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Catching Up With Shudder – International Voices

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As is true of many people, I carry more subscriptions than are probably necessary. Summing it all up, it doesn’t break the bank and I don’t exactly feel like I’m wasting my money, but how on earth could I ever watch all of the stuff on all of these different services? But each has something I want and that keeps me paying every month. One that I never regret is my subscription to Shudder, a streamer specializing in Horror (and thrillers – there’s a great collection of Gialli). I know that there are other ways to have access to a great amount of content (Tubi is free with commercials, for example), but I just feel some kind of loyalty to this one – it feels smaller; it doesn’t have an endless selection, and sometimes they can’t afford the biggest films, but it is curated by people rather than algorithms and I like that personal touch. And they do release a lot of exclusive films – some of which they produce and some of which they simply distribute.

But as I’ve often written, I have trouble keeping up with new stuff, so this week, as I’m a teacher and it’s winter holiday where I live (so I have some extra time), I’d like to catch up on some Shudder originals from last year, particularly some international releases and/or films bringing a different cultural perspective. Sometimes I see fans complain about how Hollywood has run out of ideas and is just endlessly milking properties that should have been allowed to die gracefully (but, to be fair, this is Horror – no one dies gracefully), but in recent years, streaming has really opened up the international market, and I feel that there are so many fresh voices worth exploring. So that’s the plan. Let’s see how much I can get through by the end of the week.

These will be shorter reviews – just giving some first impressions – and I’ll try to keep these spoiler free…

Saloum (2022) (Senegal)

A Senegalese genre mash-up, written and directed by Jean Luc Herbulot from Congo, this is a wild, entertaining ride, steeped in cultural references and recent history that I respectively had no previous connection to and was woefully ignorant of. Set in 2003, directly after a coup in Guinea-Bissau, the movie blends elements of a Dirty Dozen-esque Western, a slick Guy Ritchie crime flick, and African Folk Horror, while also digging into very real and raw emotional territory growing out the hellish conditions of child soldiers, the constant specter of colonialism, and cycles of abuse – personal, economic, sexual, and political. But for all of the weight of those themes, it is chiefly just a lot of fun.

We follow a trio of legendary mercenaries on an adventure as they escort a Mexican cartel member out of the coup, along with a great deal of stolen gold. After crash landing in the remote region of Sine-Saloum (in Senegal), they find their way to a kind of liminal outpost where apparently good works are done and volunteers live in communal harmony, but in fact, dark secrets run deep, the sand is soaked with blood, personal ghosts await vengeance, and literal spirits haunt the blasted land.

I enjoyed all of the characters and loved how varied they were allowed to be. Our trio of outlaws seem initially so hard, so dangerous – they can easily be read as militaristic thugs. But as we get to know them, they are so worldly and cultured. They speak many languages (including sign, which will become important). They may be “very bad men” (and they probably are) but they may also be “mythic heroes.” They are even surprisingly well-versed in spiritual matters, with one of them being some kind of cleric who can help navigate the magical threat they’ll face. Though they begin as a blend of archetypes, we come to know them as quite specific and anything but typical.

I will say that the Western and Crime elements landed better for me than the Horror. When something supernatural does turn up, even though there’s plenty of threat and blood and death, it somehow doesn’t fully tap into a horror vibe. However, the supernatural storyline is still fascinating, especially as it’s so tied to what I assume must be local folk beliefs, superstitions, and stories. The fact that I don’t know anything about this folklore made it all feel so rich and intriguing – and I appreciate that the film doesn’t seem to feel the need to really slow down and make sure that we’ve all got it all – it flies by at a clip and if you don’t immediately get something, I feel Herbulot assumes you’ve caught enough to work with, and keeps the story moving.

And beyond the action, it is also quite emotional. Balancing real world horrors and genre thrills, characters are given room to breathe and feel and change, and their personal histories come to bear in sometimes surprising, even tragic ways. This was a fascinating, high-paced, rewarding watch and while the “scary” parts weren’t very scary, the way it grounds the characters’ experiences in realistic trauma carries weight and brings the horror in a different way.

The Sadness (2021) (Taiwan)

A Taiwanese production with a Canadian director (who has lived there since 2008), The Sadness is gory, disturbing, intense, stressful, triggering, mean-spirited, and a pretty fun ride if you’re up for that sort of thing. Rob Jabbaz’s feature debut, filmed during the early days of the Covid pandemic (apparently Taiwan did pretty well at the beginning (8 deaths in 2020), so filming was actually possible), concerns a viral outbreak which transforms ‘normal’ people into vicious, sex-crazed sadists. I’d thought it was going to be a zombie movie, but is actually more akin to contagion films like Romero’s The Crazies (1973). Ostensibly, we follow a young couple as they try to find each other across a Taipei transformed in a matter of hours into a blood-soaked hell-scape filled with roaming bands of humans at their most monstrous. But I think that structure largely exists to allow Jabbaz to create scene after scene of mostly unrelated violence and depravity. But what violence and depravity! I spent probably 65% of this movie constantly cringing and recoiling at its sudden acts of extreme brutality.

It’s a really tense watch, but for all that it puts on display some truly awful stuff, it can also be a blast. It is a thrilling rollercoaster that raised my heartrate and put me on edge for the majority of its run time. And the practical effects work (from IF SFX Art Maker) is really extraordinary: fleshily realistic, but operatically explosive, they paint Taipei red by the end of the film. Faces are fried with hot oil and pulled apart, arterial geysers shoot up from torn necks, noses are bitten off, heads blow up, limbs are snapped, eyes are gouged, fingers are cleaved, and things are done which I’m not even going to put into words – it’s a lot, and it is all pulled off so well – disgusting, scary, and wild – and so creatively conceived of and masterfully executed.

At this point, I don’t know how much I need to watch a film about a viral pandemic – it can be a bit tiring. But this is such a high octane experience that it balances the weight of its metaphor, which is basically the classic zombie movie observation that disasters bring out the worst in us and that it takes so little for the thin veneer of society to be stripped away as we turn on each other. This is tackled in two ways: how the infected are portrayed and how we see everyone else respond. Of course, the infected are terrible, but the way they are terrible feels kind of novel.

