Witchcraft - vo.rs

The Witch: Folk Horror and the Puritan Nightmare

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Robert Eggers put a subtitle on his first film that told you exactly what kind of horror you were getting: The VVitch: A New-England Folktale. He reached past the ghost story and the monster movie for the register of a folktale — the sort of thing that gets told to frighten children into obedience and then curdles into something the tellers half-believe. Released in 2015, it remains the cleanest debut in modern American horror, and the most disciplined film ever made about the machinery of Puritan faith turning on the people it was meant to protect.

Suspiria (2018): The Remake That Chose Dread Over Dazzle

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The smartest thing Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria does, it does before a single witch appears: it looks at Dario Argento’s 1977 original — a film built entirely out of saturated colour and screaming music — and decides to have almost none of either. Where Argento drenched his ballet school in impossible reds and greens, Guadagnino shoots his in the colour of a wet Berlin pavement: greys, browns, dishwater whites, the odd smear of dull crimson. Where Goblin’s score never let you breathe, Thom Yorke’s does almost the opposite, drifting and mournful. This is a cover version by a musician who understands that the way to honour a song is to play it in a different key. It works far more often than it has any right to, and where it fails, it fails interestingly.

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

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

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.