¡QUÉ HORROR! 2019

Candidate #10

SUSPIRIA

(September 2018)

"They are professional performers. Illusion is their craft.”

The best word I can come up with for Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (billed as “Six Acts and an Epilogue Set in Divided Berlin”), is reimagining.

While the opening credits tell us that the script by David Kajganich is still “Based on the Original Screenplay by Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi,” this Suspiria takes the bare narrative bones of a young American accepted to a dance academy that hides a sinister secret, and lushly fleshes it out, in both theme and character, giving us something at once familiar, and yet bracingly, beguilingly new.

Or, to use the appropriate metaphor, it’s generally the same dance, but it’s set to a different tempo, so it’s got a different rhythm, and it boasts some new, brazenly daring choreography.

“When you dance the dance of another, you make yourself in the image of its creator. You empty yourself, so that her work can live within you.

“Do you understand?”

Some of those new steps are immediately introduced to us.

Even before Susanna Bannion of Ohio (Dakota Johnson) is welcomed into the Helena Markos Tanzgruppe, we meet Josef Klemperer (“Lutz Ebersdorf”*), psychiatrist to Chloë Grace Moretz’s Patricia Hingle (a name that should ring some bells from the original).

And while Argento bound himself largely to the dark fairy tale setting of the Tanz Academie, Guadagnino and Kajganich choose to frame the action against historical events in a “Divided Berlin,” tossing politics (including sexual), societal upheaval, and the long, twisted shadow of the Holocaust into this witches’ brew.

With a full hour more running time than the original, this Suspiria uses that additional time masterfully so motivations come more clearly into focus, and dance becomes even more pivotal and central to the narrative.

“Movement is never mute. It is a language. It’s a series of energetic shapes written in the air like words forming sentences.

“Like poems.

“Like prayers.”

Dance as magick.

Movement as vector for intent and desire, unleashing power more potentially destructive than bombs.

These come forcefully to the surface in this reimagining, as does Argento’s Three Mothers mythology.

As Klemperer recounts:

“Patricia wrote about ‘Three Mothers,’ lost in time, predating all Christian invention. Pre-God. Pre-Devil.

“Mother Tenebrarum, Mother Lachrymarum, and Mother Suspiriorum.

“Darkness, Tears, and Sighs.”

We may not be treated to the added layer of their three Houses just yet, but the basic mythological foundation is here for our inspection.

All these, and more, all discrete steps in this shadowy dance, which builds steadily, crescendoing in a completely batsh!t Grand Guignol finale, before segueing into a surprisingly moving Epilogue.

(Plus, Argento’s Suzy Bannion, Jessica Harper, makes a crucial appearance!)

While it’s safe to say that this was clearly another very serious instance of “Manage Your Expectations, Space Monkey,” I am relieved to announce that this is a dance I was very glad to have witnessed.

“You can give someone your delusion, Sara. That’s religion.”

* I could go on about the whole Tilda Swinton of it all (and she is amazing here, as always), but that would just detract from the whole, so let’s just leave that where it is, and simply bathe in the witchy glow of this powerful and potent “reimagining” without those added distractions.

Parting Shot: Reviews for Argento’s original “Three Mothers” trilogy can be found here, here, and here.

Given my opinions of Inferno and La Terza Madre, I honestly wouldn’t mind some more reimaginings of this type.

Parting Shot 2: Kajganich also wrote the script for The Invasion (review here), but that was butchered thanks to studio/test audience interference, so we’re not holding that against him.

He also co-wrote the script for the upcoming Pet Sematary remake, from Starry Eyes’ Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for that one. (Definitely another case of “Manage Your Expectations, Space Monkey.”)

(Suspiria OS’ courtesy of impawards.com.)

LA TERZA MADRE
(MOTHER OF TEARS:
THE THIRD MOTHER)
(Review)
If you haven’t read my reviews for the first two chapters of Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy—Suspiria and Inferno—you may do so right now, as some of my comments in the review below could reference them. (Both reviews can be found in the Archive.)
I met the Three Mothers and built three houses for them, one in Freiburg, one in New York, and one in Rome.
I discovered too late that these houses hide obscene secrets: it is from here that the Sisters spread pain, tears, and darkness throughout the world.
-- The Three Mothers by E. Varelli

A foreboding discovery at Viterbo Cemetery finds its way to the Museum of Ancient Art in Rome, where Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento) becomes inextricably linked to the blood-drenched storm of chaos fast approaching, as Mater Lacrimarum, the Mother of Tears (Moran Atias), makes her bid to reign over the world of man.

