I've wanted to see a Dario Argento movie for several years now, but never got the chance to do so.  Well, that changed today, as I watched Suspiria, the Italian director's 1976 film.  It's about a young American girl, Suzy (Jessica Harper) who comes to Germany and joins a ballet dance Academy which might not be quite what it seems.  After a few murders and other strange occurrences (like a "rain" of maggots, a nasty nosebleed, "sighs" in the night) occur, she begins to suspect there may be witchcraft at work here.  It turns out that the Academy was started by one Elena Markos, who was believed to be a old and powerful witch.  Though she is thought to be dead, she may actually be very much alive and the head of a coven of witches, who are running the Academy.

This is the first Argento film (and for that matter, Italian movie) I'm watching.  Suspiria is one of his most well-known movies (I remember Pablo was also recommending it, some years back) and was supposed to be representative of his style — artistic and splendid visuals, elaborate murder sequences, with the story not being that important.  Certainly, it's what I thought of this movie too.  The story was there but it was more a backdrop for Argento to go crazy with his visuals and kill scenes.  Not everything was explained — apart from the fact that the witches in the movie were supposed to be evil, we never found out why they killed certain people in the movie.  Also, why would you get people enrolled in your academy only to kill them off?  Anyway, I guess one shouldn't ask such questions and just enjoy Argento's excesses.

This is a very beautiful movie to look at.  Argento with his cinematographer (Luciano Tovoli) and production designer (Giuseppe Bassan) fill the screen with bright colours and lavish designs (interiors of the academy).  A lot of scenes feature striking use of primary colours (red, green, blue) — for example, you might have a shot where Suzy is sitting in darkness (with a blue tint), with a tray with wine glasses visible at the corner of the frame.  This tray would be illuminated with a red colour, and when someone opens the door to this room, you'd see a bright green light come through.  I've never seen anything quite like it.  Sure, I didn't think it was as violent as it was made out to be, but the kills and scares were certainly effective.  One murder in particular (the one of the blind man) was very well done, where Argento has him dispatched in a way totally different from what the viewer is expecting.

One of the strongest points of the movie is the sound design and music score, done by Italian band Goblin and supervised by Argento.  They add a lot to the tension of the film.  I loved the music, with the sighs in the background, accompanied by sudden loud exclamations of "witch!", and the way it got more aggressive to heighten the intensity of a scene.  The casting for the movie was also great I thought — Jessica Harper is supposed to be playing a girl about 20 years of age, but she looks much younger than that.  As a result, the stuff that happens seems more menacing.  I believe the director's original intent was to have the academy not accept anyone over 12, which means that the characters would all be kids.  That would have made the movie even more intense, but I guess then the filmmakers wouldn't have been allowed to show any of those characters dying.  John Carpenter's 1976 Assault on Precinct 13 shows a small girl being shot dead, and that scene apparently caused controversy — just imagine then, the reaction to some of the elaborate deaths in this movie!  I'd rate the movie an 8/10, and I'm even more excited now to see Argento's 1975 Profondo Rosso (Deep Red).

Oh, and I did a drawing to accompany this post too, which you can see above (click that image for a larger version).  It's supposed to be Jessica Harper as Suzy from the film, though I don't quite believe the representation is that good.  Anyway, it'll do.  I wanted this one to be in colour (after all, with all the colour in the movie, I don't think a simple ballpoint pen sketch would do it justice), so used a selection of different tools to make the image — colour pencils, a black sketch pen and black ballpoint pen.  The image you see above is pretty much straight from the scanner, it came out nicely with very little (almost negligible) post-processing.

• About the title Suspiria, though it is not explained in this movie, apparently it is the first in what is called Argento's "Mothers" trilogy, with each film being about one of three powerful witches whose goal is to spread evil.  Markos in this movie is supposed to be "Mater Suspirium" which translates to something like the "Mother of Sighs".  Argento's follow-up 1980 movie Inferno has the Mother of Darkness, and the third film (apparently scheduled for 2008) is itself called The Mother of Tears.
• About the drawing I did — while I am not too happy about the resemblance of the picture to the actress, I do like the drawing for the technique itself!

There are a few more movies in the queue for me to watch, I will try to watch one more and do a write-up/drawing combo of that, for today.