These are not mindless zombies or rage filled marauders (ala 28 Days Later). They are fully cognizant of what they are doing and who they are – but the virus has amplified any of their inherent cruelty and crossed wires in their brains such that they derive overwhelming sexual pleasure from causing harm (and the wires cross the other way too, so  be warned that there’s sexual violence as well). They are crazy and dangerous, but they have the ability to be calculating; and they are as intelligent as they’d been before infection – it makes for a really unsettling situation – almost like a mass possession, ‘evil’ spreading through the population.

But it’s not only the infected. Of course, in classic fashion, we see healthy characters take immediate steps to protect themselves to the detriment of those around them. Doors are closed in people’s faces as they run from assailants, someone who could help a woman being assaulted, hides just feet away and does nothing, too concerned with his own safety, those who have yet to be exposed to a viral load lash out at each other. Typical for a genre like this, the film holds a dim view of humanity, but hey, after the last few years, it’s kinda hard not to.

Dark Glasses (2022) (Italy)

When I heard that Dario Argento had a new film coming out, his first since Dracula 3D (2012) (about which, the less said, the better), I was, let’s say, relieved. I can’t go so far as to say ‘excited’ as I didn’t want to get my hopes up – it had been a while since he’d made a film I had particularly liked, let alone loved as I did his work in the 70s and 80s. But it was a relief that no matter what this new film was, Dracula now wouldn’t be his swan song. Well, Shudder picked up his latest and released it back in October, so now I’ve finally checked it out and I can say…it is a film.

Honestly, I generally avoid negativity here, because really, what’s the point? (and the internet is so full of it) I mostly just want to focus on work that interests me, and not to criticize films that fall short, but I can’t find very much to praise in this case – which is depressing. It’s not terrible by any means. I’m not offended by it on some deep artistic level. It isn’t a total failure. But it also isn’t particularly noteworthy either – I think if Argento’s name weren’t attached, it would come and go, maybe end up on some streamer without any fanfare, and horror bloggers such as myself would probably never end up writing about it.

Essentially, it is a straightforward thriller: a serial killer has been targeting prostitutes in Rome. One such sex worker, Diana, is attacked, but survives, though in escaping her assailant, she has a car accident and loses her sight. Then, having befriended a young boy who was orphaned in the crash, the two of them are hunted by the tenacious killer until the final showdown and identity reveal. There are chase scenes and bloody murders (the gore seems to be practically executed and is quite well done), periodic jump scares (one effective bit with water snakes), and lots of screaming too loudly when one should be silently hiding. It’s…fine.

But where it is disappointing is that, though it is capably filmed, there’s no flash, and also little substance. It’s impossible not to compare this to Argento’s earlier work and imagine what a younger artist would have done with it. Blindness might be an artistic theme, a visual metaphor – it might resonate with some psychological trait of the killer or it might make visible something about the protagonist. Here, Diana simply can’t see and bumps into things and falls down – it’s a complication, but it doesn’t bear thematic fruit, and her experience doesn’t seem to especially change her. Similarly, the blindness isn’t used to create any particularly suspenseful set pieces, playing with who can watch and who is seen. As a sex worker who makes a living out of exploiting her visual appearance and interacting with clients in a sensory fashion, it feels like there is a lot of untapped potential here – playing with objectification, with being a subject and the power, and even violence, inherent in looking (ala Opera).

Finally, and crucially, there just not much style on display. Young Argento could be stylish to a fault, sometimes putting the narrative in service of creating an enrapturing look and a feel. In Dark Glasses, the camera never finds that perfect angle, the editing never makes the heart catch. The score is fine, but it is never paired with the imagery to make something indelible. At the end of the day, all of this criticism feels a bit unfair. This is its own film and Argento doesn’t owe me anything. As artists age, they shouldn’t feel behooved to constantly recreate the work of their youth. But when an artist has done such spectacular work early in their career, it’s hard not to compare.

Speak No Evil (2022) (Denmark)

I was actually hesitant to pull the trigger on this one. It made a splash when it came out last year (which meant that I saw loads of people praising it on social media and probably more complaining about it – that’s the internet for you), and my impression was that it would be really uncomfortable and heavy. And, to be fair, Christian Tafdrup’s film is indeed uncomfortable – a kind of social horror rooted in the deep and familiar awkwardness of feeling trapped in an interaction wherein you have to do things you don’t want to or risk coming off as some kind of rude jerk, but for all of that discomfort (and some pretty unpleasant places it goes once it turns to full-on horror), I wasn’t weighed down by it. Rather, I was mostly elated by just how very good it was.

In short, a Danish family (Bjørn and Louise, and their daughter Agnes), while on holiday in Italy, hit it off with Dutch family (Patrick and Karen, and their son Abel), who invite them to visit for a long weekend. Though they’d had such a good time together before, as soon as they arrive, the Danish family is immediately made to feel uncomfortable at every turn. Louise is a vegetarian, but Patrick insists she try the wild boar he’s prepared. The Dutch parents are much rougher with their son than Bjørn and Louise would ever be. When “invited” out to a restaurant (where again, they only order meat), Bjørn and Louise are first put off by Patrick and Karen grinding on the dance floor, before then being surprised that they are expected to cover the full cost of the rather expensive meal.

Time after time, Patrick and Karen do things (sometimes small irritations and sometimes quite significant violations of privacy) that seem to push Bjørn and Louise into accepting uncomfortable situations. But at the same time, it often just feels like a case of cultural or family difference. I don’t know enough about social mores in Holland and Denmark, but I can assume there are some different assumptions about “appropriate” behavior when it comes to issues of personal space, money, directness, private life, and risk aversion, among other things. And beyond national habits, each family can simply be different.

