‘Tis the Season

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In discussing a genre such as horror, there are endless discussions of whether or not a given work should be included. Is something a thriller or a horror movie (can it be both)? Can it be horror if it isn’t scary (I’d say yes)? Can it be horror if there’s no element of the supernatural (of course)? These conversations often feel like pointless hairsplitting at best and mean-spirited gatekeeping at worst, but they also feel inevitable (I’ve spent at least one post going down that rabbit hole myself) – how can you really talk about something in any meaningful way if you can’t even agree on what it is?

But sometimes, it’s quite clear: the film was directed by one of horror’s most influential directors; it has both scenes of squirm inducing discomfort and sequences of stalking, home invasion, and assault; and it revolves around one of the all-time most classic “monsters” – witches. Very obviously, the film in question is not a horror film. More of a domestic drama. But one which I think a fan of the genre is well served by considering.

All of this is to say that this week, we’ll be looking at George Romero’s 1973 low-budget, feminist, occult drama, The Season of the Witch. As usual, there will be spoilers, so be forewarned.

The Season of the Witch (1973)

I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is about this movie that I like so much. As described above, it is a real stretch to consider it horror (more of a drama with intimations of the occult). Furthermore, while I absolutely appreciate the film’s socio-political position, it is more than a little on the nose, with what it lacks in subtlety made up for by being really, really blatant. On top of that, it’s fairly slow and not all that much actually happens, and while some performers stand out, it is clearly peopled by the regional talent that Romero had easy access to in Pittsburgh (nothing against “the city of bridges,” but some of these players would not have gone far in NYC or Hollywood). Finally, it was riddled with production issues, with the producers more than halving the budget and chopping Romero’s original cut down by more than 40 minutes (and tossing the negatives, such that most of that is fully lost). And yet, somehow, the result feels so idiosyncratic, independent, deeply watchable, and rather moving. It is not Romero’s best work, but one can easily see him in it, and I have enjoyed revisiting it from time to time over the years.

Originally titled Jack’s Wife, this is a story of a woman trapped by her role – mother, wife, homemaker. The original title suggested how utterly she is discounted by the world around her – not a person, but a relationship, a possession. The distributer felt that name wasn’t going to sell tickets and retitled it Hungry Wives!, marketing it as a softcore sex film. The fact that there is very little sex shown and none of it is remotely explicit meant that the target audience left cinemas pretty unsatisfied. Eventually, it was re-released as The Season of the Witch (after the Donovan song that plays in a key sequence), meaning that now many horror fans would leave unsatisfied, but some, such as myself, have found it to be a lovely, little gem.

Joan (Jan White) is the stay-at-home mother of an adult daughter. Her husband is out of town on business more than he is home. She has no vocation and no one really needs her to do very much. She spends much of her time idly drinking, gossiping, or playing cards with the other neighborhood wives (who are, to be fair, a real hoot!), but the whole time, however done up her hair is, or how perfectly she keeps her home, she seems distant, clearly unengaged, unfulfilled, with a  gentle smile that never reaches her eyes. I wrote above that the film lacks subtlety, but White deserves credit for bringing genuine nuance to so much of her screen time. She communicates a great deal with very little and it is easy to immediately feel for her.

The film opens with a long dream sequence in which she follows behind her husband in the woods as he reads the paper, drinks tea, and eats breakfast, all the while leaving branches to whip her in the face, before he finally puts a collar around her neck, leashes her, and leads her into a kennel where he gives instruction for her care during the week he’ll be away for work. As I’ve said – not exactly subtle, but it is an effective, odd opening. Throughout the film, we spend a lot of time in her dreams, frequently unsure whether an event is real or imagined. We inhabit the space of her anxieties and dissatisfaction; the things she desires seemingly inexorably tied to those she fears: the violation of her home/cage, a threatening, magnetic male presence, and a dangerous, disruptive wild, dark power.  

Through a friend of a friend, she encounters some materials on witchcraft and, her husband out of town and her daughter having run away from home (more on that later), she begins to explore the dark arts, edging closer and closer to reckoning with and owning her own will, and acting to have it done. Along the way, she has a fling with a younger man (an irritatingly trollish, but charismatic guy who had been intermittently seeing her daughter), burns a lot of incense, summons a devil (or maybe just lets a cat into her basement), and (accidentally?) shoots her husband. In the end, we see Joan again at a neighborhood party, but now her reserve, similar to that shown at the beginning, clearly implies a self-satisfaction that makes her the center of attention (even if she is still labeled in the final line of the movie as “You know, Jack’s wife”).

