tF classic

As Luca Guadagnino’s star-studded remake of Suspiria prepares to pirouette into cinemas, TF rounds up original director Dario Argento and his cast to look back on the mad making of a scarily inventive, exquisitely gory game-changer that’s both bonkers and

Dario Argento revisits his giallo masterpiece Suspiria.

Some weeks into the shoot of Suspiria, American star Jessica Harper was approached by Italian director Dario Argento and handed a brown paper bag. “Inside was this mound of wriggling maggots,” she recalls, a look of horror twisting her finely drawn features. “I just about vomited.”

There is no horror, only glee, on Argento’s face when he recalls filming Harper brushing her hair only for a maggot to fall from her tresses, and then another, and another, until she looks up to see the ceiling undulating with thousands of writhing worms just as the cascade begins. “She was scared!” he grins. “That was good! Many hours of maggots.”

Eleven hours of maggots, to be precise, and it made for just one of many grotesque, grandstanding set-pieces that punctuate a movie that now, 41 years on, is a perennial fixture on lists of the 10 Greatest Horror Movies Ever Made. Just ask Italian actress Stefania Casini, who has worked with Andy Warhol,

Bernardo Bertolucci and Peter Greenaway, and yet was dealt a particularly cruel death in Suspiria by falling into a room full of barbed wire. “The more I moved, the more the wire closed in on me and pinched me,” she shudders. “It really hurt. I went home looking like I’d been bitten by thousands of ants.”

OCCULT MOVIE

In the mid-’70s, Dario Argento was the hottest name in horror since Alfred Hitchcock had galvanised the genre with Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963). Argento’s 1970 directorial debut, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, had proved a super-stylish sensation, while Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971), Four Flies On Grey Velvet (1971) and, especially, Deep Red (1975) had established him as the guru of giallo – lurid murder mysteries that accentuated their characters’ grisly deaths. Now he was ready for a new challenge, channelling his own brand of chic cruelty into the “fantastique”.

“Something in my career changed,” he tells Total Film over coffee in a London hotel in November 2017, having flown in the previous night to attend a screening of a 4K restoration of his 1977 masterpiece. “I love things on the border of reality and fantasy – the supernatural. Witches were something special for me, as a child. I would have liked, maybe one time, to meet a witch. I thought my headmistress was a witch. It didn’t scare me. Witches are interesting…”

The star of Deep Red, Daria Nicolodi, provided the spark for Suspiria, sharing with Argento how her grandmother, French pianist Yvonne Loeb, used to read her bedtime tales of Bluebeard and Pinocchio. Granny also claimed, on long winter nights, that she’d attended a music academy as a teenage girl only to flee when she discovered that black magic was on the syllabus.

It was just what Argento was after. Together, he and Nicolodi penned the script, blending Loeb’s tale with influences lifted from Alice In Wonderland, Walt Disney’s Snow White And The Seven Dwarves and Thomas De Quincey’s 1845 opiuminfused classic collection Suspiria De Profundis (especially Levana And Our Ladies Of Sorrow, detailing the ‘Three Mothers’ of Sighs, Darkness and Tears).

The plot is basic: American ballet student Suzy Banyon (Harper) goes to a Freiberg dance academy; many people die; the school, it transpires, is run by an ancient coven of witches.

But it was in how best to join these narrative dots that Argento’s interest, and genius, lay. He set out to make a “magical acid trip” that would “start the way a normal horror film would finish” (a spectacular double murder, boasting more colour and choreography than an MGM musical, is arguably the greatest opening in the genre’s history) and then accelerate into an “escalating experimental nightmare”. If William Friedkin’s The Exorcist had treated the occult with sombre realism, he would go OTT, WTF fantastical, proclaiming in typically excitable fashion, “Fear is a 370-degree centigrade body temperature; with Suspiria, I wanted 400 degrees!”

MOTHER OF INVENTION

Long before the 16-week shoot began on 26 July 1976, with exteriors filmed in Munich and interiors in Rome, Argento worked with DoP Luciano Tovoli to determine the hallucinatory lensing. Bizarrely, Tovoli was grounded in realism, famed for his work with European masters Michelangelo Antonioni and Walerian Borowczyk, but when Argento’s favoured cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller declared that Argento’s psychedelic vision for Suspiria was impossible

to create, Tovoli took up the challenge. He conducted tests employing big arc lights, by then outmoded, covered with velour and tissue paper, and created scalpel-sharp backgrounds by bouncing lights off mirrors

– a technique that also deepened shadows to an impenetrable black.