It was with this premise that “The Three Mothers” trilogy finally came to a close last year, a full three decades after it kicked off in Dario Argento’s classic work of phantasmagoric cinema, Suspiria.
After all this time though, I’d honestly thought the trilogy would never be completed, since the director’s close personal and collaborative relationship with Daria Nicolodi (who forged the mythology behind the films with Argento) had been severed long ago.
There was, however, one very concrete and substantial link between them: their daughter, Asia.
It’s quite possibly that aspect of La Terza Madre that is the most noteworthy, that it is, in a manner of speaking, an ersatz family reunion.
Beyond that however, the film itself is a rather muddled and dissatisfying affair.


There’s a strange perfunctory air to the proceedings here, as if—as seemed to be the case with Inferno—Argento (who co-scripted his story with Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch) is going through the motions of serving up some of what he feels the audience may expect from a “Three Mothers” film.
The gruesome, gory deaths are here. The sinister score is here (by Claudio Simonetti, who’d also worked on the Suspiria score). The convenient exposition is here (some of which is provided by the one and only Udo Kier, as exorcist Father Johannes).
What is sorely lacking though, aside from the brazen, visual flair of Suspiria, is any sort of genuine menace and urgency, and a main protagonist worthy of our sympathy and respect.


To begin with, Sarah, though a character intimately tied to the “Three Mothers” mythology, seems a lukewarm lead. She’s largely ignorant of her role in the grand scheme of things, and even though she’s given a crash course of what she’s capable of (by Nicolodi, in the little screen time she’s afforded), Sarah never really comes into her destiny in any significant way.
She really only displays one particular Jedi mind trick, neat though it is.
Mostly, there’s just bungling and much casting about from one resource person to the next, sneaking off shoeless into the night (so as to avoid detection by the film’s Evil Monkey; yes, La Terza Madre has one of those), and delivering a vaguely excruciating, half-hearted performance.
While I did like Argento's recent performance in Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate, here, she’s a bit of a mess. And the script doesn’t do her any favours either.


Her father, meanwhile, doesn’t really seem to inform La Terza Madre with any of Suspiria’s inspired “infernal atmosphere.” Even Inferno, which I really don’t much care for, had about it a transitory sense of an inexplicable nightmare.
All La Terza Madre can boast of having are the aforementioned gory deaths, some brief (and ultimately gratuitous) lesbian action, a brief (and ultimately gratuitous) shower scene, some nudity, and lots’a witches with wild hair and bad make-up.
There’s also a parade of Grand Guignol grotesqueries towards film’s end that plays like nothing so much as a low-rent carnival funhouse.
If however, that sounds like your kind of thing, well, the film’s got all that, and, oh yeah… the Evil Monkey.

If I’m sounding glib and snarky here, it’s only because this was such a disappointment.
I really was looking forward to Argento rediscovering the dark territories of his glory days.
But he messes it up here.
He flubs it with the script, which not only displays a distinct lack of anything remotely resembling tension, but also has characters like Detective Enzo Marchi (Cristian Solimeno, from TV’s Footballers’ Wives and Strictly Confidential) who don’t really add anything substantial to the mix, yet inexplicably seem to understand there is more here than meets the eye; characters who are largely off-screen, and yet conveniently surface in the film’s climax to play frustratingly negligible roles.
The film’s riddle (“What you see does not exist, and what you cannot see, is truth.”) and the house’s secret—narrative fixtures in a “Three Mothers” film—are also equally negligible, worse than merely being throw-away. And that’s saying a lot, considering those featured in Inferno weren’t all that substantial either.


La Terza Madre seems to be nothing so much as a catalogue of missed opportunities.
There’s never any real sense of a city tearing itself apart while under the malign influence of Mater Lacrimarum. What could have been disturbing set pieces of violence and carnage (think M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening or The Signal) merely wind up being haphazard, lackluster depictions of pseudo-mayhem. (Admittedly though, the two baby bits are quite nasty.)
Argento likewise misses out on a chance for some interesting narrative symmetry, choosing to end La Terza Madre by earth, instead of fire, which closes both Suspiria and Inferno.