On the horror movie of it all, as Romero does again in his later film Martin (1978), it is never clear whether anything supernatural has actually happened or not. In Martin that question is central to the story and the horror – either the protagonist is a tragic vampire or he is a dangerous psychopath – the ambiguity is key. In this case, however, the film doesn’t concern itself with even questioning whether or not Joan’s magic has any effect. Perhaps Greg comes to her because she cast a spell under moonlight, or maybe he comes because she called him on the phone – in a way it doesn’t matter as much as simply seeing her ask for his presence (to the spirits or via technological means) – seeing her become a willful agent. But still, that uncertainty does add a taste of mystery to the proceedings that brings it somewhat closer to a horror film.

And of course, Joan’s plight is a horrific one – and all the more so for how unnotable it is. Suffering from what Betty Friedan termed “the problem that has no name” in her 1963 text, The Feminine Mystique, Joan finds herself in an empty existence, fulfilling the roles that had been set out for her (and the rest of her neighborhood housewife coterie), surrounded by the creature comforts promised by 50s era Madison Avenue and women’s magazines that glamorized homemaking and helped lure women back out of the workforce after the war. At one point, she has a dream in which she is being shown the house by some sort of agent, and it feels as if she is both being given a nigh endless list of “nice things” and being bound to a dreary responsibility, tied to this building and these objects; the scene is a bit funny, but also haunting.

There is an interesting contrast to be had with her daughter Nikki (Joedda McClain). As a young woman in the sexual revolution of the early 1970s, she has a totally different relationship to sex, relationships, independence, and willfulness than her mother. It’s not clear exactly how old she is, but it’s implied that she’s in college, such that she is in a casual relationship with Greg, an aggressively superior, yet smarmily charming student-teacher there. Still, for all of her freedom and steady self-confidence, she is treated by both her parents and society as a kind of a child. Following a falling out, she leaves home and is considered a runaway, the police called in to search for her. I can only assume that this wouldn’t have happened had she been a 20 year old boy.

The most striking scene in the film features this mother-daughter relationship. After accompanying her friend, Shirley, to visit a “witch” for a tarot card reading, the two of them end up back at Joan’s where Nikki and Greg are hanging out. In an increasingly uncomfortable episode, the four of them drink together, and Greg needles the older women, especially Shirley, targeting her insecurities of growing old, of being undesirable, attacking the hangups that stop her from doing whatever she wants and suggesting that sad, repressed people like her are ‘what’s wrong with this country.’ Nikki apologetically makes half-hearted attempts to reign him in and Joan makes some effort to cut him down for his cruelty, but at the same time, there seems to be a spark between them – antagonistic, but intriguing. Ultimately, she is complicit in Greg’s tricking Shirley into thinking that she’s just tried pot (it’s just a normal cigarette) as he proves a point about the susceptibility and power of the mind and viciously pushes Shirley to an emotional breaking point to reveal just how unhappy she actually is beneath her veneer of happy, square, middle-class housewifery. I mean, he’s not wrong, but he’s also a mean prick.

After driving Shirley home, Joan returns to find that the young couple is still there, sounds of laughter and sexual pleasure coming from her daughter’s room. Visibly unsure what to do, Joan creeps down the hall to her own room and closes the door, but she can still hear them. She buries her head in the pillows, but can’t block them out and is soon physically turned on herself, and disturbed by that fact. But is she so upset because it feels wrong to be so aroused by hearing her daughter’s moans or because she is jealous of a pleasure and a freedom that feel completely lost to her?  She ends in tears shortly before Nikki bursts in, disgusted to realize that her mother had been listening the whole time. This is what prompts her to “run away.”

In the next scene, her husband is furious with her and even strikes her for doing nothing, for not stopping their daughter from “being balled in the next room,” for somehow failing as a mother in letting this 20-something young woman leave home. Notably, Joan is not worried about Nikki at this point – not really. She doesn’t explicitly say this, but Nikki is a confident and self-sufficient adult who can make her own decisions and deal with her own mistakes (something Joan, in contrast, has trouble doing). Rather, Joan is worried about herself – what she wants, what she no longer has the ability to put up with. Soon after, on a Donovan groove, she heads into the city, buys a chalice, a knife, and some herbs, and starts reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards before bed.

