DVD Tuesday: Dreams, Screams and Sighs in Suspiria
Send your movie questions to
FlickChick.
This week's DVD Tuesday pick is
Suspiria, and it's dedicated to the one I love... the
filmmaker I love, I hasten to clarify. And that would be Italian master of the macabre
Dario Argento, who changed my life. I wrote my master's thesis about his films, and it later became my first published book. The book,
Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, in turn established my reputation as the thinking fan's horror expert, and it has inspired remarkable devotion in the most unexpected of quarters.
I was thinking about Argento recently as I read about onetime actress/former Italian first lady Veronica Lario Berlusconi, whom I first saw in Argento's
Tenebrae. Berlusconi recently took her husband to task for his wandering eye
in an open letter published in the newspaper
La Repubblica. If her "dignity as a woman" withstood on-screen death by arterial spray, I'm sure she'll survive her husband's relentless flirting.
Argento is at the forefront of contemporary Euro-horror, which is generally more self-consciously plugged into a variety of genre-related traditions than the American school: Even second-tier European horror filmmakers - particularly the Italians - tend to be more aware than their U.S. counterparts are of the
fantastique tradition in literature, theater and fine art. This knowledge gives their movies texture and allusive depth.
Suspiria is above all a completely deranged fairy tale and a candy-colored feast for the eyes. Set in a baroque, haunted ballet academy, it's shot on outdated Technicolor film stock that gives it the look of stained glass. It's driven by a clattering, wailing, hissingly propulsive score by progressive rockers
Goblin, and all together it seems like some deranged, feverish hallucination.
American dance student Susy Banyon (the oddly endearing
Jessica Harper) comes to Germany to study at the Freiburg Tanzacademie, but finds herself trapped in an operatic condensation of every cautionary fable ever written involving young girls, secret rooms, wicked authority figures, scary woods and old dark houses. On a conventional narrative level it doesn't make a lick of sense - exactly where is that room full of barbed wire, anyway? - but it unfolds with the vivid, elliptical logic of a dream.
Be warned: There are some really gory sequences, one of which is early on. The faint of heart might want to avert their eyes for a few minutes as soon as the terrified former Tanzacademie student sees those glowing eyes outside the window. But what a trip!
Things to consider:
Ambitious American filmmakers often treat horror as a commercial stepping stone, abandoning the genre as soon as they can or regretting that they've gotten "trapped" in the genre. How are the conventions of horror restrictive, and how can they be liberating?
In what ways are horror films like dreams?
Why is music so important in films in general and in horror films in particular?
In what ways does Goblin's progressive rock style go against the grain of traditional "spooky music," and why is it effective nonetheless?
Remember: Send your movie questions to
FlickChick.
Previous DVD Tuesday blogs:
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also:
This week's new DVD releases