Time after time, Bjørn and Louise almost take their daughter and go, but one thing or another holds them back until they find themselves in the embarrassing position of having insulted their hosts, who are always quite open and charming, and when Bjørn and Louise try to explain what upset them, it always sounds unreasonable (even though while watching these things take place, red flags go off for the viewer non-stop). Tafdrup crafts an atmosphere of almost unbearable tension and dread and maintains it for over an hour (of a film that’s just a bit over 1 ½ hours long) before anything happens that feels like a horror movie per se. Of course though, when the penny finally drops, it’s clear that everything we’ve seen has been deliberate. Also, while for that first hour, nothing clues in the Danish family to the fact that this other couple is anything worse than unpleasantly inappropriate, this is a horror film from start to finish. The work of the camera and especially the soundtrack is just so doom-laden that it couldn’t be anything else.

Now, I will say that once some revelations were made, while still generally well handled, I wasn’t quite as thrilled with the final act. I think that I had just been so enjoying the ominous awkwardness, and had been so keyed-up, wanting the Danish couple to just get the hell out of there, that once the masks came off, the film lost some sparkle. It still follows through on the promise of its threats, but I wasn’t quite as spellbound as I had been. But never mind the destination – the journey was one of the best I’ve gone on in a good while. And while the filmmaking is strong, so much of this comes down to the performances. A Horror of Manners, this is an actor’s piece and everyone is spectacular. I particularly enjoyed Morten Burian (who plays Bjørn) – seduced by this open, wild couple who are so unlike him and his wife, stifled by the burden of polite behavior, he is finally pushed into a corner where his moral sense is challenged and he needs to break through his own socialization to try to do the right thing. It’s an emotional tightrope. And that’s before he discovers anything at all scary.  I really liked this one.

Slash/Back (2022) (Canadian Inuit)

Her feature debut, Nyla Innuksuk’s teen horror/sci-fi adventure is a unique and worthy effort even if it isn’t totally successful as a genre piece. Wearing its influences on its sleeve (early on, one character recounts the whole story of John Carpenter’s The Thing to her friends), the film charms more for how it spotlights an underrepresented population than for the novelty of its plot.

In short, a small group of teen Inuit girls in the tiny hamlet of Pangnirtung (about 30 miles south of the Arctic Circle, pop. approx. 1,500) discover and alone fend off an invasion of weird, shape shifting, body wearing, identity stealing aliens, saving their home town, and by extension, the planet. Along the way, they navigate their own interpersonal teenage conflicts (boys and school and parents who just don’t understand) and their own relationships to their home and culture. Innuksuk filmed on location in “Pang” (as the protagonists call it) and cast the film almost entirely with local, indigenous inhabitants, few if any of whom had worked before as actors.

Thus, there is an amateur quality to the performances; but in a way, that’s actually a strength of the film. I can’t say that the young leads manage particularly realistic performances (that’s hard), but the extent to which their own personalities shine through is honestly lovely. There is a precocious, brash quality to their portrayals which is essential to the project. Past the acting, much of the film is gorgeous, the local landscape offering overwhelming vistas to explore, and Innuksuk makes good use of them, while also digging into aspects of local small town life. The film is full of specific local details and character. And the periodic inclusion of the Inuk throat singing of Tanya Tagaq (who, like Innuksuk, is also from the region) adds such a cool, characteristic drive to it all. As for the scary horror/sci-fi alien invasion movie, it’s…fine. There’s some cool creature design and the CGI and practical effects do a solid job while obviously working within a budget, but the film never quite kicks into gear when it comes to the action or tension. Still, I think it’s so important that this is a genre piece. While it may not be amazing Sci-Fi or Horror, the sci-fi and horror give Innuksuk a rich space in which to tell a significant, meaningful story.

At its heart, we have 4 young girls torn between cultures. They have grown up in this hamlet and there is a degree of local, cultural pride (for some more than others), but for the rest, the world beyond holds so much more allure and they can’t wait to escape, to get out of this little village they view as poor or embarrassing, to go to some big city (one girl dreams of Winnipeg). In responding to this invasion, which so directly threatens their homes, families, and environment, they all tap into the cultural knowledge that has been instilled in them – the traditional tools of hunting and trapping their parents have passed on, and as they triumph over this colonizing presence, they repair their relationship to where they are from. It’s hard not to cheer when they rip what have come to be decorative, traditional gear off the walls, apply what I read as a kind of war paint (plus, one girl puts on a jacket with the slogan, “No Justice on Stolen Land” – which crystalizes the metaphor for anyone who hadn’t gotten it yet) and march off to hunt down the invading force, pushed on by the rallying cry of, “you don’t fuck with the girls from Pang!” I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to tearing up.

The aliens are kinda creepy and have a cool design – tendrils writhing beneath loosely worn, stolen flesh, but the scares never really come. However, I really think that’s ok. This ‘kids on bikes’ movie, full of real people who are participating in telling a story of their land, their civilization, their struggles, all through the lens of this monster movie is really stirring in its own right. It might not be much of a “horror movie,” but it is a valuable film, while also being just a fun Kids vs Monsters flick. I’m glad it has a chance to be seen (at least by the pretty niche audience of Shudder viewers).

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And so there we have a little international sampling of Shudder in 2022. There was a good deal more, but I only have so many hours to work with here. Someday, I’ll catch up on the rest. I will say that it’s refreshing to take in such a wide range of work in one week. I generally don’t know enough about these countries to judge how accurately Senegalese, Taiwanese, Italian, Danish, Dutch, or Inuit cultural concerns have been presented, but I feel it’s been so worth taking the time to at least get a taste.

Fulci Pt. III – Fulci for Fake and A Cat in the Brain

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Maintaining my weekly writing schedule can sometimes be a challenge (case in point, I’m a couple days behind). Just choosing a topic can be difficult, especially since I don’t want to just review the latest thing I’ve seen. Rather, my goal is to only write about topics/films/books that I really find interesting or noteworthy. And so for the last few months, I’ve settled into a bit of a routine. I had my stint on “Lesbian Vampire” movies. I spent a month looking at Slashers and the “Final Girl.” I had a couple posts in a row on Argento. And now, most recently I’ve been digging into another notable Italian maestro, the prolific, varied, enigmatic filmmaker, Lucio Fulci.