She also starts dreaming about a masked intruder breaking into her house and attacking her (in sequences that could have found a place in a more traditional horror movie). Does this dream figure represent the threat and attraction she feels from and towards Greg, the danger of her own unchecked desire running wild, the risk of tampering with dark, occult forces, or just a dangerous maleness, as much her husband as patriarchal society writ large? Later, as these dreams blur into reality, all of these possible interpretations will come to a bloody head.

In recent years, I’ve heard many female led horror films described as “good-for-her” films. Whether Thomasin in The VVitch, Dani in Midsommar, or Dawn in Teeth, there is often a specific and characteristic satisfaction to seeing some woman or girl, whom we have seen marginalized by the people in her life, if not society in general, rising up and taking her place of strength, even if that means engaging in bloody acts. Even if they end up complicit in murder, if not murderers themselves, it’s hard not to nod with a kind of bloody minded approval and think, “good for her.” Romero’s Joan is decades ahead of this curve, shooting her husband in the final reel (possibly accidentally, thinking him the dream intruder, possibly not), this act and its immediate aftermath intercut with her initiation into the local coven of witches.

In that ceremony, a rope is looped around her neck and she is led to kneel, echoing her kennel dream at the opening of the film. Does this suggest that she has just traded one cage for another? I’m not sure why, but in choosing this binding for herself, it doesn’t feel that way. As the film ends, she seems so much more alive. In its bundle of will, magic, the power of the mind, desire, and the mysteries of attraction, Romero’s film presents this woman coming into her own, coming to life, and it is an engaging and touching journey.

While only nominally a horror movie and not the strongest piece in his catalogue, this artifact of early Romero (his third film, after Night of the Living Dead and a romantic comedy I haven’t seen called There’s Always Vanilla) pairs interestingly with both The Amusement Park (also 1973), a recently resurfaced public service short he made about the horrific way the elderly are discarded, and the abovementioned, excellent Martin (also, I assume it must be a direct influence on the rather enjoyable Jakob’s Wife (2021), a story of a dissatisfied housewife getting her groove back after being bitten by a vampire – I wrote a short bit about it here). There could be a valid discussion of how much Romero succeeds or not in engaging with difficulties that were clearly not his own lived experience, but he does so with earnestness and real heart, while bringing some cinematic flair to this grainy, bleak setting. People complain sometimes these days about horror “being too political,” about “virtue signaling” trumping storytelling. Those people should avoid this film – they would hate it. But if you can give it the time, if you can make some allowances, you may find The Season of the Witch the small delight that I do.

Polish Horror Series #6 – I Like Bats

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Really digging into horror cinema (or any cinema) means engaging with all kinds of work. You’ve got masterpieces that are both entertaining and artistically profound. You’ve got cheap B-movies that aren’t “great works of art” but evince a love of the creative process and feature some worthy ideas. You’ve got utter trash that is all the more lovable for just how trashy it is. The highest highs and the lowest lows both have their pleasures.

But sometimes a work can be hard to classify. There are ideas there. There are moments, elements, a look, a shot, a concept that intrigues, a performance that holds your attention, but it doesn’t exactly come together for you. Sometimes you don’t know if you’re encountering an artistic choice, where filmmakers have really taken a chance on something different (narratively, in how a film is cut, in a non-naturalistic style of performance) or if it is frankly just ineptitude. Are the themes and ideas of a given film complex and nuanced, ironically presented and rich in their ambiguity, their seeming ambivalence in fact the point, or has an intended message just been muddled, having haphazardly thrown together actions, events, character choices, and images, resulting in a film that fails to achieve cohesion?

Continuing my intermittent journey through the relatively limited terrain of Polish Horror (See others here), today’s entry is just such a film. From moment to moment, I found it quite watchable, and there were elements to enjoy, but I’m still not quite sure what to do with it and I suspect some of its more puzzling aspects may simply represent failures of good storytelling. But maybe they are intentional subversions of standard narrative conventions and expectations. Either way, I don’t think my role here is to judge “quality,” but to discuss whatever of interest may be found in a given work. So, without further ado, here we go…

Lubię Nietoperze (1986) (I Like Bats)

Polish film posters from the 70s and 80s are a trip!

