I remember, upon seeing the 2018 remake of Suspiria, reading that the newer movie was not trying to retell the same story as the original so much as it was trying to capture the mood of it. Likewise, it seemed the original movie’s director, Dario Argento, wasn’t happy with Luca Guadagnino’s take on his film. Still, I liked what I saw in the 2018 version and was curious to see how the original turned out. Plus, both versions are on my Fill-In Filmography, and I am looking to fill many of those entries. I just couldn’t seem to find the 1977 version without buying a DVD or something.
Then I found it on Tubi. Tubi’s commercial breaks are a little annoying, but at least it doesn’t edit the movies for content. Besides, who knew how long it was going to stay there?
Young American ballerina Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) has received an invite to study at the prestigious Tanz Dance Akademie in Germany. However, there’s a terrible storm, and she arrives in time to see a young woman leaving after shouting something at an unseen person inside. Furthermore, Suzy is told to go away over the intercom, an oversight that is corrected the following day, but something strange has happened. The young woman who left, an expelled student, goes to stay in a friend’s apartment when something attacks her through the window of the bathroom. Said bathroom is not on the ground floor, and she dies violently, finally falling through a skylight, her throat slashed and her neck in a noose. Oh, and her friend was likewise killed by the falling glass. Something supernatural is around, it seems.
Suzy doesn’t know much about this, but strange things happen when she tries to assert herself in a manner that her teachers don’t want her to. She doesn’t want to live at the Akademie, but then a bout of weakness during class forces her to convalesce in the room they set up for her. A blind piano player is laid off, and after shouting at the headmistress, has his throat ripped out by his seeing eye dog not long afterwards. Another student is certain there is an evil presence at the school, and that presence can only be one thing, hinted at in the musical score and finally given voice: witches. There are witches at the school, and Suzy may have to keep her wits about her if she’s going to survive there.
Up until this point, my lone experience with Italian horror movies was Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond, a movie where the plot was secondary to the mood. I watched that movie and only had a vague idea what was happening. Suspiria does something similar, but the story is something I could follow a bit better. What exactly is going on at the ballet school? I don’t know for certain, but it is something evil that isn’t afraid of a little violence. If anything, this movie shows a lot more restraint than From Beyond, which may not be saying much, but this movie didn’t have nearly as much eye trauma as Fulci’s work.
What Suspiria did have was atmosphere. For a horror movie, this was filled with a lot of subdued colors, not something I would normally associate with horror aside from red for blood, and what blood is seen here is far too bright a color to look real, but that’s true of most horror movies from this period. No, instead Argento fills his screen with a lot of blues, purples, and yellows. It’s done in a way that doesn’t look entirely natural, rendering the movie a look that suggests that something is happening involving a force that shouldn’t even exist in nature. The witch, when she finally appears on screen, is only partially visible, but this isn’t the sort of movie that is going to answer questions. Otherwise I might wonder about the room full of piano wire. It is a movie that mostly makes sense, but in the end, I was more interested in experiencing it than understanding it. That may have been the point in the end.
Now, if only Tubi did a better job inserting the commercials into the movie…
Grade: A-
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