Suspiria (1977): Argento's Colour as a Weapon

Try to summarise the plot of Suspiria and you will sound like someone describing a dream to a stranger at breakfast. An American ballet student arrives at a prestigious German dance academy. Odd things happen. There are witches. That is very nearly all of it, and it is beside the point. Dario Argento’s 1977 film is one of the few genuinely great horror pictures where narrative is the least interesting thing on offer — a fairy tale wired directly to the optic nerve, printed in colours so violent they feel like an assault, and scored by a rock band who seem to be actively trying to frighten you out of the cinema. Nearly fifty years on, nothing else looks or sounds quite like it.

The story goes that Argento and his co-writer and then-partner Daria Nicolodi built the film around a half-remembered anecdote about a German dance school that was really a coven, threaded through Thomas De Quincey’s 1845 prose-poem Suspiria de Profundis and its figure of the Mother of Sighs. That is the film’s whole intellectual scaffolding, and Argento treats it purely as a mood to be sustained. The result is horror as pure sensation, and the craft that produces the sensation is worth taking apart, because it is more deliberate than the film’s fevered surface admits.

The last of the true Technicolor

Start with the colour, because everyone does, and because it is the single most important decision in the film. Argento and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli wanted Suspiria to look like a Grimm fairy tale as a child might hallucinate it — a Disney film with the sweetness surgically removed. To get there, Tovoli shot for and printed on the imbibition (dye-transfer) Technicolor process, the three-strip method that produced the impossibly rich hues of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. By 1977 the process was all but dead; the Technicolor lab in Rome closed not long after, and Suspiria is one of the very last major films printed this way.

That technical dead-end is the whole point. Dye-transfer printing lays down pure, saturated colour with a density modern film stocks cannot match, and Tovoli abused it — flooding rooms with primary red, acid green, and cold blue gels, sometimes lighting a single scene in three clashing colours at once. There is a corridor lit in throbbing red for no story reason at all, only because the red is coming for you. The colours in Suspiria do not describe the world; they replace it. This is exactly the discovery Masaki Kobayashi made with paint rather than light in Kwaidan — that heightened, unnatural colour goes around the reasoning brain and speaks straight to the body. Argento just turned the dial past anything a Japanese soundstage would have dared.

Goblin, or the score that will not let you settle

Now the sound, which is the film’s other half and arguably its most aggressive weapon. Argento had the Italian prog band Goblin (working closely with the director) compose and record their score before the shoot, then played it loud on set so the actors moved to its pulse. The main theme is a celesta melody, childlike and music-box sweet, laid over a bed of pounding drums, hissed whispers, wordless shrieks, and a voice that seems to be muttering the word “witch” just below the threshold of comprehension.

The mechanism here is genuinely nasty. The score never lets you relax into a scene, because it announces dread before anything has happened; you are braced from the first frame, so that when nothing occurs the tension curdles, and when something does occur you are already at breaking point. Argento mixes the music at a level that competes with the dialogue, which frustrated some contemporary critics and is precisely correct — Suspiria does not want you following the plot, it wants you drowning in the atmosphere. The Goblin score is as responsible for the film’s terror as anything on screen, and it invented a template that horror scoring is still borrowing from. Half a century of synthesised menace, up to and including the pieces I will point you toward below, owes it a debt.

Set-pieces engineered like arias

For a film so committed to dream-logic, Suspiria is ruthlessly structured around its major sequences. Argento builds each murder as a self-contained aria — a slow accumulation of unease, a burst of baroque, almost operatic violence, then release. The famous opening, in which Suzy arrives at the academy on a night of biblical rain and a fleeing student meets her end, is a masterclass in escalation: the storm, the automatic doors, the taxi ride, the flash of a face in the woods, all before the horror proper begins. Argento shoots it like a nightmare you are already inside and cannot wake from.

Watch how he uses architecture. The academy is a fever-dream of Art Nouveau — the exteriors drawn from the real Haus zum Walfisch in Freiburg, the interiors built as a maze of stained glass, ornamental iron, and wallpaper in patterns that seem to writhe. Doors are handles set too high, at a child’s eye level; corridors go nowhere; the geometry is wrong in ways you feel before you notice. Jessica Harper, as Suzy, plays it with a wide-eyed passivity that annoys viewers expecting an active heroine and works perfectly for the material — she is Alice, drifting through a Wonderland that wants to eat her, and her lack of agency is the horror. She is being moved through the film the way you are moved through a dream.

The verdict, and where to go next

Suspiria is the strongest argument in cinema for the idea that horror is a sensory art before it is a storytelling one. Judged as a mystery it is thin; judged as a machine for producing dread it is close to flawless, and it has aged into something even richer than it was in 1977, because the world has caught up to how strange it is. Argento made two loose companion films — Inferno (1980) and, decades later, Mother of Tears (2007) — completing his “Three Mothers” trilogy, and neither reaches this pitch. Suspiria is the one where every instinct aligned.

Where to go from here depends on what grabbed you. If it was the colour and the European delirium, Possession (1981) offers the same operatic hysteria pushed into a marriage falling apart. If it was the sheer sensory overload and the sense that a film can be about its own images, Don’t Look Now is the colder, English cousin, using red as an omen rather than a bludgeon. And if you want to see what happens when a very different director takes this exact story and reads it as a political and physical nightmare instead of a fairy tale, the 2018 remake is one of the boldest reinterpretations horror has produced — a film that understood the original well enough to refuse to copy any of it. Watch them as a pair. The distance between them is the whole argument about what horror can be.

Spoilers below

Everything above is safe to read before your first viewing. Now the machinery under the hood.

The revelation, when it finally arrives, is that the academy is run by a coven led by the ancient, unseen witch Helena Markos — Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs herself — kept alive in a hidden chamber behind the building. Suzy stumbles onto the secret only in the last reel, guided by a friend’s murder and a muttered clue about irises and footsteps counted in a corridor. The whole plot, such as it is, resolves in about ten minutes of a film that has spent ninety on atmosphere.

What is remarkable is how little Argento cares whether the mechanics hold up. Markos is defeated almost casually — Suzy finds the invisible witch by the sound of her rattling breath, seizes a decorative glass dagger, and stabs her, at which point the entire academy begins to convulse and collapse, the coven’s power dying with its matriarch. Suzy walks out into the rain as the building burns behind her, and she is smiling — the film’s last image, a survivor’s grin that is either triumph or the first sign she has been changed by what she has seen. Argento cuts to black on that ambiguity and the Goblin theme crashing back in.

The death that everyone remembers arrives before the credits, the murder of the fleeing student, Pat, who takes refuge in a friend’s apartment only to be dragged through a window, stabbed repeatedly through her own exposed heart in loving close-up, and dropped through a stained-glass skylight to hang from a cord as the coloured glass rains down and kills her friend below. Argento stages it as a set-piece so ornate it borders on the absurd, and the excess is the signature — the violence in Suspiria is not realistic and does not want to be. It is choreography, an aria of red, the exact opposite of the numb documentary cruelty that another 1974 film had just proven could be even more frightening. Two roads out of the same decade. This is the beautiful one.