Suspiria (1977)

• Year: 1977
• Released: 12 Aug 1977
• Country: Italy
• Adwords: 1 win & 3 nominations
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076786/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/suspiria
• Metacritics: https://www.metacritic.com/movie/suspiria
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: Italian, Russian, English, German, Latin
• MPA Rating: R
• Genre: Horror
• Runtime: 92 min
• Writer: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi, Thomas De Quincey
• Director: Dario Argento
• Cast: Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci
• Keywords: cult film, witch, whodunit, evil, germany,

	7.3/10
	79/100
	65% – Critics
	65% – Audience

Suspiria Storyline

Suzy Bannion travels to Germany to perfect her ballet skills. She arrives at the Tanz dance academy in the pouring rain and is refused admission after another woman is seen fleeing the school. She returns the next morning and this time is let in. She learns that the young woman she saw fleeing the previous evening, Pat Hingle, has been found dead. Strange things soon begin to occur. Suzy becomes ill and is put on a special diet; the school becomes infested with maggots; odd sounds abound; and Daniel, the pianist, is killed by his own dog. A bit of research indicates that the ballet school was once a witches’ coven – and as Suzy learns, still is.

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Suspiria Movie Reviews

Absolute perfection

I was afraid to write about this film here. What else can I say about it? My love for it as pure as the adoration you feel for your first love. This is what movies are all about to me: a dream world that is punctuated with staccato blasts of violence, neon and Goblin’s never topped soundtrack. It took the remake of the film to get me to write down my feelings on this film.

Suspiria is all about the impact that magic has on our world, a subject about which creator Dario Argento said, “There’s very little to joke about. It’s something that exists.” The genesis for the film came from a trip through the “Magic Triangle,” the place where the countries of France, Germany, and Switzerland meet.

The movie theorizes that if there are three Fates and three Graces, there must be three Sorrows: Mater Lacrymarum, Our Lady of Tears, Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs” and Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness. This was inspired by a 19-century book by Thomas de Quincey called Suspiria de Profundis.

Argento brought his wife Daria Nicolodi on that aforementioned trip and when he lamented that they hadn’t seen a witch, she shared a story her grandmother, the French pianist Yvonne Müller Loeb Casella, had told her of an academy that she attended on the border between Germany and Switzerland that had a faculty that practiced black magic.

While Argento claims that this story was false and other elements were more of the inspiration for the movie, Nicolodi feels otherwise. “Suspiria was imagined and written by me, thanks to the fundamental inspiration of my grandmother’s story,” she said. “Then, for the usual quibbles related to the cinema industry, this story was signed by both of us.”

Even the end of the movie was inspired by a dream that Nicolodi had in which she encountered an invisible witch and then a panther exploded.

While she was to originally star in the film, to make it more marketable to American audiences, Jessica Harper took over the lead. You can still see Nicolodi at the airport scene in the beginning and hear her as the voice of Helena Markos (supposedly, that’s a 90-year-old ex-prostitute who Argento found on the streets playing that role).

Suzy Bannion (Harper) is an American ballet student lost in Germany, arriving in a violent rainstorm and looking for her new school, the Tanz Dance Academy As she arrives, another student, Patricia, flee in terror. Despite the storm and her pleas over the intercom, no one will allow Suzy into the school. The cab drives her back to down as she watches Patricia run through the woods.

Patricia finds her way to a friend’s apartment but within moments, she’s pulled out a window – Argento’s biggest directorial signature – stabbed and then lynched through the apartment’s stained glass skylight while her friend watches on, helplessly, before she’s impaled by pieces of bloody stained glass.

