A Film Canon

Although Dario Argento has always been interested in haemorrhaging Technicolor, it's only with Suspiria that he successfully fuses this with the suffocating claustrophobia of deoxygenated blood, producing a series of red-blue thresholds that culminate with the entrance to the coven of witches that drives the narrative. Set largely in an Italian dance academy, it's renowned for its vibrant, imagistic horror - and this is certainly distinctive, prompting a series of extravagant set pieces, and several surreal, multi-faceted sets and tableaux that feel like self-contained works of art in themselves. However, it's the very theatricality of these sets, their self-conscious staginess, that draws Argento's exquisitely cinematic conception of space into relief, as he and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli provide such an elegant, extensive degree of camera movement that these backdrops are in effect cinematised, transformed into so many manifestations of the hallucinatory apprehensions that plague American student Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper). As a result, as the film progresses, Argento shifts his focus away from the physical to the cinematographic parameters of these spaces, saturating them with more and more coloured light until the characters' bodies are occluded and blurred in a way that does them much greater violence than the spectacle of murder this moment tends to precede. At the same time, the unbearable, intrusive intensity of Goblin's iconic synth-goth score breaks down the viewer's own sense of comfortable distance, as if the point of Argento's refined, mannered mise-en-scenes were to create a literal sound-stage, in which light and sound find some common denominator or wavelength within highly constricted conditions; a kind of nascent techno-horror, in which the supernatural is just another name for the technologically inconceivable.