The first act of Krystyna Kofta’s and Grzegorz Warchol’s sometimes evocative, sometimes blackly comic, and sometimes narratively obtuse and meandering I Like Bats is quite an enjoyable vampire flick. Izabela, or Iza for short (Katarzyna Walter), is a modern, independent vampire in a small town, who is regularly hounded by her aunt and the ghost of her grandfather (who expresses his wishes by making his absurdly angry looking portrait fall from the wall) to finally settle down, get a man, and stop vamping around.

But Iza doesn’t want to hear about it. She seems happy living her life her way and rolls her eyes at her aunt’s entreaties. She spurns the advances of one pushy, entitled local creep and seems to take pleasure in hanging out with her bats, making pottery for her aunt’s curio shop, and apparently preying solely on unpleasant men, often those who first try to prey on her.

Her un-lifestyle seems quite satisfying and she resists her aunt’s insistence that it’s time to start acting like a ‘real woman.’ I think the film is most gratifying in these early scenes of her presenting herself as vulnerable (sometimes dressed as a prostitute, sometimes simply being a woman walking home alone at night) only to turn the tables on some sleazebag, and sometimes getting to be fully badass, walking away from exploding vans, luxuriating in the rain and the night, and indulging in quality time with her beloved, shrieking, chattering bats.

But then a guy comes to the curio shop, buys a tea set and the main story starts in earnest, as does the narrative and thematic ambivalence. Basically, she falls in love (for some reason) with this psychiatrist and has herself committed to his institution to be cured of her vampirism (does she really want that cure or does she just want him – it’s not clear). He doesn’t believe her and treats her for delusion, but eventually, he comes around, falls in love and, after a bout of artfully filmed sex (her first time), ala Pinocchio, she becomes a ‘real girl,’ seeing her reflection for the first time, and they get married and have kids. But in the final moments, it’s revealed that the vampirism has passed to her young daughter.

But this middle stretch gets difficult because the motivation for so many character choices and the moments when a character actually feels something and changes somehow all felt like they happened off screen. The film maintains a light, ironic tone, often set to the playful score by Zbigniew Preisner (who scored a few Hollywood films but would be best known internationally for his work with Kieślowski, e.g., Red, White, Blue, or The Double Life of Veronique), and there is no real sense of urgency to the proceedings. It’s hard to fathom what she sees in the psychiatrist (named Professor Jung – perhaps there’s something to read into this – maybe we are to take all these figures as archetypes and not characters as such), and his journey from skepticism to passionate love feels unearned. The world of the film is one where nothing has stakes (argh – sorry) or happens for a clear reason. Cars crash and no one notices. Kids break shop windows and come in to retrieve their ball and no one mentions the window. A woman in a bar gets bored, takes off her top and starts dancing and no one bats an eye (again, I can’t help myself). Things just are. And then they are something else.

All the same, it is disappointing when this cool, self-possessed character, who seems to rather enjoy her vampirism, suddenly sees a pretty boring guy, gets immediately love sick and starts pining after him; worse still, in the end, she’s somehow happy to have so dramatically changed. It all feels so disheartening that, given the ironic elements, I wonder if this is intentional. Are we meant to view her change as a fairy tale happy ending (the virginal dead girl gets “kissed” by the prince and “comes to life”) or are we perhaps supposed to see the inherent personality erasing loss of self in this recurring narrative?

Fairy tales often progress in an unquestioning mode. Things simply are the way they are. Whether a fish talks or a bean stalk grows into the clouds, characters accept everything as natural; nothing is ever shocking and I Like Bats does lean on some fairy tale elements. No one really questions the existence of vampires (they only deny that Iza could be one as apparently in this world, all vampires are men – is this some comment on how a certain kind of sexual desire is perceived?). The cinematography (which is really quite attractive) is often dreamy and artful. The location used for the institute is Moszna Castle, a palace with 99 turrets sometimes referred to as “Polish Disneyland” (also – and I wonder if this was meant to function as a kind of visual pun given that the castle is quite well known in Poland, and there is a strong theme of sexual desire running under the vampirism – “moszna” in Polish translates as “scrotum” – so take that as you will).