Some of the casting choices are also somewhat dubious, as model turned actress Atias brings nothing (beyond her physical beauty) to the role of Mater Lacrimarum, and Jun Ichikawa (who plays Katerina, one of Mater L’s witchy lackies) is so glaringly over-the-top, it’s embarrassing. Not even the needlessly—and inexplicably—brutal method of dispatch Sarah uses on Katerina can make up for the truly awful performance.
And that curiously hysterical ending…
Talk about inexplicable and embarrassing.


I must apologize for the tone, truly.
But I really wanted this one to be good, not just so the trilogy could close triumphantly, but also because I’ve been waiting quite a while for Argento to once again make the cinema a dark and disturbing place where nightmares breed.
And maybe he’ll do that with his next effort, Giallo.
For now though, La Terza Madre is a distinct and resounding disappointment that merely makes the cinema a dark and sad place where dreams are gutted, and die rather messily.
Ironically enough, just like a victim in an Argento film.

(Mother of Tears OS and images courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com and shocktillyoudrop.com.)

Thanx to Jeb, for bridging the language barrier.

reVIEW (16)
INFERNO [2 of 2]

I, Varelli, an architect living in London, met the Three Mothers and designed and built for them three dwelling places, one in Rome, one in New York, and the third in Freiberg, Germany. I failed to discover until too late, that from those three locations, the Three Mothers ruled the world with sorrow, tears, and darkness.
Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs and the oldest of the three, lives in Freiberg. Mater Lachrymarum, the Mother of Tears, and the most beautiful of the sisters, holds rule in Rome. Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, who is the youngest and cruelest of the three, controls New York.
And I built their horrible houses, the repositories of all their filthy secrets.
-- The Three Mothers by E. Varelli

That bit of information, given at the top of Inferno, lays out the mythology of “The Three Mothers” trilogy, and quite possibly, is the only important thing you need from this thematic sequel to Suspiria.
We learn this through Rose Elliot (Irene Miracle, who was in Alan Parker’s Midnight Express), reading from The Three Mothers. Rose suspects that she is, in fact, living in the very building Varelli built for the Mother of Darkness, and since this is a Dario Argento film, naturally, Rose is right.
Troubled, Rose writes a letter to her brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey, who would go on to spend considerable time on Dallas), a Musicology student who happens to be studying in Rome. But the letter is read by Sara (Eleonora Giorgi), who, impulsively enough, goes to the address designated as the home of the Mother of Tears, apparently now a library. And again, this being an Argento film, Sara meets a messy end.
Mark then calls Rose, who asks him to come to New York. And we’re back with Rose.
Thus, does Inferno’s “narrative” free-wheel its way from city to city, from character to character, as Argento draws us deeper into the mysteries of the Three Mothers and “their filthy secrets.”

Sadly, what is clearly missing from Inferno are the elements that proved to be the enduring strengths of Suspiria: Luciano Tovoli’s cinematography and Goblin’s music. In Inferno, Romano Albani (who would go on to shoot Argento’s Phenomena) is the cinematographer, while Keith Emerson (of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer) provides the score.
Neither necessarily does a bad job, but in light of the work done for Suspiria, this just seems lackluster.
Additionally, the lavish attention to detail that Giuseppe Bassan paid to the production design on Suspiria, is noticeably absent here. Nowhere in Inferno do we see sets as visually striking as those in Suspiria. (Yes, not even the underwater room where Rose drops her keys, the silly goose.)
And while Jessica Harper gave an excellent performance as Suzy Bannion, Leigh McCloskey’s Mark is a wooden bore. This is the sort of acting that would make Hayden Christensen proud. The audience is given no apparent point of identification with Mark, and we’re pretty much forced to go along for the ride for want of anybody else to peg as the narrative’s hero.

Suspiria may have had some flaws, but it’s otherwise an excellent entry in Argento’s body of work. Inferno, on the other hand, really does seem to lack the bite of its predecessor.
There was a certain clarity of vision that made Suspiria work, that made its dark Alice in Wonderland scenario resonate. Here, in Inferno, things almost seem mechanical, as if Argento were giving us exactly what we’d expect (or what he thought we’d expect).
We’re made to accept Rose’s fixation on Varelli as a matter of course, without any real explanation or sense of how that obsession came into being. It’s almost like the only reason she is so fascinated with Varelli is so the film can start.
And as the film unspools, the standard Argento strangeness plays out, but somehow, it just doesn’t engage. An antiques dealer (Sacha Pitoefi) meets an unlikely end while out drowning a bagful of cats during a total eclipse, a sequence whose only significance seems to be this: beware the hotdog men of New York.
Even the penultimate secret (the one beneath the soles of your shoes) doesn’t seem like such a big deal. And the ultimate secret, as the Mother of Darkness unveils herself, plunges the movie into Hokeysville.