Declaring his “symphony of dazzling colour and light” owed debts to “romanticism, renaissance art, impressionism and surrealism” – to which can be added the clear cinematic influences of illusionist and film pioneer Georges Méliès and German expressionism – Suspiria nonetheless popped like nothing seen before. For the infamous attack on a blind man by first a swooping bird and then his own guide dog (shot in the Munich square where Hitler mounted many of his speeches), Tovoli and Argento took two whole months to design the choreography and mechanical means to mobilise the camera, and then a further week to light the square before trashing three cameras as they hurtled up and down cables.

“It was all storyboarded because it was so difficult: more and more and more to a crescendo,” says Argento, speaking quietly and hesitantly but communicating pure relish. “I wanted colours, gore and flamboyance.”

It was never enough. Every scene, Argento demanded, must contain invention, while each anamorphic widescreen frame should swim with style, shadows and symbols. The blocks of primary colour needed to explode, and Argento opted to print the film in three-strip Technicolor, a defunct process, to further heighten the contrast.

Harper, despite having starred in Brian De Palma’s camp classic horrormusical Phantom Of The Paradise (1974), had never experienced a set like it. Argento cast her as Suzy for her “big eyes, like a manga… that fragile and childlike force”, and because his financiers F.A.C. and producer (and younger brother) Claudio Argento had dismissed his original plan to populate the dance academy with 11 to 14-yearold girls. They wanted 18 to 21-yearolds, and an American star.

And so it was that Harper found herself working for a director that she could barely understand and acting in scenes where her international colleagues were saying their lines in Italian, German and English, safe in the knowledge that Italian movies of the ’70s dubbed all dialogue in postproduction. Harper had seen Argento’s Four Flies On Grey Velvet and considered it “pretty fabulous”, but “had no idea that Suspiria was going to be so influential… I expected it to be a reasonable addition to the genre, nothing more, nothing less”. She did, nonetheless, give herself wholly to the swirling chaos, content to be whisked up like Dorothy in the cyclone and transported to a retinascorching, brain-melting realm. “I knew I was just going to have to go with this one,” she smiles.

Similarly perplexed was German cult hero Udo Kier, stolen from a Rainer Werner Fassbinder production shooting

‘INSIDE THIS FAIRYTALE ARE ALL THE ELEMENTS OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS AND OF SEX’ DARIO ARGENTO

nearby to sit on a bench outside the towering BMW building in Munich and deliver one key speech. Said speech, delivered to Harper, was two pages long and full of gibberish about darkness and magic, meaning Kier’s English wasn’t up to it. “Someone fed me the lines,” he remembers. “He recited the entire speech with me following him word perfectly about two seconds later.”

DEVIL’s DIN

Matching Suspiria’s beautifully berserk images is the malevolent soundscape by Italian prog-rock outfit Goblin, who’d previously scored Argento’s Deep Red and would later re-team with him for George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead (1978), which Argento produced, and Phenomena (1985). As with DoP Tovoli, Argento pushed them to their limits, demanding “strong music… like actors screaming… an infernal atmosphere” at a time when film scores were, as a rule, politely orchestral. What Goblin spirited up and spat out was a true symphony for the devil, clashing African percussion, Greek bouzoukia, a wretched, raspy voiced lullaby (“LA-LA-LA LA LAAA-LA!”) and hissed shouts of “WITCH!” to not so much unnerve viewers as unhinge them.

Forty years before Edgar Wright choreographed car chases to music in Baby Driver, Argento blasted out Goblin’s music on set, syncing close-ups of knives plunging lovingly into flesh and blasting ornate, gothicfairytale sets to smithereens in time to Goblin’s banshee-boogie. “There was a scene where I had to run through a corridor and things were exploding, glass was breaking,” recalls Harper. “I could have gotten hurt.”