Having first watched some of his early thrillers (all new for me) and then some of his most iconic horror work (all films I’d seen before and knew I liked), for my final post in this series, I wanted to look at a couple of pieces that might help contextualize him and his oeuvre: One of his last films, the 1990 quasi auto-biographical A Cat in the Brain (1990) and the recent biography, Fulci for Fake (2019). For some additional context, I’ve also referred to a book I picked up at Argento’s book store in Rome, “Lucio Fulci: Poetry and Cruelty in the Movies.”

Fulci For Fake (2019)

Simone Scafidi’s biography is framed with a somewhat odd narrative conceit. We follow an actor, Nicola Nocella as he prepares to play Fulci in a dramatization of his life. He spends hours in the makeup chair, sits around in his underwear drinking whiskey and contemplating images from films, and makes pilgrimages to interview a wide range of people who were either close to Fulci or are authorities on his work. The interviews are real, but nothing else is – there is no biopic and he is an actor playing an actor. Apparently the title homages a film by Orson Welles, F for Fake (1973), a largely fabricated documentary about an art forger. I have mixed feeling about the frame – the film probably could have functioned just fine based on the interviews alone, but there is maybe something to it. In accompanying this “actor” as he tries to get under the skin of his enigmatic subject, we try to do the same. But however much information we have, however many family members share their memories, Fulci remains more than a little unknowable. Which would be true for anybody; we all contain fathomless depths, and going on this actor’s journey helps highlight this truth. Approaching the mystery of this idiosyncratic, private, driven figure, both we and Nicola may get close, but we will always come up against a wall at one point or another, and watching him go through the process perhaps suggests a possibility of how we might engage emotionally with this investigation as well.

Nicola removing his makeup

As for the interviews, they are very warm, very personal reminiscences. A portrait is painted of a workhorse professional, proficient and flexible as he, chameleon-like, moved from one genre to the next, capably crafting effective work regardless of the subject matter or intended effect, and a probably loving but still emotionally removed father and husband, a figure clearly not without faults. Scholarly and technically adept, he’s presented as a very thoughtful, intelligent, practical artist, one who’s private life generally remained private, though it was sometimes touched by great sadness (his first wife committed suicide and his daughter broke her back in a horse riding accident).

The input of his daughter, Camilla adds a lot of personal, emotional detail.

Given my focus here, it is striking to hear some of the interviewees track his turn to horror. Now it’s probably clear after the last couple of posts that I am a big fan of (what I’ve seen of) his horror work in the 80s, but I can still totally understand how one could view even the best of them as weird, funny, messy, or even boring little films – ultra-violent, lurid B movies that don’t make sense, with odd acting choices and terrible dubbing. That said, I was fascinated, having learned more of his very accomplished early career, to hear friends and family speak of how he had never been so artistically satisfied before he left narrative coherence behind in pursuit of horror effect. One speaker countered the suggestion that these horrors suffered from their budget, that some potential had gone unfulfilled, that some kind of flaws were on display, stating that what the movies looked like and sounded like, every element in them, was actually exactly how Fulci had wanted them to be.

This suggests an interesting if obvious reading – everything is intentional – criticisms that something feels cheap or is unrealistic or non-logical are as aesthetically constructive as suggesting that “Guernica” would have been a better painting if Picasso had only learned how to paint photo-realistically. Clearly, here is a technician and an artist who fully grasped the methods of a typically understood “well-made-film” and simply decided that his path involved something quite different.

It is also quite sad by the end. Following a bout of illness in 1984, he simply didn’t seem to still have the power to do what he had once done. This led first to a decline in quality and then, as investors and producers lost faith in him, a massive and devastating loss in the opportunity to work at all. From 1959-1978, he had directed 33 movies in a wide range of styles. From 1979-1991, he worked almost exclusively in horror and ultra-violent thrillers (17 movies, 50 in total). He died in 1995 from complications of diabetes after not working for the last four years of his life.

A Cat in the Brain (1990)

His penultimate work, A Cat in The Brain is a fascinating, at times confounding, testament to leave behind. Fulci plays a horror film director named Dr. Lucio Fulci who begins to be haunted by the disturbing, violent images he’s committing to film. After opening credits featuring a cat puppet devouring brains, we meet Fulci as he calls “cut” on what had initially seemed to be a “real scene” of bloody dismemberment, thus initiating the film’s fungible relation between cinema and reality. He then takes himself to lunch at a nearby restaurant, only to find that seeing meat causes him to flash on the gory, cannibalistic scenes he’s just finished filming.

Plus, steak tartar REALLY shouldn’t just be left out unrefrigerated, on display.

This has been happening to him a lot – uncontrollable images, rooted in his own work but not exclusive to it, appearing uninvited, driving him mad. He can’t have a moment of peace without brutal violence impinging on his imagination, interfering with his ability to work, to eat, to maintain any normal human interactions. Unsurprisingly, he seeks professional assistance in the form of a psychiatrist who lives around the corner. Unfortunately (and this is a spoiler, but it happens very early in the film), the therapist, Professor Egon Schwarz, sees this as an opportunity to carry out some mayhem himself, and subsequently hypnotizes Fulci to think himself possibly responsible for a series of murders that Schwarz is undertaking. Really, Lucio should get his money back.

NOT a good therapist…

And so it goes: Fulci is attacked by his own dark thoughts, but is also witness to his therapist killing a bunch of people, thinking he might be guilty of these crimes (if they are, in fact, happening at all and not just his own fevered, hallucinatory imaginings).  But by the end, the real killer is found out and Fulci leaves with a beautiful woman on his boat, “Perversion” for a much needed holiday (better for the mind than a therapist and it won’t frame you for multiple murders). Or he kills her and cuts her up for bait. Nope – that’s just one more film being shot – off they go on vacation.

