Inferno: Argento's Second Mother

Inferno opens with a woman reading a book, and then it drowns her. Argento takes his time getting there; the film’s first substantial sequence involves Rose Elliot lowering herself through a hole in the floor of a New York cellar into a flooded ballroom, swimming among submerged furniture and a floating corpse, in a room that has no business existing beneath a Manhattan apartment building. She surfaces, escapes, goes upstairs, and writes a letter to her brother. Then the film loses interest in her completely.

That is the honest description of Inferno, released in 1980 as the follow-up to the biggest success of Argento’s career, and it explains both why it failed commercially and why a certain kind of viewer regards it as his purest work. 20th Century Fox put money behind it on the strength of Suspiria, expected another Suspiria, and received a film with no protagonist, no investigation that concludes, and a narrative structure best described as a relay race in which every runner is murdered before reaching the next. Fox barely released it in America. It has spent forty-odd years being rediscovered.

The architecture is the plot

The premise comes from Thomas De Quincey. In Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey conjured Our Ladies of Sorrow — three sisters who preside over human grief. Argento and Daria Nicolodi took that fragment and built a mythology: three Mothers, each malevolent, each housed in a building constructed for her by the alchemist-architect Emilio Varelli. Mater Suspiriorum in Freiburg, which is where Suspiria took place. Mater Lachrymarum in Rome, who would wait twenty-seven years for Mother of Tears. And Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, in New York — which is Inferno.

The crucial move is that Varelli wrote a book about what he had done, and the book circulates. Rose Elliot, a poet living in the New York house, buys a copy from Kazanian, the antiquarian across the road, and reads enough to understand where she lives. Her letter to her brother Mark, a music student in Rome, is the thread that pulls everyone else in. What follows is a series of people reading, or nearly reading, or being seen holding the book — and dying for it.

This is the film’s actual subject, and it is a good one. Inferno is about buildings that are alive and hostile, and about the terrible danger of understanding the room you are standing in. Varelli’s houses are the antagonists. The keys, the ductwork, the sealed rooms, the water under the foundations — the film’s threat is architectural, and characters die because they open doors. Argento shoots interiors as circulatory systems, and the camera spends an unusual amount of its time travelling through gaps: under floorboards, along vents, behind walls. You are being shown the building’s anatomy while the humans blunder about on its surface.

Keith Emerson, and what the score is doing

Goblin do not appear. Argento hired Keith Emerson, of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and the result divides people permanently. Where Goblin’s Suspiria work was a rock band making a nursery rhyme sound like a threat — whispers, bouzouki, tape hiss, the sound of something breathing near your ear — Emerson delivers full symphonic prog: organ, orchestra, and an outright appropriation of Verdi’s “Va, pensiero” from Nabucco for the film’s most florid passages.

The complaint is that it is bombastic, and the complaint is correct. The defence is that bombast is the register the film requires. Inferno has no intimacy to protect. Where Suspiria was a child’s nightmare and needed a lullaby gone wrong, Inferno is an opera about an ancient malignancy that owns real estate, and Emerson scores it like the end of the world arriving on schedule. The Verdi choice is sly, too — “Va, pensiero” is a chorus of exiles longing for a homeland, dropped into a film about entities who have built themselves three homelands and defend them by murder.

Romano Albani’s photography, meanwhile, is doing the Bava inheritance in plain sight: hard gels, unmotivated reds and blues pouring through windows from no discernible source, a palette applied to the image like paint. I’ve traced that technique’s whole lineage in colour timing as horror, and Inferno is one of its purest specimens. The submerged ballroom sequence is lit gold and green underwater, and it remains one of the most beautiful things in Argento’s filmography — a set built and flooded, shot with the camera in the water, achieving a genuine dream texture that no amount of digital work has since improved on.

The ghost in the credits

Here is the fact that makes Inferno matter to a collector. Mario Bava worked on it, uncredited, and it was the last film he touched. Bava supplied optical effects and matte work — the impossible geometry, the shots where a building’s interior extends into somewhere it cannot go — with his son Lamberto serving as assistant director. Argento fell ill during the shoot, and Bava’s contribution grew accordingly. Bava died in April 1980, the year of the film’s release.

