In response to complaints that his 1965 crime drama Pierrot le Fou was overly bloody, Jean Luc Godard is credited with telling a journalist, Not blood. For the French New Wave pioneer, violence seemed to be not a question of morality but rather of palette, and the screen was simply another splattered canvas.
Several Italian directors produced horror and suspense films from the 1960s to the 1980s, some of which paid homage to Hitchcock’s notably chromatic work, yet took on a more lurid aesthetic, pushing the levels of gore and nudity. Giallo is Italian for yellow, a reference to the yellow covers that are typical of the sensationalist pulp books these films were modelled after. Despite being translations of British detective stories, they were initially published in the late 1920s; however, it wasn’t until Mussolini’s prohibition during the postwar period that they became more widely read. Throughout the genre’s lifetime, it has been notoriously challenging to define the precise characteristics of Giallo as a genre. There is substantial debate regarding the definition of what constitutes a Giallo film since there are no specific standards or definitive guidelines. A Giallo film is mood or atmosphere influences its classification as such just as much as its immediate, physical components do.
That said, the genre was never established as ac ohesive cinematic movement. Directors like Argento, Bava, Lucio Fulci, and Sergio Martino rose to prominence through the commercial side of Italian cinema, which had a long history of copying popular Hollywood genres like westerns, cop movies, and sword-and-sandal epics but making them less lucrative and significantly bloodier. When it came to renditions of Giallo in the 1970s and 1980s, Argento was the director who mastered the genre through his work Deep Red in 1975 before advancing to semi-surreal supernatural thrillers like Suspiria and Inferno.
Many consider Suspiria to be the auteur’s most lavish and effective manifesto against cinematic formalism. In the likeness of Godard, Argento crafted a narrative and aesthetic war between the red of emotion and the blue of contemplation for a study of atmosphere, relying on confusion and disorientation for power and embracing absurdity. As a supernatural thriller, Suspiria drew its inspiration from fables, folktales, and the gory, sex-and-death ethos of Giallo . The distinctive red lens of the film’s production design stands as the glittering, poisoned apple in a fairytale equation devised by Argento toimitate the colour of Walt Disney’s ‘Snow White.’” Suspiria deals in witchcraft, Le Tre Madri Three , the source of its warped visual and sonic wonders. This coven of witches preys on the beautiful students of a German ballet school with dark secrets of diablerie and souls damned to wander the earth, wreaking havoc on the innocent in luculently lambent technicolour . Argento’s masterpiece is a dark fairy tale told through a series of expressionist paintings, structured by an architecture of odd proportions from which the spectator observes through impossible angles so as to be made to feel like a helpless onlooker.
This pervasive sense of wrongness is part of Suspirias terrorising beauty as the film dances and exalts around its own dreamlike world, the form melds exquisitely with its content through its wailing instances of gushing violence both aesthetically and corporeally. If any film can be considered 3D without putting on those pesky glasses, Suspiria takes the cake and bleeds all over the fondant.
In an attempt to craft a collage from Argento’s torn book of filmmaking rules, Luca Gaudagnino, revered by forbidden romance fans of 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, reimagined Argentos film as an “homage” to the director. It became one of the most divisive films of 2018, constantly reconfiguring its source material throughout its runtime yet never forgetting to provide a graphic depiction of a beloved nightmare.
The poster for Dario Argentos Suspiria captivated 10-year-old Luca Guadagnino, who anxiously sketched versions of its blood-soaked ballerina in his school notebook. But it wasn’t until he was 13 years old, having watched the actual movie that had been shown on Italian television, that he was certain the horrifying tableaus of imagination, curiosity, and horror could very well emerge in his future. Set in 1977, the year of the original film’s release, 2018s Suspiria solidifies itself as a daring and elaborate piece striving to honour its earlier incarnation that also defiantly looks to impose its own new steps and rhythm on the past to invoke a sense of legacy and rebirth across culture, gender, and politics. Italian prog rockers Goblin famously provided the original film’s soundtrack, whose dissonant cacophony of heavy breathing, whispers, screams, and chants provided the ideal accompaniment to Argentos vigorous assault on the senses. In the remake, this sinister evocation of melody is complemented by Thom Yorke, the frontman for Radiohead, yet, the use of colour tells a different tale.
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