This is such an interesting almost final film – at once self-reflective, impishly playful, and as over-the-top sensationalistic as anything else he’d done. One detail of note is that it was almost entirely constructed in post, repurposing gory scenes from a number of unreleased recent projects. Just about the only new scenes filmed are those focusing on Fulci himself. With the help of his daughter, Camilla (as I understand from Fulci for Fake), he managed to salvage a string of recent disappointments and craft a bizarre, gorily personal work of quasi-autobiography.

But for all that it is so very personal, it is also deeply ambivalent. On the surface, it suggests a man who is disturbed by the work that he’s doing, preyed upon by the horrific images he’s in the business of producing. He wants them to leave him alone, to be able to enjoy a moment of “normal life,” but is being driven mad by the “cat in his brain,” scratching at his spirit, gnawing at his mind, driving him to obsession and unwilling to let him go. And yet, the tone is generally blackly comic throughout. Though filled with endless sequences of bloodletting (probably more than any other film he produced – because it is so explicitly about them), this feels less like a horror movie. I mean, it’s not really funny, per se, but the feeling is much more that of a light comedy, a lark. I just don’t feel he intends us to take all of it at face value, but is rather sending up the notion that his artistic predilections are anything to be at all disturbed by. The film feels playful, though the content is brutal and generally played straight – this is irony, not satire. And yet, you can’t help but wonder if it does reveal something true.

I don’t think this stands as a masterpiece of the genre, but it is really worth watching (and can sometimes be quite fun) for the sake of contextualizing him and his work. Plus, while he almost always gave himself a tiny cameo in his films, this was the only time he really “acted,” and he acquits himself quite well.

In Summation

So that’s Lucio Fulci. It’s been an interesting three weeks of really getting into him and there is so much more to explore in the future. There are a few other early 80s horrors which, while not as acclaimed as those I’ve covered, sound like they could be worth checking out (I hear The Black Cat is good). Some time, I’d also like to dig into his later, apparently less successful works (maybe Aenigma or The Devil’s Honey). Someday, I may even take in an old western or musical, just to scratch that itch of curiosity (Four of the Apocalypse sounds cool). I can’t say I’ve always considered him a favorite director exactly, but this focused time of consideration has really left an impression. I think it took me time to come around to embracing his particular flavor of dreamy, messy, sleazy, weirdly-transcendent splatter-art. But it really is something special, and when you are open to it, utterly effective.

I had read that he described the “Gates of Hell” trilogy as “total films” but misinterpreted what he’d meant. I had imagined an Artaudian (see Antonin Artaud and the “theatre of cruelty”) intention, assaulting the viewer with every available tool, using surreal non-reality as one of many devices that might crack open a receptive mind: a horror film as “a victim burned at the stake, signaling through the flames.” But the phrase was touched on in Fulci for Fake and apparently, he meant rather a kind of total freedom. The films are free to be film, not story exactly, but its own artistic medium (something Artaud would have approved of as well). After years of working as a craftsperson, honing his filmmaking prowess as an adroit gun-for-hire, he finally allowed himself to pursue “Art.” However, his particular brand of art would probably be seen as trash by many and I think that is an element of what makes it so very lovable. And not everybody has to love everything.

His is an oeuvre all his own, and I think the world is a richer place to have had him in it.

Fulci Pt. II – The Gates of Hell “Trilogy”

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Last week I began a dive into the output of Lucio Fulci, prolific Italian genre filmmaker famous within horror circles as a purveyor of extraordinarily gory, creepy, atmospheric, and sometimes not-quite-coherent horror films. I approached his work in search of some heavy “horror” and was surprised to find among his earlier films a very different tone. Sure, there were blood-soaked or nightmarish moments, but these were more thrillers with moments of graphic violence, and sometimes they could even be lyrical, emotional, visually stylish, or even classy in ways I wouldn’t have expected of him. But that is the point of such an exercise – to learn what I didn’t know. Still, I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface.

That said, this week, I’d like to take a look at three of his most acclaimed horror films, all of which I’d previously seen, and all of which embody the grisly, oneiric, often putrescent aesthetic with which he’s most associated: The City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and The House by the Cemetery. Taken together, they are often termed “The Gates of Hell trilogy,” though they are all actually discrete, standalone films with no continuation of story from one to the next, and some actors returning in different roles (at least Catriona MacColl is in all three). While there is no narrative thread between them, other than a weakened boundary between worlds, more than anything else, they share a mysterious, ominous, Lovecraftian vibe and a unique approach to horror cinema. Whereas The Psychic only a few years earlier had been a tightly wound, perfectly constructed supernatural puzzle box, each element fitting into place just so, following his success with Zombi 2, Fulci dove head first into a nightmarishness cut loose from the strictures of narrative, resulting in some of his most acclaimed, most disturbing, and most niche work. It’s an interesting progression. So, let’s get to it, shall we? (This time, given how decentralized narrative is, I won’t be issuing spoiler warnings. If you think you might like to watch these unspoilt, go do so now. They’re available on many platforms.)

The City of the Living Dead (1980)

Catriona MacColl almost turned down her part as she felt the script was just “a series of special effects without a story.” She wasn’t entirely wrong, but I think that if one is willing to go along for the ride, it can be a ghastly good time. This is not my favorite entry in the trilogy, but I think it stands as both a wild, atmospheric midnight movie and a clear transitional experiment as Fulci really tried committing to the horror first and foremost. What story there is feels quite insubstantial, but the series of nightmare images, the horrors upon horrors upon horrors, can be mind-blowingly effective. It’s the kind of movie that might not always frighten so much as disgust, but it’s also trying to crack your mind open, just as its undead figures like to one-handedly tear open skulls, squeezing out the gooey brains within (apparently undeath does wonders for your grip).