Furthermore, the film seems to take place in some unspecified time with some modern sensibilities but costuming and cars that seem from a more distant past. Similarly, the setting seems to be deliberately unfixed – signs are in Polish, but in one scene, they visit an institute where vampires are imprisoned in cages on the beach at “the ocean” (while Poland is on the Baltic Sea, it is nowhere near the ocean). There are many advertisements (for cigarettes mostly) in English and Iza’s small town seems surprisingly multi-cultural for my (perhaps incorrect) impression of Poland in the 80s. This all comes together to imply a dreamlike no-place and no-when, peopled by odd characters who sometimes act for no-why.

This had been on my radar for some time just because it is a Polish vampire movie (and there aren’t many if any others exist at all), but I recently got the chance to see it with English subtitles because the Severin Films remaster just came to Shudder (sadly, it’s quite difficult to do screen captures from Shudder – so the pics here are from an inferior print – the newly remastered version really looks so much better) as part of a set of movies accompanying the second edition of Kier-La Janisse’s fascinating House of Psychotic Women (the first edition of which I wrote about here). Her focus is on films that present “female madness” and I’m very curious how she frames this one. Though it is her explicit reason to be in the clinic, Iza’s vampirism does not read as any kind of mental illness. She seems quite happy with it and the way she lives. If anything, her insistence on the attention of this man seems like the unmotivated compulsion. Maybe therein lies the madness?

She seems constantly surrounded by sleazy, irritating, or pathetic men, and she seems to exclusively feed on those who in some way hunt her, who desire her, sometimes acting on that desire violently. Professor Jung doesn’t seem much interested in her at all, either because he doesn’t like women, or he doesn’t want any distractions from his work (two explanations he gives), or he just doesn’t like her. Is his indifference the magic spell that infatuates her so? She is only upset that he doesn’t take more interest. And in the end, when finally he comes around, rescues her from the beach-vampire-cage institute, and takes her off to go skinny dipping/make love to her until she’s human, she seems very happy in her “normal” human family life. If anything, the reveal of her daughter’s fangs (and penchant for killing gardeners) plays as a darkly comic twist – that even though Iza has put her dark past behind her and settled down into civilized life, this unruly female desire resurfaces in her offspring. Does the film want us to be happy for Iza in her newfound “normalcy” and to laugh at how the “problem” persists or does it want us to mourn for Iza’s loss of identity as she disappears into bland conformity and to laugh at how good it is that her lost vivacity continues in her child? Un-life will find a way.

It is a consistently watchable (and again, the look and feel and sound of it all is striking and expressive) and frequently enjoyable film, which still puzzles in its often confounding character beats. Is this an issue of poor editing and half-baked writing, or is it instead successful in ironically telling us a fairy tale that we should view as facile and even harmful, its disjointed, apparently unmotivated qualities supporting that reading? It’s hard to find much analysis on it in either English or Polish (thus, I’m particularly curious to see what Kier-La Janisse has to say). The short English descriptions online present a quirky vampire romance (but I found no real analysis or criticism beyond user reviews saying “weird, great movie” or “weird, boring movie”) and much of what I’ve found in Polish either describes it as a bit of superficial, erotic schlock produced late in the communist regime as a kind of ‘bread and circuses’ to keep the public entertained and thus pacified (attacking it as regrettably ‘low art’) or uses it as an example of how Polish cinema really didn’t respect and therefore didn’t succeed at genre film (attacking Polish film culture for being over-snobbish when it comes to matters of ‘low’ and ‘high’ art). Hey, if any Polish readers know of more insightful readings out there, please let me know – I’m very curious and limited by my embarrassingly weak Polish skills.

For my part, I watched it twice in a couple days and enjoyed watching it both times, but I can’t say if I think it’s good or not. It has been interesting to consider and it’s certainly got moments that shine. It’s fascinating how sometimes watching something from a culture you didn’t grow up in (even if you’ve lived there for a while – I’ve been in Poland for 14 years at this point), you can be more forgiving of faults, more open to reading what seem like very strange choices or even mistakes in a more charitable light. I often feel like maybe there’s something culturally informing all this that doesn’t land for me, that just goes over my head. It makes for a rich and sometimes mysterious viewing experience. If you’re not in a hurry, and you’re in the mood for an odd little piece of off-kilter vampire cinema from a specific time and place (trying to be no time or place), perchance this one is for you.

