An Italian Horror Triptych / ****

Thanks to the influence of my friend Ryan, I’ve been diving more and more into 70s Italian horror, both in general terms and, more specifically, into the giallo genre. Along the way, I’ve found a lot of films that I really love – Lucio Fulci won me over with Zombi and The Beyond, I’ve started to finally get onto the wavelength of Dario Argento, and my first glimpses of Mario Bava have been positive ones. Even so, I often find myself struggling to write reviews of giallo films, if only because there are so many elements that are essential to a good entry in the genre – a black-gloved killer, a dream-like logic, the murdering of beautiful women, either a man blamed for the killings or a woman drawn into a(n often psychosexual) mystery – recur in the best films. As a result, I often find myself struggling to find something new to say about the ones that I’ve seen; even when the individual films are different from each other, they have a tendency to run together.

Such really isn’t the case for the pairing of What Have You Done to Solange? and The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, two essential entries in the genre that nonetheless are so markedly different that they merit some discussion as to the various ways that you can push giallo into something different. Despite being less than a year apart, Solange and Wardh show that giallo is far more than just the sum of its elements, instead allowing directors to take the basic story in a wide variety of directions.

Take Wardh, which in many ways, feels like your archetypal giallo (it’s essential enough that in retrospective, several jokes from The Editor make more sense to me after seeing it). You have a diplomat’s wife, torn between men – her husband, a new lover, an ex who reeks of danger – and finds herself at the crux of a slew of brutal murders. Typical giallo fare, but director Sergio Martino taps into the surrealism and dreamy atmosphere that can set films like these apart, giving us a glimpse into the rapidly fracturing world of (the always upsettingly gorgeous) Edwige Fenech’s unfaithful wife. Wardh‘s plot is beyond convoluted (I think the solution somehow works, but it’s definitely a wild one), but that’s really not the draw here – what works is Martino’s atmosphere, which set the tone for so much of the genre to come. A sexually charged atmosphere, beautiful visuals, inventively stylized killings, a focus on psychological torment over jump scares, the undeniable objectification of women despite being focused on female characters – all of that and more finds an early, iconic formation here, and you can feel its shadow over a lot of what I’ve seen “since” then.

Meanwhile, Solange is from close to the same time – one year earlier – and yet feels like an entirely different film. Yes, you have the gloved killer, the preying on women, the focus on characters’ guilt and psychology, the lurid atmosphere – all of what you think of as belonging to the genre. But Solange, for all of its uncomfortable subject matter (the main character is a teacher who’s accused of the murdering of female students – partially because he’s definitely having an affair with one, something the film doesn’t really seem to have too much of an issue with), feels less like a stylized slasher and almost more like a procedural. For all the grimness of the crimes – and they’re genuinely horrifying – there’s a focus on the motive behind them that gialli don’t often have, with a strong focus on how we got here and what led us to this point. There are plenty of other elements here, of course – as mentioned, this is a prime example of the “man accused of the crimes works to clear his name” part of the genre – but Solange feels almost like the “serious” film that led to the more exploitative films to come.

That’s not to say that Solange isn’t exploitative, lurid, or thoroughly a thriller; it’s just that it takes itself a little more seriously and seems to work as much as a crime film as it does an entry in this odd Italian subgenre. And watching it back to back with The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh makes for a compelling experiment in how two films of the same genre could be so different from each other, despite having so much in common. Indeed, that very contrast is what made the double feature so successful in the end.

Of course, there’s more to Italian horror than giallo – for many people, the first introduction to that world comes in the form of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. It took me a long time to get onto Suspiria‘s wavelength – to realize that Argento could care less about plot, and instead works entirely in a dreamlike, odd way that focuses more on style, setpieces, and the odd sense that the story both works on a primal level and yet doesn’t make any sense at all. If you can get into that state of mind – that is, realizing how little story matters here – you’ll probably enjoy Inferno, Argento’s semi-sequel to Suspiria that finds him creating a mythology about “three mothers” who have made their homes around the world, and this time diving into a New York apartment building which may be the local hub for evil activity.

