Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
The opening line from War Pigs by Black Sabbath (regarded by some as the first true metal band) is possibly the worst lyric of all time. The sheer audacity of rhyming ‘masses’ with ‘masses’ is clearly horrendous songwriting. Yet in terms of its sheer, bloody-minded commitment to delivering its message in the most bluntly prosaic manner possible, it is wonderful. It is art. It is metal.
Director Dario Argento's approach to film making can also be described as metal. His films are loud, proud, and generally make little sense, Just like a Black Sabbath song. Argento is even in a rock band called Goblin. They usually write and perform the music for his films. They’re amazing and you should check them out. Argento has made some truly incredible films, and just as many absolutely terrible ones. But his best film is probably Suspria. And Suspiria is probably the most metal film ever made.
Many years ago I had a friend who was allowed to watch horror films. My parents didn’t let me watch horror films, so all my experiences of horror films came from my friend telling me about them. When you’re eight years old, the subtleties of plot and the finer points of film making tend to go over your head. So when my friend described the horror films he had seen to me, it was less a coherent narrative, and more of a ghastly supercut of heads exploding, rivers of blood and nightmarish transformations.
My parents were strict, so it was around eight years later when I was allowed to watch horror films. Before I was allowed, I would slowly trace my finger over the spines of the video cassettes in the video rental store in the little town in Ireland where I lived, and through a combination of my warped imagination and the exaggerated images on the front covers, I would build a repulsive representation of the film in my head.
I found myself becoming terrified of films I had never seen, and, as it turns out, films that didn’t even exist. Because when I finally did watch horror films, I was shocked to find out they weren’t just wall-to-wall gore and torture, but actually they were mostly people hanging around and talking and things people do in normal films. Occasionally someone would be killed, of course, but compared to the nightmarish visions in my head, I discovered that most horror films looked cheap and cheerful, and it was very clear I was watching special effects, with fast paced editing covering up the cracks. Alien, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Friday 13th… all of these films had a reputation that could never live up to the utter madness that had been sloshing around my head for so long.
All this changed when I saw Suspiria. Suspiria is not a normal film. Suspense, tension, narrative coherence? All of these things fly out the window (literally), about ten minutes into the film. Suspiria feels like it’s made by an alien who has read the Wikipedia page for ‘horror film’ and thought “cool, I’ll have a go at making one of those”. Because while Suspiria ticks every box for every horror film convention (beautiful women screaming, blood & guts, an isolated setting, plinky plonky creepy music), it does everything completely wrong.
Bavaria, Germany, modern day (technically 1977, but time and place are fuzzy concepts for Argento). Suzy, a young American ballerina arrives at an airport in the middle of a storm. Everything is soaked in red, blue and green light. Drenched and panicked, she hails a taxi cab. Pounding, atonal music drowns out the dialogue, A young woman runs in terror through a rain sodden wood. The word ‘witch’ is spat over the soundtrack. A corpse drops from the skylight of an ornate, bright red grand hall. Maggots drop from the ceiling. Huge shards of glass abruptly kill someone else. What on earth is going on? This was exactly what I imagined horror films were actually like.
Suspiria is less of a film, and more of a heavy metal song. It starts at full volume and never lets up. It makes no sense, but it’s beautiful.
I had finally seen the film of my dreams, or rather, the film of my nightmares. And it totally lived up to my expectations. But the impact was very different from what I imagined. Rather than the traumatic experience promised by hours of obsessing over forbidden images and the prosaic shocks of non-existent films, Suspiria offers something radically different; the imagined horror film made manifest. While one can simply handwave the film away as 90 odd minutes of horror clichés, in actuality the onslaught of generic conventions writhing and reconverging without referent constructs a gloriously phantasmagoria of hyperreal mush. A Technicolor (tm) wasteland of barely comprehensible imagery.
But Suspiria isn't just an infantile regurgitation of half-baked horrors. It is utterly, even overwhelmingly beautiful. Jessica's barefoot journeys into the liminal dreamscape of the academy see her gracefully lurching after the “blue iris”, a narrative conceit that is so slight it is either drivel or poetry or more realistically both at once. While this scene occurs at the denouement, it spirals uncomfortably and wonderfully with other half remembered highlights. The nails through Daria Nicoladi 's eyes as she shrieks orgiastically. The pleonastic death-rattle of the ancient witch anchored through her stylishly theatrical depiction as a silhouette through a hastily hung sheet at an impromptu sleepover. Maggots writhing uncontrollably in a beautiful young woman's hair. These images are ripped straight out of a 10 year old's horror fanfic. And it is precisely because of their naivety, of course massaged through nothing less than exquisite cinematography, that the surrealistic barrage of Suspiria achieves true nightmare status.