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“Then I heard this weird kind of snoring…”:Review of Suspiria (1977)
by John Plunkett
Suspiria, directed by Dario Argento, is the first of Argento’s loosely linked “Three Mothers” trilogy, followed by Inferno (1980) and Mother of Tears (currently in post-production). It contains plenty of fake blood and screaming young women, and more ham acting than a dinner theater troupe.
Suzy (Jessica Harper) arrives in Germany on a dark and stormy night, on her way to a renowned school of dance. When she arrives, she sees a fear-maddened young woman, Pat (Eva Axén), slipping out the door, but no one will let Suzy in. Soon, we see Pat brutally murdered: a hairy arm crashes through the window and begins to stab and stab again; the camera lingers over the women’s exposed, twitching heart as the knife goes in.
Suzy eventually gains admittance to the ballet school, run by the Nurse Rached-like Ms. Tanner (Alida Valli, of Eyes Without a Face) and the heavily made-up Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett). The place is slightly off-kilter, with odd hangers-on: a silent Romanian servant with protruding false teeth, a creepy little kid, a blind accompanist and his menacing German Shepherd. The upstairs dormitory experiences a rain of maggots, causing one budding ballerina to speculate, out of the blue, “Maybe there’s a hex on the place!” Argento has a great fondness for strange lighting- the halls are lit by blue, red, and green light from no logical source, intentionally made more garish by printing the film with an obsolete Technicolor process. He was trying to impart a surreal, nightmarish quality to the film, but it makes the ballet school look like it's being used as a haunted house for Halloween.There is a night scene in a temporary dormitory. Most movies of this ilk would use this as an excuse for gratuitous cheesecake shots, but not Suspiria. Instead, the demurely clothed girls are inexplicably terrified because they hear the unseen directress of the school snoring nearby. It is unintentionally amusing, especially when Suzy’s friend Sara (Stefania Casini) recounts an earlier incident with the sleep disorder sufferer: “Then I heard this weird kind of snoring… I tell you it was so weird, I never forgot it!” While I’d love to see the horror film crafted with enough skill to make snoring a thing of menace, this isn’t it.
It’s not until halfway through the film that Suzy starts to realize that things are going on – why would she? Aside from the death in the first few minutes of the film, and the weird snoring, there’s little horror until the end, and even then there’s not much. The plot, which Argento came up with along with his girlfriend Daria Nicolodi, makes no sense and very little really happens.
There’s a funny scene with a malicious and persistent bat on a string, which inexplicably appears to torment our heroine. One can imagine Argento and Nicolodi brainstorming for ways to make the film more terrifying, and then the epiphany: “We’ll put in a BAT! Won’t that be great?” The bat aside, Suspiria is mostly too boring and uneventful to enjoy even as a cheesy B-movie. And the ending! The horrible, anticlimactic ending, in which you wonder how the Evil that haunts the school stuck around so long if it can be defeated so easily.
On a charitable note, the opening murder sequence does get the pulse jumping, and there is one scene of an attack on a dark night, in an empty square with pale looming buildings, which is genuinely creepy. The macabre music by the Italian progressive rock band Goblin is quite good and works to make the bland atmosphere in the film a little more chilling.
Suspiria is often cited as one of Argento’s best works- which isn’t encouraging. By the end of the film, you might be doing some weird snoring of your own. But unlike the snoring, Suspiria itself is easy to forget.
With superior being a bright full moon, this movie rates:
© Plunkett, 2007