If you want classic horror atmosphere, it’s got howling wind, fog, and old rickety houses. If you want something gross, it’s got head drillings, disembowelments, and all the viscera you can stomach (tee hee). If you want crazy, why-is-this-happening moments, it’s got bleeding eyes, storms of maggots, unexplained resurrections, surprise blow up sex dolls, goopy cross impalements, exsanguinating wallpaper, and so, so much more. If you want a compelling story, you should remember one you read some other time because that’s in short supply, but if you want unrivalled, creative awfulness, this movie is for you.

In short, a psychic, Mary Woodhouse (MacColl), at a séance, has a vision of a priest in an old misty cemetery hanging himself, and she goes into a fit, somehow understanding that he has just fulfilled an ancient, 4000 year old prophecy and opened the gates of Hell. The only way this can be reversed is for his corpse to be found and destroyed before All Saints’ Day (a few days hence). Unfortunately, the shock of it all is too much for her and she drops dead. Fortunately, her grave diggers are pretty lazy and leave her coffin in the ground with only a spattering of dirt on top, citing “union hours” such that when she suddenly comes back to life in her coffin (which is never explained) and starts desperately clawing at the interior, shredding her fingers in the process, intrepid reporter, Peter Bell (Christopher George), hears her screams and rather than, you know, opening the coffin by its latch, rescues her by slamming a pick axe into the lid multiple times, almost destroying her face in the process.

It’s intense and scary – her initial terror at coming to in such circumstances, her desperate, self-harming attempts to free herself, and the axe blade coming so close to her head as she is “rescued” by this hard drinking newsman. Anyway, she convinces him of the need to go to Dunwich (a clear nod to Lovecraft, whose work was a clear inspiration for the feeling of all three of these films, though none of them are adaptations of any of his stories), home of the dead priest, and thus, they set off to save the world.

Meanwhile, in Dunwich, odd things start happening. Rotting toddler corpses appear out of nowhere, startling teenage sex offenders. A crack opens up in the wall of the local dive bar, the fresh crevasse possibly leading to otherworldly terrors. A teenage girl is attacked by a mysterious hand shoving rotting, wormy goo into her face, prompting a heart attack. The denizens of the local funeral home start disappearing and turning up in people’s kitchens, I’ve already mentioned the maggot storm, yes maggot storm, and of course, there is the most famous oh-dear-god-why moment of the film (if you can’t take heavy gore, you might skip the next paragraph). Story wise, they eventually close the hell gate…or do they? Duhn, duhn Duuuuhn!!!

Ok, so the centerpiece of the movie: two teenagers are making out in the front seat of a car someplace creepy. The girl stops, having heard something, so the boy (Michele Soavi, director of Stagefright, among many others!) turns on the headlights and for a split second, they see the dead priest in front of them, hanging from a noose, his eyes boring into hers. Then he’s gone. Then he appears outside another window and stares her down until his dark magics start to work on her and her eyes start bleeding – first just a trickle, but it becomes a torrent; then her mouth begins to foam and she starts vomiting out her own guts. This continues for quite some time until, I don’t know, a liver or something comes out. I remember the first time I ever watched this, my jaw on the floor. “What is happening? Why is it happening? Ugh! Ew! Wow! How are they doing this? This is incredible. When will it stop? Why won’t it stop?” This time, I could clearly see when this is no longer a real human head, but a bloody, sheep intestine regurgitating dummy, but on first viewing, I was so shocked by the audaciousness of this crazy, awful, disgusting thing that I didn’t even clock the replacement. It is repulsive, and also just so weirdly amazing (and oh, that poor, poor actress – the bleeding eyes alone must have been so uncomfortable).

There are moments in the movie that don’t work – some acting is leaden, the dubbing is typically bad, and there are things that just do not make much sense. Also, Fulci follows some of his artistic impulses to their logical conclusions, which while being inevitable signs of an auteur, doesn’t always result in the most effective choices. For example, he always had a thing about close-ups of eyes – but here there are whole scenes of dialogue where we only see the speakers’ peepers. But, hey – good for him for following his joy. However, the stuff that does work is breathtaking: the pervasive doom of it all, the unexplained, and probably unexplainable horrible occurrences, the fun play with goopy zombie creatures, surprise skeletons, and EC comics inspired lighting – it all results in a non-cerebral, non-narrative play of horror-ness. And while this engenders a certain surreality, I think this first outing in pure horror is just a taste of what was soon to come.

The Beyond (1981)

Having flexed certain cinematic muscles in the last film, here Fulci’s less narrative, more poetic, and still very, very, very gory approach to horror really comes to fruition. Heads are impaled on iron nails, distressing things are done to eyeballs, bodies are dissolved by lye and acid (not at the same time), faces are destroyed by little hairy creepy crawlies, the dead rise, a child’s head explodes, and there are more close ups of eyes than you can shake a bloody railway spike at – but all of this grue serves an end beyond simple spookhouse shocks and disgust – the gestalt effect is bleakly poetic: a mad dream in which everything at first appears menacing but more or less understandable, but by the end of which, reality comes unmoored and you find yourself hopelessly, eternally adrift. It is an odd, chilling little picture and it has plenty of charming, lovably idiosyncratic, though not always successful, elements, but taken as a whole, it is a real masterpiece of the genre.

Liza Merrill (MacColl returning) inherits a run-down New Orleans hotel where 60 years earlier, a sorcerer had been lynched, tortured to death, and walled up in the basement for practicing black magic. Attempting to fix up the place and make it financially viable, Liza encounters problem after problem. One worker falls from a scaffold, startled by a creepy image in a window. The basement is flooded and the plumber called in to check it out is soon found dead, his eyes squished, floating next to a decrepit, much older corpse. The housekeeper’s head ends up impaled on a spike. What a money pit! 

But desperate for cashflow, Liza’s not going to be deterred, plus, as she says, she’s “lived her whole life in New York and if there’s one thing I’ve learned not to believe in, it’s ghosts!” (for any fans of Community, all I can hear is Britta saying “and I lived in New York City!”) So she keeps plodding ahead, surprisingly unbothered by both the weird goings on and the crusty-white-eyed blind woman (who might not actually exist) who tells her that the hotel stands on a gate of Hell and that it’s in danger of opening. She befriends a grumpy local doctor, John McCabe (David Warbeck), whose apparent belief in science is stronger than his ability to reckon with the supernatural weirdness directly in front of him, and together they fall down a rather hellish rabbit hole.