You can see him in it. The moon over the New York house, the painted depths, the way certain spaces resolve into something more like a proscenium than a room — that is the man who had been faking the infinite on no money since Black Sunday. Mario Bava spent a career inventing the visual grammar that Argento then took to market, and Inferno is the handover made literal: the pupil’s most extravagant folly, with the master’s brushwork holding up the walls. Watch Kill, Baby… Kill! — Bava’s own most delirious exercise in a house that will not obey physics — and you find the film Inferno is really descended from, more than Suspiria is.

The other ancestor is Rosemary’s Baby, and the debt runs deeper than the apartment building. Polanski established that the horror of the occult-building film is bureaucratic: the neighbours are in on it, the arrangements predate you, and the lease was signed a long time ago. Argento takes that premise and removes the paranoia, which is a genuinely radical decision. Rosemary spends her film not being believed. Nobody in Inferno has time to disbelieve anything. They read the book, they understand instantly, and they are killed within the reel. The film is Polanski’s structure with the psychology stripped out and only the machinery left running.

The case against

Inferno is close to indefensible by ordinary standards, and pretending otherwise does the film no favours. It has no stable lead. Argento introduces a character, invites you to invest in her, and then hands the film to somebody else — and he does this more than once, so that the audience never gets a foothold anywhere. The closest thing to a protagonist by the late reels is Mark, blank and reactive, played by Leigh McCloskey with an expression of mild puzzlement that never varies, and the film uses him as a camera on legs. Characters walk into danger for reasons the script does not supply. An extended detour involving Kazanian, the antiquarian across the road, a pond and a great many rats is either the most audacious non-sequitur of Argento’s career or simply a scene that got away from him.

The dubbing is rough even by the standards of the era. The mythology is asserted rather than developed — you are handed a cosmology in voiceover and expected to accept it. And the film’s admirers have a habit of treating incoherence as automatic evidence of depth, which is how bad criticism gets written about good films.

The argument in its favour has to be made on different ground. Inferno is what happens when a director with total command of image and no interest in story is handed a studio budget. It is a film organised entirely by association: water, fire, paper, glass, light. It moves the way a dream moves, which means it moves by rhyme rather than cause. Judged as a thriller it is a failure. Judged as ninety minutes of sustained, hostile, gorgeous atmosphere it has few equals, and the fact that Argento would follow it with the ruthlessly logical Tenebrae proves the plotlessness here was a choice rather than an incapacity.

Spoilers below

Mark reaches the New York building and finds Varelli, and the reveal is one of the great sick jokes of Argento’s cinema: the architect who built the three houses is still alive, ancient and paralysed, unable to speak except through a mechanical larynx held to his throat. The man who designed the Mothers’ world has been reduced to a component of it — kept, maintained, and denied even a voice of his own. His nurse has been attending him throughout.

The nurse is Mater Tenebrarum. She discards the disguise, and the film’s final movement abandons the last pretence of realism: the Mother of Darkness reveals herself as Death, robed and skeletal, in a transformation staged with the frank theatricality of a magic-lantern show. Argento is not straining for plausibility. He is closing a fairy tale, and the last image is fire — the house burning, the mythology consuming its own architecture, Mark stumbling out into a New York that has no idea what has just ended.

What makes the ending work is its refusal to explain. There is no confession, no psychiatrist, no motive. Compare that with the giallo convention Argento had honoured his whole career and would return to in Tenebrae, where a killer’s pathology gets a full lecture. Here the reveal explains nothing, because there is nothing to explain: the Mothers are old, they own three buildings, and they kill whoever reads about them. The horror is the flat fact of it.

Suspiria was terrifying because a young woman was somewhere she did not understand. Inferno is unsettling for the opposite reason. Everyone in it understands perfectly well. It changes nothing.

Where to watch: the Blue Underground and Arrow restorations both do right by Albani’s gels and the underwater work, which is the whole reason to be here. Pair it with Suspiria for the myth, or with Phenomena to watch the same instinct — image first, story never — arrive at an even stranger destination.