Retrospective Film Review

Suspiria (1977) • 41 Years Later

A newcomer to a prestigious German ballet academy comes to realise that the school is a front for something sinister….

Dario Argento’s most famous movie is Suspiria, not least because it was the easiest to market overseas and was made in the English language. Argento became the “godfather of giallo” in the 1970s thanks to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971), and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972), leading to his international breakthrough with Deep Red (1975). The latter inspired a number of US filmmakers, most notably John Carpenter with Halloween (1978), and Argento’s follow-up Suspiria once again breathed fresh life into the horror genre.

There’s such a simple story to Suspiria it can be encapsulated in maybe a couple of sentences, but it’s not a movie you experience for rich characterisations and narrative complexities. Argento himself works on the belief that “cinema of prose” is where you never notice the camera, while the “cinema of poetry” is the precise opposite. Suspiria is a work of indelible poetry, as…