When Real Life Horrors Intrude

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Hello out there, dear readers. I’m sorry to say that this week, I really don’t have much of a post for you. Over the weekend, we discovered that our cat is very, very sick with a really serious heart condition and all I currently have mental capacity for is going back and forth from the emergency clinic and trying not to get in a car accident. I even thought I might try watching and writing about something light and comforting like It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, but I haven’t even achieved that, and it’s only 25 minutes long.

I sure do love horror films and stories, and I particularly appreciate when they make room for grief, when they feel like they have emotional depth, are about something real – through their fictional lens, we can grapple with some of the most difficult and vital aspects of living. But fiction is key here. When you’re thrust into an encounter (which you knew was bound to happen sooner or later, but you’re never ready for) with the reality of someone you love really suffering, and feeling like there’s so little you can do to help them, feeling like you’re failing them, it just breaks the world. It is a horror – crushing reality impinging, heartlessly on the comforting illusions of safety and security and agency that we need to hold onto to get through our lives without snapping.

Sadly, this week, I don’t have the power to dwell in those fictional horrors I find so rewarding. I don’t even have it in me to hang out in the comforts of a childhood Halloween special. I just have to deal with the reality in front of me and do what little I can for a lovely, loving creature about whom I care so deeply.

Sorry this post is a bummer. If you check in regularly, thank you so much – please keep doing so. Next week, I’ll be back with a movie or a book or something fun and spooky.

See you then,

Glen

Suspiria:  Cinematic Pleasure, Candy Colored Joy

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Following last week’s look at Argento’s output in the eighties, I felt like staying on this train and finally tackling what might be considered his opus, Suspiria (of course, others will argue the point, but that’s what I suppose the internet is for).  Regardless of whether or not it’s his best work (and it very well may be), it is easily his most iconic and recognizable. It was the first of his films that I saw and it surely made an impression (I also expect it was my first Italian horror film way back when, and thus my first exposure to some of the typical traits thereof, such as the characteristic dubbing).

And yet, for all that it holds a place of honor among fans and critics, I think there is sometimes a kind of snooty gatekeeping reaction against it. “Oh sure, you like Suspiria. But everyone’s seen that; you can’t really call yourself a serious horror fan until you can comment incisively on Jenifer (an Argento-directed episode of the anthology TV show, Masters of Horror) and the collected works of Umberto Lenzi, Bruno Mattei, and Joe D’Amato.” Additionally, given the divisive nature of its 2018 remake (which I really love and have written about here), I think many fans of Guadagnino’s film (criticized by some for how it differs from the original), have thus taken a defensive posture against the original, or at least, have cooled on it. While I understand that emotional response, I’d encourage anyone in that camp to revisit Argento’s film. Having re-watched it a couple of times recently for this post, I can attest that it holds up as a very special movie and is worth watching with fresh eyes. So, let’s get into it…

Suspiria (1977)

I may not watch it so often, but every time I do, I get immediately excited. The opening scene is just such a thrill (in which not much really happens, but the way it doesn’t happen is so cinematic and magical). Our main character, Suzy, arrives at an airport in Germany late at night, and it is immediately the most gorgeously shot airport I’ve ever seen (not a gorgeous airport mind you, but gorgeously shot). As she walks towards the exit, every time the automatic doors open, a storm rages outside and the musical theme creeps in, only to cut out the second the doors have closed.

It’s as if she’s in this liminal space of travel, still between worlds, still protected within its walls, but outdoors, a gale of menacing supernatural force howls. Finally outside, buffeted by the wind and the rain, she eventually succeeds at hailing a taxi and has a hilarious interaction with the driver, familiar to anyone who’s spent much time abroad – she says the street she’s going to multiple times and he just shrugs, not understanding and not caring; finally she shows him the address and he goes “Ah, Escherstraße,” pronouncing it, to my ears, identically to how she had been saying it, and starts to drive. Now moving, her face is bathed in ever changing colored lights. It’s not realistic – I don’t think she would be lit this way by actual florescent signs and streetlights, but it feels real while it is happening and this disorienting chromatic play beautifully situates her as a small, wet, fragile being alone in a very foreign, incomprehensible, and unforgiving land.

When the taxi pulls up at her destination (the dance academy at which she has come to study), the deep red and gold building looms like a monster above her and the rain comes down in buckets, highlighted by an improbably bright light, just out of view. She sees a girl shouting in the doorway and running off into the night, but is denied entry herself by the voice on the intercom and has to return to the impatient driver to be taken to a hotel for the night.

