In advance of Monday’s screenings, WFS Committee member Jessy Reese reflects on her first encounter with Dario Argento’s Suspiria.
I’m nineteen years old in a cold flat in Melbourne’s inner north. I’m alone, watching Dario Argento’s Suspiria on my laptop. There’s psychedelic prog-rock transmitting tinnily but with great force from the laptop speakers; pinks and purples are splashing over me from the screen. I’m an Art History student who takes things Very Seriously and, while I consider myself interested in cinema, my vocabulary is mostly limited to contemporary arthouse dramas and Wes Anderson movies. I grew up with a nervous disposition, so my only experience of horror movies to date has been isolated scenes caught between channel-changes on TV that would then launch unceasingly out of my memory and make me feel nauseous – a weirdly sexy vampire Lemora scoffing orange-tinted flesh; The Exorcist’s famous backbend; a grim Hostel torture sequence. At this time in my life, taking classes on the Pre-Raphaelites and early Modernism, I’ve probably absorbed the belief that horror is distasteful.
The dialogue in the movie seems, to me, to be a shoddy dub and, along with the bad-rip, illegal-stream pixelation, lends the home-screening a thrilling, ‘I’m-watching-something-I-shouldn’t’ quality – or maybe I’m romanticising in hindsight, because at the time it also seems to me like it could be bad filmmaking. On-screen, women are falling into pits of razor-wire and getting stabbed through beating hearts, but the gore is minimal and unreal. Alida Valli is extremely unnerving. There’s an unending onslaught of visual information. It’s colour like I’ve never seen used before in film. My eyes roam continuously over the elaborate sets like Argento’s camera itself, never stopping to rest. The walls are closing in. I’m unsure about where plot fits in the director’s hierarchy of interests. I’m confused. I’m excited. I thought I was supposed to think watching beautiful women be killed on screen was anti-feminist, but what about the fact that I’m enjoying it? I’m not sure what’s bad or good anymore. I’m happy to be scared! I’m never the same again!
This is the story of the film that changed how I thought about film. So deeply did it challenge what I thought to be ‘The Point’ of cinema, that I never thought of any art form in the same way again. Given Suspiria‘s cult status as a high point of art horror (and probably the most visually striking of all), it may seem to some naïve that I didn’t know what I was in for. But, despite the recent era of A24/ Neon-led prestige horror, the genre still suffers from a misunderstanding of its cinematic virtues. Where I initially read grubby sensationalism, I now see poetry. What I thought was a bad dub from another language, something that gave the movie on the small-screen a bootleg quality, I now understand to be a feature of the highly innovative and energetic Italian genre-cinema industry of the late 20th Century – a process of dubbing dialogue entirely in post-production, rather than fussing with it during filming. Instead, during filming, the cast and crew were blasted with the nerve-jangling soundtrack by Goblin, played live by the band to imbue the set with the high-energy intention of the final cut. What may seem like a crazed layering of chaos with a disregard for sense (no one would claim Argento’s first concern is an airtight narrative) is an intentional exercise in upending genre expectations and presenting the viewers with a psychedelic experience. In Argento’s own words: “It starts how most horror films end, and it just keeps building and building, crescendo on crescendo.”
At nineteen, with my fists tightly wrapped around feminist semiotic language, I thought it was a massive aesthetic issue to erotically film women being stabbed. However, there exists in Argento’s work a self-reflexive commentary on the nature of spectatorship and ‘the gaze’ in cinema, particularly in the giallo genre, which he brought to fame in the footsteps of Mario Bava. Argento’s later film Tenebrae remains the clearest example of this self-awareness, and of Argento’s honourable question mark of a final answer. In many ways, though, Suspiria bears the same marks and can be read as a force of female energy. It was co-written by a woman, Argento’s collaborator and romantic partner, Daria Nicolodi, and features cult actress Jessica Harper in the lead, as well as icons Joan Bennett and Alida Valli (whom Film Society members will recognise from The Long Absence and The Third Man), in a film that (you be the judge) ends triumphantly for the protagonist.
I’m a lot less squeamish now and further down the tunnel of the grisly and downright odd than I was ten years ago, but I still believe that Suspiria taught me more about visual pleasure in narrative cinema than Laura Mulvey ever could. And for those that don’t want to think too hard about their slasher thrills, there’s the promise of an Undeniably Cinematic Experience – a film that is best served to a packed crowd and blasted out at them like a transmission from their own strange dream.