In general, Inferno takes everything that Suspiria did and tries to crank it up further – more story, more style, more characters, more locations, and so forth. The result lacks some of the tightness and effectiveness of its predecessor, but that doesn’t really make it any less stylish or entertaining. By the time we’re in the apocalyptic finale complete with synth-rock Latin chanting, you know what you’re in for, and you can either accept it or just bail. Inferno isn’t among Argento’s best works, but it’s got a ton of great setpieces, including a long underwater stretch that works in its simplicity, that aforementioned finale, an eerie encounter in a classroom, and more. It’s not the best entry point into Italian horror – and really, it’s not quite as fun as Lumberto Bava’s Demons, which I recently watched – but it’s still a good time.

IMDb: The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh | What Have You Done to Solange? | Inferno

Suspiria / **** ½

It’s taken me a long time to come around on Suspiria. The first time I saw it, probably 15+ years ago, I saw it knowing only that it was hailed as an essential and classic horror movie. What I got was bewildering to me; stylish and colorful, sure, but also nonsensical, unclear, and just sort of a mess. Then, a few years ago, I decided to give it another shot, seeing it on the big screen, to see if maybe I just had a bad first experience…but this time, a butchered and neutered print left me even colder to it, not really understanding any of the appeal of the film. To me, Suspiria’s popularity was bewildering; the script was a mess, the sequences often incomprehensible, the acting off-kilter…I just couldn’t get it.

But over the past couple of years, I’ve finally started to understand Italian horror – the style, the emphasis of mood and mise-en-scene over story, the focus on surreal and nightmarish imagery more than script or acting. It started for me with Lucio Fulci films, but there have been others along the way, including some more exposure to Argento. And so, I decided it was time to revisit Suspiria one more time, if I could find the right chance. So when the Belcourt theater in Nashville announced that they’d be screening the new 4k, uncut restoration of the film on the big screen, it seemed like the perfect chance.

And, man, am I ever glad I went.

There’s no denying that being more attuned to the rhythms of Italian horror had a huge impact on my viewing this time, as did realizing exactly how much – and how little – story I was going to get with Suspiria. Because, make no mistake, this is a thin, thin movie, in which a ballerina attends a school run by witches, and creepy things happen. That’s about all there is to Suspiria in terms of plotting, and yet, seeing the film in its full, uncut, restored glory, it’s hard not to get swept up in the nightmarish, intense setpieces. From a haunting pursuit that ends with creative use of a stained glass window to a blind man being attacked by his own guide dog, Suspiria shows off Argento’s knack for staging a sequence, and if it doesn’t always stand on the logic of the film or entirely make sense of its own accord, well, you’re certainly not thinking about that while you’re watching it.

But more than that, the colors – my god, the colors. Seeing Suspiria not just in a pristine  restoration, but in a restoration that made every single super-saturated color nearly pop out of the screen…well, it was a jaw-dropping way to see the film, one that frequently left me speechless at the imagery on display. It’s the ideal way to see – and to appreciate – Suspiria, a film that almost entirely relies on its ability to sweep you up in its saturated, hypnotic, strange world. (Mind you, the iconic score by Goblin does no small amount of work here, creating a strange, off-kilter mood that’s impossible to shake. It’s a bizarre, atypical score for a bizarre, atypical movie, but man, do they ever work well together.)

There are always going to be things about Suspiria that just don’t work for me. Even knowing how loose and shaggy the story is, there are big chunks of the movie that just feel silly and nonsensical, stretching the already tolerant boundaries of Italian horror to their breaking points. That’s probably most true in the film’s climax, a truly jumbled set of moments that feel like nothing so much as the film running out of time and hurriedly wrapping itself up so it could beat traffic. And even with the unbelievable style on display, part of me prefers the sleazy, go-for-broke horror of Fulci to Argento’s controlled, beautiful death.

But for the first time, this screening helped me understand what everyone loves about Suspiria.  It left me in awe of the iconic death sequences, unsettled by some of the intense mood setting, and absolutely floored by the beauty of the compositions. And more than that, it finally helped the film fall into focus not just as a niche art thing, but as a unique and fascinating piece of horror unlike most anything else. It’s beautifully, intricately composed, worried entirely about its visuals over its story (and even its scares), and absolutely, carefully controlled in its craft. And as someone who so often loves horror but finds the craft lacking, that’s no small thing.

IMDb