by Tony Nigro
Normally when I revisit a film, my response is affected by time and place, but it's never so with Dario Argento's Suspiria. The film exists on a different plane located at the other end of some wormhole, a place where temporal shifts are the norm, where every room looks like a mod experiment gone wrong, a set that Kubrick rejected as too baroque for A Clockwork Orange. The story isn't short of any of the narrative leaps, bound, and WTFs found in its Italian horror contemporaries. The agenda is style over script, design above all, and not in a bad way. Indeed, spectacle is the best way to dress up what would otherwise be confusing schlock. But spectacle is one thing, and total sensory immersion is quite another. Suspiria happens to be one of my favorite examples of such, and maybe it's the visceral responses it elicits in me, the inexplicable dread despite a story that is so damn retarded, that whenever I watch it all previous viewings escape me.
add a comment