Just as Argento painted his kaleidoscopic visuals long before computers came on the scene to allow filmmakers to toy with filters and colour gradients, so Goblin’s score arrived before the age of MTV and music videos, a genre it is thought to have helped shape. But don’t, for a second, think that all of this colour and clatter add up to a kitsch contrivance that now evokes nostalgia or cynicism, like watching an Iron Maiden video from the 1980s.

Suspiria, to this day, makes for distressing viewing, with its operatic flourishes sprinkled with more subtly disorientating techniques. Manage to peer through the fear and you’ll notice that not only do the co-eds often interact like children, but that doorknobs are placed at head height to amplify their vulnerability. Franco Fraticelli’s aggressive editing, meanwhile, splices static long-shots to fanatically detailed close-ups, thereby effectively skewing viewers’ spatial orientation.

Like Harper on set, you just have to go with this one, to untether your mind and immerse yourself emotionally into a vivid, fetishised world where the blood is bright and beautiful but the sadism is very real.

Released in Italy in February 1977 and rolled out throughout the year internationally, Suspiria opened to mixed reviews, with critics lambasting its trite plot and perceived misogyny as much as they praised its dazzle (“A movie that makes sense only to the eye,” concluded J. Hoberman of

The Village Voice). It fell foul to censors, heavily edited in the UK and US, and was for many years available in the UK only as a pan ’n’ scan budget-range VHS that butchered its carefully calibrated framing and palette as messily as Argento butchered his protagonists.

Casting a Spell

And yet its reputation grew, with Suspiria becoming, for many, a gateway drug into the crazed delights of Italian genre cinema. Argento would complete his ‘Three Mothers’ trilogy with the equally brilliant (though less universally acclaimed) Inferno (1980) and the much-derided Mother Of Tears (2007), and between these two sequels his own star would dim even as Suspiria’s continued to shine brighter and brighter.

“It was successful because it was a fairytale reinvented, and inside this fairytale are all the elements of the

subconscious, of psychoanalysis, and of sex,” Argento sums up, while Harper simply states, “It was the wild, wonderful and weird pinnacle of my career.” But there is another reason for Suspiria’s lasting impact, she asserts, pointing out that “it was completely dominated by women” and saying that an atmosphere of “feminine intimacy” was conjured by an ensemble that included 1940s Hollywood icon Joan Bennett as vice-directress Madame Blanc, and Italian siren Alida Valli as instructor Miss Tanner.

Far from viewing Suspiria as misogynistic, Harper claims it was ahead of its time. “It was nice working with a mainly female ensemble for a change,” she shrugs, a theme that Argento is naturally keen to pick up. “It is the world of female, yes,” he nods over a sip of coffee. “I’m very comfortable in that world. Women are very important to me. I love women.”

What he wasn’t always comfortable with was the idea of a Suspiria remake. First posited in 2005 as such ’70s American classics as Dawn Of The Dead, The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were being retooled, it looked set to happen in 2008 when director David Gordon Green attached himself, casting Isabelle Huppert and Janet McTeer.

Then, in 2015, came news of a TV series entitled Suspiria De Profundis, also based on Thomas De Quincey’s book of the same title, in which the author himself would be a character and a series of fearful mysteries would be solved, Sherlock Holmes-style. Argento, who had been aggrieved by the idea of an American remake, was himself announced as the series’ artistic supervisor, and though there’s been two years of silence, he now assures Total Film that it is set to go before cameras in Dublin in October this year.

THE ITALIAN JOB

In the meantime, the movie remake has finally happened, shot by acclaimed Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, A Bigger Splash) between October 2016 and March 2017 and starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton and, yes, Jessica Harper. She’s giving little away. “I spent some time with Dakota in the make-up room, but we only chatted briefly,” she says. “I’m sure she will be great in the role. And Tilda Swinton is amazing. I can’t wait to see the finished product.”

“I think it will be something very different [to mine],” says Argento. “I’ve not seen anything from it. But I’m pleased it is being made by Luca. The American remakes are not very good.”

Guadagnino’s remix will surely introduce a whole new generation to Argento’s masterpiece and, just as surely, and regardless of quality, it cannot hope to match the cultural impact of the original. But one thing is not certain: will Argento watch it?

“I don’t know,” he chuckles.

“I… don’t know.”

Suspiria 4k-restored limited numbered collectors edition is now available on blu-ray.