailer)

Let’s start with this: “The only thing scarier than the last twelve minutes are the first ninety-two” is one hell of a tagline, even if it’s not strictly speaking true. From just looking at the plot summary, Dario Argento’s Suspiria, not to be confused with the 2018 version directed by Luca Guadagnino, takes the form of a pretty by-the-numbers slasher film, though that itself requires some moving around of the timeline a bit. It’s about seventeen years after Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho started codifying the genre, but calling Suspiria a “by-the-numbers” slasher movie ignores the timeline, where the glut of that genre that started after Halloween’s release a year later.

Mentioning Alfred Hitchcock is actually rather important, though. The genre of cinema Argento’s work falls under, “Giallo”, professes that it owes quite a lot to Hitchcock’s style of filmmaking. Giallo is a pulp-y style -- it’s Italian for “yellow”, as in, the color of pulp novella pages -- and strives to match Hitchcock’s methods of doling out information and creating suspense. And this is something that Suspiria does quite well. If there’s any reason to watch Suspiria, it’s for the atmosphere.

If you haven’t actually seen this movie yet (i.e., if you didn’t watch it in the week between when I said I was going to talk about it and now), at least take a look at this still frame:

It’s almost overwhelming to look at, and that’s the point. Almost the whole movie, especially during the movie’s more violent moments, looks like that. And when it’s not the environment, it’s the lighting, and even when it’s neither of those, the soundtrack provides an additional layer of tension. There’s a specific eighteen or nineteen note melody that is set to trigger an almost pavlovian response in its audience.

If there’s one thing that Suspiria (1977) does poorly, it’s in the other half of the Hitchcock method I mentioned earlier: the doling out of information. It’s a slasher movie, but it also wants to be a mystery movie, it wants to invest its audience in who is killing these people and how. Putting aside the forty-plus years of pop-culture osmosis that this movie has been through, there’s also the fact that the same theme, that same overarching nineteen note melody also contains hints of a rather spoilery word. I won’t repeat it here, just in case, but seriously, it’s right there in the theme. You’ll know what’s going on before the opening credits are over if you’re paying attention.

But that still sells the movie short, I think. Because it is an exercise in atmosphere more than anything else, and some might argue that knowing the answer to the movie’s mystery only makes it all the more intriguing of a film. There’s a reason it’s survived as long as it has. It’s still a pleasure to watch, and I’d recommend it to just about anyone who is interested in its sort of horror.

-F

Next time: The VVitch, directed by Robert Eggers