Now, I am aware that Inferno has its share of defenders, who rhapsodize about the film’s nightmare logic, and even manage to find ways to justify the leaden acting and the bizarre climax. I’m coming from a place though where I can’t help but put Inferno right beside Suspiria, and come away thinking, “Man, Suspiria was a whole heck of a lot better than this.”

In the end, Inferno really doesn’t work for me, and its only saving grace is the establishing of the “Three Mothers” mythology (which Argento and Nicolodi—who appears in Inferno as the unlikely-named Elise Stallone Van Adler—based on Thomas De Quincey’s essay, “Levana and Our Lady of Sorrows”).
The idea that all the evil and misfortune in the world exists because of a trio of ancient Mothers roosting in the shadows of their “horrible houses” is a tantalizing thought. But that thought doesn’t really come across in Inferno, doesn’t crystallize into anything with any lasting significance. Instead, much of Inferno has the ephemeral nature of a bad dream: marginally unsettling while you’re experiencing it, but once the end credits have rolled, it doesn’t really stick.
The sense of sinister mystery so evident in Suspiria is gone here, replaced by the inexplicable (il)logic of a nightmare. It’s a biting disappointment, not just in light of Suspiria, but also given that the Mother of Darkness is described as the “cruelest of the three.” There was such an opportunity here to portray that cruelty, and with the indication that she was even more pitiless than Suspiria’s Mother of Sighs, I half-expected a Grand Guignol tour de force, but instead got this confused grotesque.
I can only hope that the upcoming La Terza Madre returns to the darkling territories Argento mapped out so expertly in Suspiria.

Parting shot: Since both Suspiria and Inferno end in fire, it only seems natural, for the purposes of symmetry, that La Terza Madre should end in conflagration as well. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Speaking of symmetry though, there is something curiously apt that La Terza Madre stars the product of Argento and Nicolodi’s romantic relationship: daughter Asia Argento, who’s starred in a number of her father’s films (including Trauma, La Sindrome di Stendhal, and Il Fantasma Dell’opera), but who is perhaps best known to the mainstream film-going audience from films like xXx and Land of the Dead. She was also in Sofia Coppola’s brilliant Marie Antoinette.
The flesh and blood offspring of the physical union of Argento and Nicolodi, starring in the final chapter of the “Three Mothers” trilogy, the celluloid offspring of the pair’s creative union: like I said, symmetry.
Also in La Terza Madre are Udo Kier (sadly, playing a different role from the one he had in Suspiria), and naturally, Daria Nicolodi. Claudio Simonetti (of Goblin) is doing the original score.

(Inferno DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

Thanx to Carla and Ed, for the plane ticket to New York.

reVIEW (15)
SUSPIRIA [1 of 2]

The long-anticipated culmination of Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy, La Terza Madre (Mother of Tears: The Third Mother), is nearly upon us. In light of that momentous horror geek occasion, I thought it appropriate to take a look back at the first two installments, 1977’s Suspiria, and 1980’s Inferno.
(It’s also the 30th anniversary of Suspiria, so here’s to the old gal…)

When Daria Nicolodi (who had appeared in Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso and subsequently became romantically involved with the director) suggested a move away from Argento’s beloved giallo, he took the advice to heart. Collaborating with Nicolodi on the script, Argento would end up creating one of his most enduring works, Suspiria.

New Yorker Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper; her more recent films include Todd Haynes’ Safe and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report) has just arrived in Germany as a new student at the Tanz Akademie, a prominent European dance school. Her arrival at the Akademie in a violent rainstorm coincides with the hurried flight from the premises by third-year student Pat Hingle (Eva Axen), who is soon violently murdered in a horrific setpiece which ends in a devastating rain of glass.
What follows in the wake of this brutal event is a phantasmagorical journey to the dark heart of the mystery that lies in the depths of the Akademie, a journey chronicled in a film that has been described as both a “magical thriller” and a “fairy tale for adults.”
Thirty years after its release, the film’s elements which hold up the strongest are the visual style Argento and his cinematographer Luciano Tovoli adopted, and the disturbing musical score by Italian progressive rock band (and frequent Argento collaborators), Goblin.

