Dario Argento’s masterpiece, Suspiria, welcomes you into its twisted universe with a loud cacophony of sound. It sounds like a storm coming in, and it draws the audience’s attention to said storm. Then, the storm calms and we listen for anything else and out of the blackness and silence grows a spine-tingling song. Goblin’s theme to Suspiria. What I find most interesting about this moment is that while the cacophony of noise should be the most shocking part of the scene, it plays much more like the calm before the real storm, which is the quiet tingling, whispering score. We experience the loud noise, which should traditionally give us fear, but there’s nothing inherently scary about it here. Suspiria only starts to become creepy, when we confront the silence and then the score, underscored by the incredibly creepy whispering. This is Argento telling us that even in the quietest of moments, even when we know that the storm has calmed itself, we are not safe. Instead, it is in those moments we are in the most danger. We are in the horror when the silence comes and the score starts to creep into our bones and there’s nothing we can do about it. Argento is a master filmmaker and this opening is a great start for his masterpiece.
This becomes even more terrifying when the score itself seems to occupy a large amount of the film. There is an interesting moment when the score cuts in and out as our protagonist exits an airport, almost compelling the camera forward and along the story. We know that outside of the airport offers some type of danger, that the school our protagonist offers some kind of danger because the score transports said danger upon us. It sounds like something out of a sinister fairy tale. The score than overtakes the film as the protagonist enters a taxi. There is no escape. In the calm between the storm, during the storm itself, the theme, the fear, is present. The theme itself has a driving force as well that seems to make even the most mundane of moments intense and a driving force in the story. Of course, all of this is combined with the expert direction of Dario Argento and the cinematography of Luciano Tovoli, who, during the airport scene, push the camera out towards the doors with the music playing to accentuate the way that the music drives the plot. The camera itself, almost always, near the beginning of the film, has a dynamism to it, and when it doesn’t, you can tell. When the camera holds on something, it’s almost as if we are not moving, but the cogs of the story are. Something horrifying is in the process of happening, but we as an audience are left ignorant of said horrors. When the score does finally cut out, it is at a moment of ignorance for us. We are transported into the POV of the main character, as Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) attempts to enter the school during a storm and is interrupted by a fleeing student shouting at the top of her lungs about something, we the audience do not hear. The lack of the score here is to allow us to transfer out of the dreamy haze of consciousness in the story that existed in the opening moments of the film and into the more clueless fear of the main story. The next more murderous moments also have a score, a pounding, haunting score of unbridled intensity, as the young woman who ran from the school before is going to stay in a new apartment. She is attacked, of course, and a similar pounding score is found, underscoring the chaos of the gruesome moments, but also the violence that lies in them. Again, as this attack is played out the cinematography and the direction are excellent. Argento starts the camera far back from the subject and from outside of a window, framing the subject inside the window as if to trap her in a cage. As soon as we see the next cut, which breaks continuity, of the victim sitting when we had seen her standing, we know that Argento is ramping up, creating jumps in time, ready to show us the horrors he has in store. Soon the victim’s face is being pushed against the glass of a window, physically distorting the victim’s face, and the music and sound create the noises of a guttural screaming. The touches like the distortion of the face, the guttural screaming of the music, and the cold symmetry of the building the scene takes place in, all serve to make the enhance the film’s ability to create a masterful carnival of fright. Argento, in cutting, oddly doesn’t match continuity again.. Argento transports his subject into a whole different place, a floor up creating a jarring, blend of an edit. He’s transporting his audience from moment to moment, cut to cut, but he’s cutting the time short bringing the events close and closer to the audience. We are experiencing chaos, and we are experiencing the fear of the moment, eventually leading to the bloody conclusion of the stabbing of a heart on screen, the breaking of the glass and the hanging of the woman. Argento, after providing us with a flurry of edits, slowly gives us a terrifying pan down and over of the victims of the attack, punctuated by the image of a woman with a piece of glass splitting her face. Argento has shown us the result of the calm after the storm twice now and it’s not too pretty either time. The opening minutes of Dario Argento’s Suspiria are some of the best in horror movie history and they do so by blending the effortless music, sound, and visual elements of many artists. This is a spectacular film and I had to write about it. I had to write about the terrifying heights of Argento’s Suspiria. Bibliography Suspiria. Dir. Dario Argento. Perf. Jessica Harper. RCS. Settore Quotidiani, 1977.
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AuthorStephen Tronicek. Archives
July 2017
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