In the car, she catches a glimpse of that girl, terrified, running through the woods from some unknown threat. We then follow that girl into a shockingly gorgeous art deco interior where she will shortly be murdered in the next scene (and that murder will of course be a visual spectacle – gory, scary, and stunningly composed, every rich streak of blood in its place).

I’m not going to describe every frame of the movie, though almost every shot could be framed, so consciously and artfully has it been crafted, but I wanted to give some sense of how strong it starts, of its atmosphere of overwhelming audio-visual elation.

Sometimes Suspiria is dismissed as style over substance, as that colorful movie, as an exercise in empty visual excess, but at the end of the day, what is the medium of cinema? It’s just light, brighter or darker, in different hues, accompanied by sound; thus, I think it short sighted to discount work which gives so much attention, so much care to exactly those elements, lovingly, joyfully, successfully crafting a sensory experience unlike any other (which still delivers other cinematic value as well) simply because the story is simple.

Suspiria is basically a fairy tale. A young girl (Suzy Bannion) goes to a mysterious dance academy in the middle of a dark forest. Everyone there is strange and standoffish, and the teachers are demanding. Struck by a light reflecting off a crystal in the hallway, Suzy falls sick and is forced to board at the school against her will while she recovers. Her diet is controlled and it’s implied that the wine is drugged or enchanted. There are odd disappearances and deaths; those who displease the instructors meet bad ends. Suzy feels compelled to investigate and comes to learn that they are a coven of witches, led by the often invisible old crone who is perhaps leeching some of the young students of life. Having killed the witch and broken her power, Suzy escapes the school as it burns, the other witches screaming within. Technically, these are spoilers, but in a fairy tale like this, I really don’t think it matters.

There are some absurdities along the way and things that just don’t make sense (it seems obligatory to ask why any dance academy, even one run by evil witches would keep a room filled with razor wire – also, in one scene the pianist who provides music for classes seems to be playing an orchestra – we see him at the piano, but we hear a string section and perhaps some woodwinds until he stops playing), but the simple story actually plays out with consistency, and serves as a structure to hold glorious images and spectacular sequences of dread, suspense, and optic extremity.

And the quality of those images really cannot be oversold. Leaning hard into the fairy tale of it all, Argento instructed the cinematographer, Luciano Tovoli, to base the colors of the film on those of Disney’s Snow White, and utilized the same Technicolor film printing process that had been used on The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, thought outdated at that time (after printing Suspiria, the last Technicolor equipment in Italy was dismantled). Furthermore, Tivoli mostly eschewed typical colored gels, instead creating screens of colorful velvets and tissue paper which he used to paint the light, intending a greater tactile effect, which I feel he achieved. For more on Tivoli, I recommend this fascinating exploration of his work.

From moment to moment, especially exploring the luscious interiors of the academy, or the building where Pat is killed, my breath catches in my throat. There is really is something to the deeply saturated colors; this is as true of the crushed velvet on the walls as it is of the light coming through the stained glass in the ceiling, or of the bright red, paint-like blood trailing down a victim’s body. The whole film is a sensory delicacy, a delight.

And light and color are not the only sensory elements of significance. In this, their second collaboration with Argento, Goblin crafted an inimitable, dominating score. It features the synth-prog groove one would expect of them, but is also just really aggressive – sometimes discordant, sometimes jarring. Thus, it brings certain scenes to life, adding a sense of the arcane even to moments which lack other markers of danger – such as when Suzy speaks with two psychiatrists about witches (like you do) in a bright, modern, sunlit courtyard. Between the music and the camera’s ever shifting position, Suspiria never lets you forget you’re watching a horror film, even while listening to some doctors whose specialty seems to be expository dialogue.

But regarding that exposition (probably one of the least gripping aspects of the film), I do appreciate something about the lore. Inspired by a prose poem by Thomas De Quincey, describing an opium dream about three ‘mothers of sorrow,’ matching the three fates, or the three graces, the screenplay by Argento and his partner, Daria Nicolodi posits witches as powerful, menacing, and malicious, but doesn’t bring any typical Christian mythology into it. Satan’s never mentioned, nor is sin. I love when we can have supernatural threats that linger just beyond our understanding without having to buy into something that feels like an infomercial for the church. It is nice not to be plagued by religiosity in an occult horror film, but beyond that, I think it’s just more interesting, more evocative. This world has its own mythos and we catch only the smallest glimpse of it, letting it loom that much larger in the shadows. This will be satisfyingly expanded on in Inferno.

