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Movie: Suspiria (1977), directed by Dario Argento

Watched on: Tubi

Ran: 7.33 miles, 9’10”/mile, 01:07:12 (recovery run)

 

I was feeling a little beat-up after yesterday’s long effort, so I figured this might be a good opportunity to cue up Argento’s Suspiria during a slow recovery run. It’s a fine choice when you just want to tumble down a mental rabbit hole into a bad dream from which the only way out is through. After all, no matter how fast you run in a nightmare, the monster is right behind you—so you might as well slow down.

 

The plot of Suspiria is hardly the point, but here’s a quick rundown anyway: Suzy Bannion is a young American ballet dancer who has come to study at a prestigious dance school in Germany, and things are weird from the start. An expelled student and her friend are found brutally murdered. Suzy “mysteriously” faints and hemorrhages, and is confined to quarters on a “special diet” which makes her strangely sleepy each night. Maggots rain from the ceiling. The school’s blind pianist is killed by his faithful seeing eye dog. Suzy’s newfound friend vanishes when she gets too curious about what the school’s staff get up to after hours. In trying to track her down, Suzy learns that the academy was originally a school of the occult founded by a Greek witch who died in a fire. And now that Suzy knows more than she should, too, it’s not hard to guess what’s next on the agenda.

 

Honestly, it’s not at all a bad story, and it holds together a lot better than many horror movie plots, but as I say, it’s not really Suspiria’s focus. More than anything, Suspiria is an experiential approximation of a nightmare—or maybe the inversion of a nightmare: even though the plot more or less makes sense after the fact, everything seems otherworldly and inescapable as you watch it all unspool onscreen. To me it almost feels like cause and effect are suspended and time does that dilation thing that makes scary dreams so much scarier.

 

A lot of what produces this mesmerizing effect is the film’s look. Can we talk about the sets and props? There are art nouveau elements set against dizzying angles and geometries and nothing works and therefore everything works. Light and shadow are fighting tooth and nail in every shot. The textures will make your brain itch, while the colors are, and I can’t stress this enough, insane: neon blues and oranges, screaming reds and sour apple greens, all somehow dancing happily together with the saturation dialed up to 11. I’m normally not a fan of unrealistic movie blood, but Suspiria’s gore is almost magenta and yet in context it’s perfect. Nothing else would work. And it’s not just perfect because it’s nightmarish; while I’m not at all a fan of bright colors in waking life, every shot in this dreamworld is sublimely beautiful. Seriously, you could blow up pretty much any still frame from this movie and I’d happily hang it on my wall.

 

Next up: the sound. Suspiria’s most overt tool for conjuring its particular brand of trance is its music—hallucinatory fever dreams by prog-rock band Goblin. It goes farther than that, though. Suzy is portrayed by Jessica Harper, whose voice I find to be just the right timbre to lull me into a false sense of security. Her voice represents reason among an aural hellscape of delirium, and that makes the delirium all that much worse. Add to that the subtle surreality of every actor having spoken her lines in her native language so that the ADR doesn’t quite sync up, and you’re left off-balance in every conversation.

 

But to me, the single biggest factor that makes Suspiria so perfectly off-putting relates back to its script. Suzy and her fellow dance students are grown women, but in the story as originally envisioned, the dancers were intended to be pre-teen girls. Elements of this remain in the dialogue and behavior of the other dancers—they tease each other about boys, they hurl juvenile insults and stick their tongues out at each other. It explains some things about the narrative, too, which, when stripped of its horrific elements, is strangely reminiscent of a Nancy Drew mystery, with girls whispering after bedtime and counting footsteps in the hall to deduce the location of a secret door. More than anything else, I think this is what makes the film so effective: the scariest nightmares of our lives—the ones that really made our hearts pound and woke us up screaming—aren’t the anxiety dreams of adulthood, but the ones in which we ran from monsters as children. And, y’know, it’s creepy to see grown-ups acting like (and being as helpless as) kids.

 

So yeah, do yourself a favor; give Suspiria another watch. That is, if you want to run from the monsters again. And you know you do.