You might say, “Wait, what is happening here?” Argento isn’t going to slow down or explain anything to you. What do you expect from one of the last movies shot in Technicolor and specifically lit to take advantage of the otherworldly colors that that film stock produced? Argento told cinematographer Luciano Tovoli that they were trying to make the film look like Disney’s Snow White. In fact, he had to be talked out of making the students of the school all twelve years and under by his producer – and father – Salvatore Argento. Argento made the girls all around twenty years old but didn’t rewrite their dialogue, which is why they act so naive and their dialogue is so childlike. Next time you watch this movie, notice the doorknobs. They were placed at the same height as the actress’ heads so they would have to raise their arms to open them. All so they would really be children, not adults.

The next morning, Suzy goes back to the school where she meets the headmistress, Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett in the final role of her career) and Miss Tanner (Alida Valli, who is also in Argento’s Inferno). She’s supposed to stay with Olga (Barbara Magnolfi, The Suspicious Death of a Minor), but she’s kicked out in moments and must return to the school. There are some scenes cut from the film that reveal that Olga is probably a witch in training, hence why she plays with Suzy so much.

The next day, Suzy starts her classes but quickly grows dizzy. Then, she becomes friends with Sara (Stefania Casini, The Bloodstained Shadow). Later that evening, when the girls are getting ready for dinner, maggots rain from the ceiling. Again – why? Supposedly its just rotten food, but it feels like something much more sinister is happening, especially when Sara notices the academy’s director wandering the halls late at night and hiding behind the curtains.

Can things get worse? Sure they can. The school’s blind piano player is killed by his own dog. And just as Suzy remembers that Patricia had uttered the words “secret iris” to her, she passes out just as a man enters her room, chasing Sara through a series of rooms until she becomes entangled in barbed wire before the black-gloved man decides that this is now a giallo and slits her throat. This was an incredibly painful scene for Casini to shoot, as even though the barbed wire was fake, it still entangled and tore at her skin.

Suzy learns from Sara’s friend Dr. Frank Mandel (Udo Kier!) that the school had been established by Helena Markos, a woman that everyone in town believed was a witch. She is now dead, the victim of a fire, and another of Mandel’s friends, Professor Milius (Rudolf Schündler, Karl from The Exorcist and Father Conrad from Magdalena, Possessed by the Devil, one of the scummiest possession movies you will ever see) believes that her coven is suffering without her as their leader.

Suzy returns to the school and discovers that she is alone. She follows the sound of footsteps to Madame Blanc’s office, where a mural of irises opens a secret door. Entering this passage, she overhears the Blanc and the teachers plotting her doom. And then, running from Blanc’s nephew Albert and his servant, she finds Sara’s body.

As Suzy hides in a room, she discovers that Helena Marcos is sleeping there. As the witch awakens, she possesses Sara’s body and come after Suzy to kill her. A flash of lightning reveals where Marcos is hiding and Suzy stabs her through the neck with a giant neon peacock quill – quite literally The Bird with the Crystal Plumage – and kills the old woman. The entire school begins to burn and fall apart around her, killing the teachers who had just been planning to kill her. As Suzy escapes into the rainy night, she pauses to smile. I absolutely adore this scene, this moment of survival, this brief bit of exhilaration. Suspiria is quite literally a haunted house ride and our heroine has survived.

The Italian band Goblin – credited as The Goblins – composed the score along with Argento before the movie was filmed. Of note are the hushed whispers of Claudio Simonetti, who has said that that much of what he says in the songs is nonsense.

I’ve gone on record numerous times about my hatred for the remake of this film. But I want to use this time to talk about what this movie is, not what that one isn’t. Everything magical about film is within these 98 minutes. Instead of worrying about narrative cohesion and things making sense, I find it best to just sit back and let Suspiria take you somewhere amazing. You’d do well to watch this movie with that in mind.

cheap and dumb but STILL very chilling and well worth seeing

This movie looks pretty cheap and silly throughout. It is so amazing to me, then, that despite this and the rather predictable plot at times, the movie is so effective at scaring the viewer. So, it isn’t really the plot, the acting or the special effects that make it a good film. Instead, the director, cinematographer and musical director deserve the kudos as the movie builds and builds and builds in intensity thanks almost completely to lighting and a suspenseful (though somewhat repetitive) score. Together, they create a visceral reaction that transcends the plot and acting–almost as if your mind is unaware of the terror while your body begins to react strongly with a quickening pulse and nerves that are on end.

