The Original Suspiria Is An Alright Movie With Exemplary Production Design

Before I spend two-and-a-half-hours this weekend seeing what the director of Call Me By Your Name has done with his horror remake of the same name, I felt it was high time to see what all the fuss was about the original Suspiria motion picture. Hailing from Italy and released in 1977, the film's reputation precedes it both in my social circles where people talk about it in reverent hushed responses and in the larger pop culture where its impact has become so immense that it even got mentioned twice in the 2007 Best Picture nominee Juno. The films larger influence on horror movies, in general, may be even greater than the praise it's received, the amount of horror fare that owes more than a tip of the hat to this Dario Argento directorial effort is unfathomable.


But beyond all that influence, there is Suspiria the movie, which concerns American dancer Suzy Bannon (Jessica Harper) arriving at her new dance academy, the Tanz Dance Academy, in the German city of Friedburg. The moment she arrives, she's encountering all kinds of strange circumstances such as her being refused entrance into the Academy (this nighttime snafu is later rectified), not to mention that wretched maggot infestation in the quarters where all the prospective ballet dancers sleep. Worst of all though has to be the gradual disappearance of people connected to the Academy, certain individuals keep vanishing without a trace as if some larger malevolent force is at work here...

Suspiria as a movie is all about three expertly executed (no pun intended) death sequences and oodles of excellent production design, the rest of it, for me anyway, is predominately competent but never as compelling as it could be. Plenty of similarly iconic horror movies from this era made a lot with very little at its disposal but Suspiria struck me as a film that's more workmanlike in its barebones nature rather than a demonstration in elegant simplicity. None of its bad or amateurish, far from it, but for a primarily atmospheric exercise, I was shocked at how little dread I felt when on-screen characters weren't getting mutilated, much of Suspiria just floats right by you without leaving an impact like a ghost passing in the night.

But the trio of extremely memorable gory death scenes are impressively realized, no two ways about it. An opening scene of a runaway dancer being murdered in her best friends bathroom just keeps taking things to the next level of scary madness in a riveting fashion, you really never know what horrors are gonna befall this poor woman next. Suspiria doesn't just repeat the same type of death scene three times though, in fact, the imagination on display for each individual demise is what gives them so much power. Whereas that opening death is a prolonged sequence of intensity, the death of a blind piano player is played out in a starkly different manner as the character is plagued by a sense of extended quiet unease before his sudden murder.

As for the last entry in this remarkable trio of death scenes, well, it's use of barbed wire made my skin crawl, it's such a slow & gruesome way to kill off a character that had me covering my eyes as I recoiled in terror. Despite all the nasty deaths occuring on-screen, the majority of the sets in the Tanz Dance Academy are filed with visually pleasing architecture and walls draped in beautiful bright colors (a similar color palette is used in many memorable pieces of lighting throughout the story) that make numerous locales look like something out of the most twisted Wes Anderson movie never made. On a visual level, Suspiria is a feast and then some, it just constantly dazzles the eyes, sometimes with its meticulously crafted sets and other times with the similarly impressive visual effects used to bring its myriad of death scenes to life.

The only real problem with the death scenes is that they're so heavily disconnected from the lead character, Suzy Bannon, to the point that it's like they're occuring in a whole other movie. Suzy Bannon and the other characters in the movie are the real weak link for Suspiria. Whereas the production designs and death scenes are sublime, protagonist Suzy Bannon just isn't all that dramatically involving the eventual villains of the piece are similarly lacking as memorable horror movie foes. The disposable extended dialogue sequences always had me just paying attention to the intricately detailed sets instead of the flatly-realized characters. Clearly, I'm in the minority on being more reserved in my praise for Suspiria but even then I still think the best elements of this movie really do live up to its reputation.