Suspiria - Utterly Mental

People often tell me that I'm a film buff.  I feel far from it given that I constantly find out about films I've never even heard of before.  One of those films is Susperia, mentioned by Mark Kermode in his review of Black Swan a couple of years ago and in his list of the 10 greatest gothic films in last month's Observer.  Kermode said that fans of Suspiria would see Black Swan as a rip-off, his opinion being that Suspiria one of the great films of the horror genre.  That's more than enough recommendation for me, so with the intention of eventually becoming the film buff people keep telling me I am - last Thursday evening I watched Susperia.

The first thing to establish about Suspiria is that it's utterly mental.  Jessica Parker plays Suzy Bannion, an American dancer who comes to a famous German dance school to start her ballet training.  The first time we see her is walking out of the airport terminal into a dark and stormy night, talking to a taxi driver intent on ignoring her and then arriving at the gaudily pink dance school just as a girl is fleeing in apparent hysteria.  Before the night is over, this girl will be dead, stabbed horribly and hanged by an unseen force that appears through her apartment window.  The next day Suzy begins her training at the dance school.  As the weird events and dead bodies begin to pile up, Suzy is soon drawn to the possibility that something otherworldly is going on, that the people who run the school are not all they appear.

As one reviewer on IMDB has perfectly summed Suspiria up - it's like watching a bad dream.  It's set in a world where lights and colours on walls change from shot to shot, where the laws of physics are mutable, where people stare madly out of the corners of their eyes and where sounds and incidental music are a cacophony of discordant noises.  In short - a nightmare made celluloid.  Our heroine is trapped in a world from which she cannot escape, drawn ever-closer to dark truth that every bone in her body is screaming for her to run away from.  But in this world the logic of dreams takes over, a logic that makes the horrible truth of the dance school as inevitable as Suzy's next breath.

The film starts with a murder of horrific violence that focuses on a girl being stabbed and them brutally impaled on glass.  After this we move into slightly more sedate horror territory, with the film being happy to allow its mood, sound and general weirdness to generate a sense of unease and panic in its protagonist and viewer alike.  The last 15 minutes of Suspiria is all the more shocking then as the sub-Evil Dead make up and animatronics are brought out for the final denouement.  In the end it's a film that's strangely effectively in providing scares in several different ways.  As a wannabe film buff with a penchant for the horror genre, I feel a little silly to have never even heard of Suspiria until only a few years ago.  Other horror film fans out there in the same situation as me would do well to seek it out.