Insanely gory and nightmarish Italian horror

Many people consider this to be Dario Argento’s finest film and it is indeed a very accomplished piece of work. Argento’s use of technique is second to none and he ably succeeds in creating a visually stunning film in which the basic plot is not important but the flair with which key moments are played out is everything. I thought the film was very successful in what it was trying to do; that is, build up a nightmarish dream world. Like Fulci’s THE BEYOND, SUSPIRIA is a surreal film in which nothing is what it seems, and packed with horrific images.

The plot is rather simplistic and merely serves as a linkage between the graphically gory set pieces, and in this respect it’s a surprise that the film has been re-issued uncut in this country (many of key moments are truly gut-wrenching). In this respect it differs from a lot of Argento’s other work, films which have mainly been firmly-footed in the giallo genre. There are a number of excellent scenes in SUSPIRIA which stand out as high points of ’70s cinema, and indeed in the horror genre as a whole: Argento really knows how to terrify his audience.

Some of the acting here is rather forced, and not especially brilliant. My main issue would be with the heroine, Jessica Harper, somebody who I didn’t really take to during the film’s course, but of course this is just a personal preference. Some of the dialogue scenes are a bit unintentionally funny which detracts from the film somewhat, but thankfully these moments are few and far between. Who can forget a professor’s theory that “bad luck isn’t a product of broken mirrors – but of broken minds”? Like just about all of Argento’s earlier movies, SUSPIRIA has great photography in which primary colours are highlighted and mixed into some stunning compositions on screen – just look at the setting of the murder at the film’s opening, with the stained glass roof panels. Argento really knew how to put his cameras to their best use. Like Sam Raimi, the director is always looking for different and unsettling camera angles, and one that stuck in my mind is where we see Harper drinking a glass of wine in close up, not seeing her, but watching the glass tipping and gradually emptying. It’s an enchanting moment.

As I mentioned before, there are a number of fantastically gruesome set pieces scattered throughout the film. The opening scene, where two girls are killed inside a giant hall, is truly spectacular, and must go down in horror movie history as one of the most visually accomplished moments of all time: Argento actually manages to make murder beautiful, an oxymoron if ever I heard one. The scene consists of a very brutal moment where a girl is stabbed over and over by an unseen supernatural killer (we see a bare arm plunging the knife into her chest), and then dropped through a glass roof and hanged. Pieces of falling debris also impale another girl below.

The most cringe-worthy scene is where a girl falls into a room of razor wire, and struggles to escape but gets more and more wrapped up in it before her throat is brutally cut, this bit is really hard to watch (although what they were doing with a room full of razor wire…) A blind man also has his throat ripped out by his own guide dog, and Argento enjoys himself by launching a camera off a rooftop and having it swoop down towards his victim. The ending to this film was despised by some, but I personally liked it, and thought the witch’s hideous gurgling/snoring was very disturbing, although the invisibility effect was a little unrealistic. And then it’s time for the entire building to collapse and burn down, perhaps Argento had been watching a lot of Corman Poe films to get his inspiration here.

The gore is exaggerated greatly, which may be a turn off for some. I’m not much of a prude when it comes to gore but here it really does go over the top and is hard to watch. For instance we see a knife blade plunge into a beating heart at one point, and another blade slash open someone’s throat. These deaths are very extravagant, horrendous, and definitely not for the squeamish. The musical score is a highly important part of the film and used to build up terror very effectively: it’s loud and pounding, relentlessly assaulting the viewer with a nightmarish din, thanks to The Goblin. Listen out for the frightening moments when “witch!” is shouted. I altogether this film is one of Argento’s best, and contains everything that makes Italian cinema what it is, i.e. a firm grasp of style. A gruelling non-stop journey of horror for any self-respecting movie fan.