Suspiria (Ltd 3-disc Synapse Steelbook) (Blu-ray) (Import)

Very good. Surreal.

While this is a great movie wich led obvously to the remake feel the remake is more subtle on the sacres at first and what is going on in the dance school.

Top Dario Argento horror movie. Pounding soundtrack from The Goblins. The stunning use of photography and colours is amazing, the film is a visual treat. The leading actress Jessica Harper is talented its surprising she did not go on to any great success she is very good in this. Argento made some great films early in his career including Phenomena, Tenebrae and Opera but his later work Dracula, Phantom of the Opera, The Card Player etc has been very poor. It says an awful lot when 90 percent of over 2000 reviews rate this 6/10 or better. One of the very best Italian horror films and highly recommended to all.

i was a little unkind in my original review. I remember seeing Suspiria on it's release in the cinema - the whirligig of visuals, the repetitive use of the colour red and the pounding Exorcist/Carpenter-inspired music from Goblins made for a pretty scary experiences when I was18. The story is pretty straightforward -young Suzy Bannon, an American ballet student (Jessica Harper: Pennies from Heaven), comes to a German dance academy run by the redoubtable Madame Blanc (Hollywood veteran Joan Bennett) and her second-in-command, the grim-faced Miss Tanner (Alida Valli). She soon comes to suspect that all is not as it should be - one student mysteriously flees the academy as Suzy arrives in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, only to be murdered later that night, a blind piano player from the school dies soon afterwards and one of her new friends goes missing shortly thereafter. And then there's the mysterious Directrice, who comes and goes and has a horrid raspy rattle while she snores in her sleep. Suzy soon discovers that the town used to be home to a famous witch in the 19th century who founded what eventually became the dance academy, and suspects that a witches coven is still active on the premises. Time for Suzy to go creeping along dimly lit corridors and hunt them down!Having viewed a bit more from Dario Argento of late, its clear he loves setting up imaginative individual scenes, even at the expense of a cohesive whole. And the intense Goblins soundtrack seems to be often used to make up for the banality of seeing a character tiptoeing down a corridor. We can only guess at the relevance of the mysterious young nephew of Madame Blanc - is he a warlock-in-waiting, watched over by the splendidly flint-faced Romanian cook, or is this just a nod to The Omen? Most probably the latter, given the Hitchcockian attributes of Bird with the Crystal Plumage, for example. Half-way through the film, Warhol favourite Udo Kier (Flesh for Frankenstein) pops up - a little heavy-handidly - as little more than a plot device to explain why psychiatrists are interested in witchcraft and to allow a little more history of the dance academy to be given to the audience. And the plot device of some stored hampers of food in the attic going bad (haven't these people heard of fridges or cellars?) and getting infested with maggots (a) gives an opportunity for us to squirm at the students' hysteria as maggots drop into their hair, and (b) produces the excuse for everybody to have to sleep downstairs in the rehearsal room that night, including the mysterious rattley-throated Directorice, allowing a bit of clunky exposition of the plot. Stylistically though, the film remains a visual treat, with the Art Nouveau style of the ballet school reminding me of the Vincent Price's Dr Phibes movies. The deaths at the beginning of the movie remain two of the more gory ones in the horror canon, so much so that they (the scenes, not just the actresses) were hacked to ribbons in early VHS and DVD releases. Certain set pieces like the pit of wire in the attic are inspired, if one doesn't question why people have wire pits in their attic rooms in the first place! Suspiria showcases what 70s Italian horror WAS good at - memorable and ingeneous ways to kill people off - though falling short in the ability to develop a sustained air of dread compared to, say, John Carpenter classics such as Halloween and The Fog. Most of the frights here come from the Goblins' prog-rock soundtrack suddenly erupting from the speakers at high volume and shocking us out of our seats. William Castle would have been proud.

It's really hard to know what to say about Suspiria. One the one hand, it's beautiful to watch, chilling throughout and properly scary by the end. It has reasonably good acting, suitably grisly deaths and moments (blind man killed by his own dog, maggots falling from the ceiling, girl pulled through window, stabbed repeatedly then hung), and will certainly stay with you. On the other hand, it tries too hard to be scary. One of the characters gets utterly hysterical just because she's not sure where the teachers go at night, and while the score (all loud, harsh noise mixed with screams) does unsettle, it does so rather too harshly, and often plays at random times. Also it frequently makes no sense. Even by the end of the film, there is no explanation of the eyes seen in the fog, how the main character is able to recall days later what the girl running from the school as she arrived was saying, when she couldn't hear it at the time, why the knife-wielding killer who attacks one of the girls just sticks the knife through the crack in the door and wiggles the latch instead of opening it and so on.I think in the end, the film is a very good one. It's very artistic, and while the incongruencies, strange lighting and so on baffle you, they do work well to make you unsure of what's going to happen at all times, which does add to the sense of dull terror that fills the film. It probably won't scare you all that much during the film, but it works retroactively. I saw it yesterday, and it's still stuck in my head, wiggling round and making itself seem more chilling in retrospect than it actually was at the time - probably the opposite to most other films.I recommend the film strongly, although it won't be to everyone's tastes as it is very different from Hollywood horror films.One more thing - I'm also very confused about the language of the film. It's by an Italian director with a mostly Italian-named cast, but if it's dubbed you can't tell. If it was originally in Italian, don't let the dubbing put you off anyhow. Unlike other films (City of Lost Children - GRRRRRR) that were ruined by poor dubbing, this one is completely unaffected.