In keeping with the adult fairy tale tone of the narrative, Suspiria is drenched with vibrant colours and boasts impressive sets (production design by Giuseppe Bassan, who had worked with Argento on Profondo Rosso, and would again on Inferno and Sotto Gli Occhi Dell’assassino), which bolster the “totally artificial style” the filmmakers were aiming for. Though also heavily influenced by German Expressionism, Argento points to one particular—and rather unlikely—film which was a source of inspiration for Suspiria’s look: Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
It was from this animated classic that Argento and Tovoli drew the rich and deep colours that made Suspiria look quite unlike any horror film that had come before it. (It was shot by Tovoli on the last of the IB Technicolor stock in Italy.)*

Meanwhile, to provide the “infernal atmosphere” needed for the film, Argento collaborated with Goblin, to produce one of the most unsettling scores in horror cinema.
Along with Jerry Goldsmith’s work on Richard Donner’s The Omen, the Goblin/Argento music is one of the most conspicuous and intrusive film scores in cinematic history.
It is also—again, like The Omen score—one of the creepiest soundtracks to ever assault the ears of this particular horror geek. African percussion, Greek string instruments, plastic cups, whispers of “Witch! Witch!” all collide in an aural storm of chaos and foreboding, as the film’s bizarre events unfold before the audience’s eyes.

Given Argento’s tendency to shrug off the conventions of narrative, Suspiria’s plot is not a particularly strong one, subsumed as it is by the dark fairy tale stylings of the piece. It is the sort of tale where the sound of footsteps carries over impossible distances, solely to allow Suzy to uncover the Akademie’s ultimate secret.
If you’re a stickler for story and plot, then Suspiria is not the film for you.
Additionally, Suspiria displays the marvels of postdubbing, a standard practice in Italian cinema, where all sound, including dialogue, is recorded after the film is complete. Thus, some of the English dubbing tends to distract. To further complicate matters, during filming, certain cast members spoke their English lines phonetically, while some didn’t even speak English at all. Thus, some of the performances are questionable in light of the curious on-set language barriers.
And a couple of bits that didn’t work way back in 1977 (you cannot help but note the strangely puppet-like nature of German wildlife) still don’t work today. My sincerest apologies, Signore Argento, but that sadly overweight bat did indeed contribute to the “totally artificial style” of the film, but in a particularly dreadful way.

Still, there is that look, and that score, and Harper is an excellent protagonist (praised by horror writer and unabashed Argento fan, Douglas E. Winter as “the best of Argento’s heroines”). She is the audience’s Alice, simultaneously wonder- and terror-struck, by the Akademie’s sinister mystery, thrust into this shadowed land and left to work her way to the beating heart of it, before she can find surcease and escape.
With the look, rhythm, and logic of a particularly disturbing nightmare, Suspiria may not be to everyone’s tastes, but it’s certainly a must-see, as one of the most visually stimulating horror films ever made.

* Tovoli would collaborate once again with Argento on Sotto Gli Occhi Dell’assassino.
He was also the cinematographer on five consecutive Barbet Schroeder films (the brilliant Reversal of Fortune, the not-so-brilliant Single White Female, Kiss of Death, Before and After, and Desperate Measures).
More recently, he’s shot Julie Taymor’s interesting and kick-a$$ Titus and reunited with Schroeder on the dismal Murder By Numbers.

Parting shot: If you haven’t seen Suspiria yet, check it out, if only to see a really young Udo Kier as Dr. Frank Mandel, who helps provide much of the film’s exposition. Sadly though, he’s in only one scene.

(Suspiria OS courtesy of impawards.com—this particular OS came alongside a truly horrible trailer that had a sophomoric nursery rhyme on VO, a patently fake skeleton with a wig on, and a font whose letters were made to resemble distorted hearts. In the trailer, the letters actually beat; VHS cover art courtesy of amazon.com; DVD cover art courtesy of itsonlyamovie.co.uk.)

Thanx once again to the J&R Travel Agency for getting me that plane ticket to Germany.