My tone may be glib as, for all that I love this movie, it is full of odd, weird, nonsensical moments. The acting is stiff (and I’m being kinda charitable). The dialogue strains one’s ability to suspend disbelief (such as when a county clerk (Fulci himself in a cameo) explains that he has to leave his office for a two hour lunch because after weeks on the picket line, the union won this concession – in America in 1981? Not bloody likely – it’s just a hilarious giveaway that this was written by a European – still they do understand something about America – the doctor keeps a loaded revolver in his desk, like you do…). The dubbing is worse than usual and though it was mostly filmed in Louisiana, there’s still some great set dressing signage, such as the notice outside the morgue: “Do Not Entry!” Still, all of these elements that may be deemed faults just make me love it more. That and they also add some levity to an otherwise overwhelmingly desolate, dread filled nightmare of a film.

One of the things I love is how I can’t track the moment when things change. When is the gate to Hell opened? When do Liza and John pass its threshold? When did everything completely stop cohering? It’s never obvious, and while this lack of narrative clarity may be deemed a weakness, I think it’s central to the film’s success. At the beginning of the film, there is a hot, sticky, fetid atmosphere of doom, but the story feels more or less straightforward (weird, gross, and badly dubbed, but straightforward). As far as halfway through the story, I felt like events more or less logically followed, but by the end, everything had come loose. Characters may exist, but also may not. We see an item someplace and then it is gone. Nothing makes sense anymore, but the transition from very weird but essentially understandable, to total dream logic is so smooth as to not notice it happening. Furthermore, this is accompanied by a sojourn into dream geography.

Early in the film, Liza finds an old landscape in the hotel which we had seen the tortured warlock painting before he was killed. It shows a barren grey land, scattered with bodies of the dead. Attacked by an undead employee, Liza and John leave the hotel for his hospital, finding the streets of New Orleans now mysteriously empty. So too is the hospital, except for its dead, which have all started to shamble about. This prompts a somewhat ridiculous action sequence wherein the doctor just cannot pick up on the fact that every time he shoots a dead person in the chest, nothing happens, but if he shoots them in the head, they fall down (also, his revolver seems to hold at least 9 rounds – is that a thing?). Stubbornly, he just keeps aiming for body shots until finally, they escape down a stairwell only to emerge in the basement of Liza’s spooky hotel. After passing through an opening in a wall, they find themselves in the desolate landscape of the previously discovered painting with no sign of the former cellar, no means of egress. Looking at this endless, inhuman expanse, their eyes go white and they are frozen in existential horror.

All three films of the “Gates of Hell” trilogy are often labelled “Lovecraftian,” but this has to be one of the best expressions of Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic horror I’ve seen committed to film. An often fair criticism of old H.P. (beyond the unfortunate racism and xenophobia) is that his stories were rarely character driven, but rather, characters found themselves delving deeper and deeper into the bowels of some otherworldly madness, mere witnesses to the horrors within, doomed to be destroyed by that which they uncovered. That is somewhat the case here, but somehow the above described passage from typical spooky reality into full-blown nightmare makes it work, and the film is really chilling at the end – the horror lands. Reality has unraveled so seamlessly that characters’ (often bad) decisions feel more or less natural and you go along with them. And the place they get to at the end is so ethereally awful, with no warmth, hope, or humanity. It is not the Hell of a Christian mythos, but rather a cosmically unforgiving no-place – a state of lifeless, listless hopelessness more than a metaphysical location.

And along the way, the horror beats are just at the top of the form. There aren’t many jump scares, but one at least really got me. The gore is so very over the top and squirm inducing – the sort of stuff that makes you laugh for how strongly you’re reacting to it, such as the scene when an architect falls from a ladder in the above mentioned clerk’s office and an army of tarantulas come out of nowhere, for no clear reason, and proceed to Eat. His. Damn. Face. Gah! For minutes of full on, gross out, fleshy, bloody, crawly, bitey, “dear god, why is this even happening and I’m pretty sure tarantulas don’t work this way, but still, ewww, ick, ugh!” horror fun. Sometimes the special effects are not totally believable and you can spot the moment when there is no longer a real human face (or a real arachnid for that matter), but a bloody prop, but it really doesn’t matter – the extremity of it all is so over-the-top that the very concept of what is happening (not to mention the rivers of the red stuff) just makes my brain scream. It is delightful in its way.

It also must be said that this is a beautiful film: the steamy setting, the mysterious quality of being lost in a fog, the play of light on beads of sweat forming on a man’s brow as he scrambles to survive. There are often comparisons made between Argento and Fulci, especially as they both took a turn for supernatural work around the same time (Argento’s Inferno has some definite similarities to this week’s films). But whereas Argento took an aestheticized approach to occult horror in his “Three Mothers Trilogy,” Fulci’s work, and particularly The Beyond, is no less artful, for all that it is clearly less aesthetic (if that makes any sense – it works in my mind). The framing of the shots, the edits, the lighting, the totally effective gut-wrenching sequences of bodily destruction – all of it is so intentionally and masterfully executed, and absolutely unique.

The House by the Cemetery (1981)

It’s a bit strange to consider this third entry a part of a “trilogy” with the other two as it lacks any gate to Hell and its tone is decidedly less grand, less apocalyptic. Still, as a more intimate “family moves into a spooky house and spooky things happen” movie, it is still bizarre and wild, with characteristically strange (one might even say ‘crazy’) character beats, atmosphere thick as really melancholy butter, very bloody practical effects (though perhaps less over-the top than the other two) and a surreal, dreamy quality that feels akin to that of the first two films. It also might be the strangest of the three, which can make it the most fun or a bit of a slog depending on how you take your weird.