Even when it feels obvious that story beats have been crafted primarily to set up the next visual payoff, that payoff never disappoints, such as when the maggots falling from the ceiling (thanks to meat kept in the attic, which has spoiled, presumably due to its proximity to evil witches and not because it was being stored, unrefrigerated, in an attic) results in all the students and teachers having to sleep in a large dance studio, the boys, girls, and teachers divided by white sheets. The lights are turned off and suddenly, all of the screens are backlit in red and I go, “oooh, cool!” Behind Suzy and her new friend Sara, ghostly silhouettes flit across the screen, until one particularly decrepit figure beds down exactly behind them and starts to snore in a gasping, rattling, unsettling fashion.  Sara feverishly whispers to Suzy about how that must be the school’s true headmistress, said to be away. Nothing really happens here, but it is an intense scene, visually striking, and heightening the story’s sense of mystery and threat.

One other key to the film’s success which could not be overstated is the center provided by Jessica Harper, who plays Suzy. Apparently Argento had originally wanted the dancers to all be children no older than 12, but the producer (his father) was concerned that censors wouldn’t pass a film with such violence if it featured kids (the script, however was never changed, which explains some of the childish interactions of the clearly adult actresses – also, to maintain the feeling of children, all doorknobs on the set were placed at about Harper’s head level).

Slight of frame, with big, gently curious eyes, Harper brings a childlike quality to the role, without at all behaving immaturely. She instead carries an awareness, a self-assurance throughout as she questions the stern headmistress about the killings, interviews psychiatrists about witchcraft, or squares off against the ancient occultist behind the curtain. Her stature and costuming implies vulnerability and youth, but her character is willful, steady, and intelligent.

Furthermore, Harper plays every moment with a kind of quiet sincerity, lending credence to the sometimes wild turn of events around her. Sometimes characters don’t seem to realize that they are in a horror movie, but Suzy seems to from the first time that the airport doors slide open and the sounds of mysterious threat starts screaming at her through the pounding rain. She can’t hear the soundtrack, but it feels like she is properly unnerved by it nonetheless. Without her at the film’s core, the often mad, if beautiful, pageant of aesthetic horrors might really not hold together (a criticism that could be levied against Argento’s follow up, Inferno).

Finally, it would be an oversight not to give any attention to the violence of the film, which is also unique, stunning, and potent. As is often the case with Argento, it is in the kill scenes that his cinematic flair most comes to play. Pat’s face pressed through the window, the knife seen entering her still beating heart, her friend dead on the floor of this grand lobby, a pane of glass splitting her face, the blind pianist threatened in the wide open, empty town square in the middle of the night, fascistically imperial monuments on all sides, only to be attacked from a totally unexpected direction, Sara in the razor wire, before the blade is pulled, graphically across her flesh, Markos with the crystal peacock feather pressed through her rotting neck; each kill is preceded by a sustained, tense game of teasing suspense and shock, and with few exceptions, each death is seductively beautiful.

Even in its brutality, the violence of the film is artful. I feel like each drop of blood, each pin in an eye, each shard of glass piercing the skin has been placed with great care, balancing horror movie scares that can startle or disgust with visual compositions that the eye doesn’t want to look away from.

Are there moments that don’t work? Sure (a certain bat attack and fake dog mouth come to mind). Does my attention sometimes wander a bit until the next extraordinary visual or sequence is presented? Yeah, I’ll admit it. But for me, those things just don’t matter so much. It is a unique monster of a film, the product of a singular vision, and a tremendous success. Though the tale is one of murder and horrors, full of hostility and brutality and unsettling moments and gore, the total effect for me is one of delight, every frame filled with the obvious joy of artists making exactly the thing that most excited them, and doing it so very well.

It must also be said that I do dearly love Guadagnino’s 2018 remake as well. They are such very different films, but each revels in a kind of excess (Argento’s being a maximalist aesthetic trip and Guadagnino’s being so overfull with ideas and history and character), and each creates a space in which I love to dwell. I think in a case like this, they need not be in competition and a fan need not take sides. You can love all your kids, but maybe you love some of them in different ways.