There is a story, but having fully settled into his personal style of bizarre phantasmagoria, Fulci doesn’t seem particularly invested in us really understanding it. Paul, some kind of scholar, relocates his family from NYC to a small New England town to continue the research of a colleague who recently went mad, murdered his mistress, and hanged himself. Along with his reluctant wife, Lucy (Catriona MacColl back again – maybe it’s her presence that makes these three a trilogy) and their young, gratingly dubbed son, Bob, Paul settles into this creepy house where we’ve already seen a young couple (one of whom is played by Daniela Dora who we recently saw bleeding from the eyes and regurgitating her gastrointestinal tract in The City of the Living Dead after similarly complaining to her boyfriend about his creepy choice of make-out locations) brutally murdered and dragged into the basement (she can’t catch a break).

Of course, this is a bad place to bring your family and it ends poorly for everyone. A mysterious ghost girl keeps telling Bob to stay away from the house, but he’s got no say in the matter and sooner or later, everyone falls prey to the dark force below, the enjoyably named “Doctor Freudstein,” a mad scientist, now giant, worm and slime filled, murderous mound of flesh, who had conducted his evil experiments here many years ago and has been prolonging his life by harvesting the body parts of any who make the mistake of darkening his door.

When we discover the doctor in the end, it is an odd turn, but the film is full of such very strange moments that it doesn’t feel at all out of place. That eerie, menacing, utterly weird quality runs through the whole film. From moment to moment, it’s effective and gloomily unsettling, but it can also feel ridiculous – more so than the first two films this week, I think this really depends on the viewer’s mood and openness to going on this either envelopingly spooky, or absurdly insane ride.

Early on, when they’re still in New York, Bob (a, let’s say, 4 year old boy) has a large framed photograph of an old farmhouse on his wall. Only he can see the ghost girl open the curtains in the photo as she warns him not to go in the house. His mother seems slightly irritated that her son is a bit crazy. Later, of course it turns out to be the house they’re going to – why would it have been on a small child’s bedroom wall in the first place?

One of the more evocative scenes features the ghost girl standing in front of a shop window where she is shocked to see the head fall off a mannequin as its neck burbles up a fountain of blood. When it happens, we don’t know for sure she’s a ghost, but she already feels somewhat unreal and the whole sequence feels puzzlingly hallucinatory. Later in the film, Bob’s seemingly sinister babysitter, Ann (Ania Pieroni, very recognizable from Argento’s Inferno and Tenebrae), who bears some resemblance to the un-headed mannequin, has been sharing odd, menacing looks with others throughout the film (especially Paul – there is a scene that features a volley of close-ups between their respective eyes – and at least one shot of Lucy’s eyes, noticing, as no one speaks but something is happening), and has tried breaking into the forbidden murder basement, finds herself trapped down there and gets her head graphically sawed off. First of all, it’s peculiar that the ghost girl has such a premonition of the death of this side character and not a member of the family she’s trying to warn away (I mean, everybody dies), but it seems stranger to me that this little ghost girl is going window shopping in the first place.

Everyone in the town thinks they’ve seen Paul before, that he had recently visited with his daughter. He denies this and it is never resolved. Had he been here with Ann perhaps? Was it some kind of doppelganger? Was he somehow fated to come to this place? Whatever it is, there is a cryptic feeling of bad portent that hangs over the town and somehow settles on Paul and his family, and he does fall into a kind of obsession, uncovering the truth of Dr. Freudstein. Also, and wholly unrelatedly, he has an epic fight with a fake bat that clamps onto his hand and won’t let go no matter how much he stabs it (seriously, this bit went on for about 25 minutes).

Sometimes characters pick up on the bad vibes and are duly creeped out, but sometimes, they are so blasé about truly disturbing things that it makes you wonder if they see what you have seen, if anything is real. This can add to both the lyrical, looming unreality and the what-is-going-on potential laughability of it all. A favorite moment for me takes place the morning after we’ve seen an estate agent visit the house when no one was home only to get repeatedly stabbed with a fireplace poker and then dragged into the basement, leaving a long streak of blood across the floor. So now it’s the morning and we see creepy babysitter Ann in the kitchen, shot from above, cleaning up what is obviously a huge puddle of blood outside the cellar door, with a look that communicates, “I should probably clean up before someone starts asking questions.” Then Lucy walks in and we shift camera perspective so we see the Ann’s face in the foreground, with Lucy behind her (which means we no longer see the blood). From the previous set up, we know what Lucy should be seeing and it makes sense when she asks, clearly put off by Ann’s dire scowl, what the babysitter is doing. Ann pauses and just says, “I made coffee.” Satisfied, Lucy walks out of frame and a beat later, she’s carrying a tray with coffee service into the bedroom and telling her husband how strange she finds this girl. She never responds to the giant pool of blood. She never mentions the giant pool of blood. Did she actually see the giant pool of blood. Did I?

You can take this as a hilarious mistake, as bad acting, as nonsense, but I feel like giving the benefit of the doubt and calling it intentional. I think we are being wrong-footed at every turn and not in service of some kind of convoluted plot twists as might have been true in an early giallo thriller, but rather in service of a non-rational state that the horror seeks to inculcate. This runs through the film, culminating in a final moment where it seems that Bob alone has escaped Freudstein’s attacks, only to realize that he is now a ghost child himself, walking down the lane with the girl and her mother, now part of the Freudstein family (maybe he was always a part of the family – I don’t know). It is a somber, haunting ending to a delightfully specific film.  

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So those are the “Gates of Hell” films. I’ve watched a lot of horror movies and I swear, there’s really nothing else like them. And while some threads can be found between them and the earlier works discussed last week, they are also so unlike where Lucio began his journey into darker fare. That said, they won’t be for everyone. Some won’t be able to stomach the gore and some won’t have patience for the slow, dreamy non-linearity. But if you have any appetite for such things, especially in such a combination (delivering the most insane, bloody terror along with something poetic and occasionally elegiac), these are just masterpieces: ridiculous, disgusting masterpieces.

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.