Suspiria (1977): Fusing Fantasy with Horror
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In the haunting forest sequence of Snow White, you see the branches reach out like arms that catch her like a trap.
Suspiria (1977): Fusing Fantasy with Horror
Figure 1: Poster of Suspiria (1977)
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61Bf6f68DcL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg
When I first watched Dario Argento's "Suspiria," I was blown away by its color palette, the concept, and set designs that made it so poetic. It is different from so many 70s films, because this is a decade when there were a lot of mainstream Hollywood films that felt very grounded. So many bleak and violent films that dominate horror genre is tainted by a grounded realism and Argento subverts the genre with supernatural elements.
By using highly saturated hues, particularly reds and blues, Argento exaggerates the horror moments emotionally and never do they feel too cold or sour. The palettes feel otherworldly almost on a level you'd find in animated film and ironically, Snow White was one of its major influences.
Narrative
Nicolodi co-wrote the screenplay for Suspiria with Argento, and she researched several children’s stories during the writing. But for the reluctance of distributors, Argento would have had the film feature young children.
The narrative is like an epic poem, each with its distinctive and contrasting visual elements. Jessica Harper, an unwitting dancer travels by car to a secluded dance academy. The building's design feels like something straight out of a silver age disney animated film with all of its stylized and colorful set pieces.
Colors
Figure: Screenshot with colors to show the range of tones
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/27725353945482318/
The colors of "Suspiria" emotionally sets the tone. Luciano Tovoli, the cinematographer, bathes the screen in a range of primary hues that supports the disorienting intensity of the framework. The vibrant reds bleed into the eerie blues, stylizing a nightmarish world. Red signals danger and the foreshadowing violence, meanwhile the constrasting blue evokes dreamier realms and a complete detachment from reality.
Suspiria and Dr. Caligari (1920)
Figure: Poster of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Note. From Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Das_Cabinet_des_Dr._Caligari.JPG
"Suspiria" and "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" both have similar expressionistic backgrounds, which increases the inner psychological fear. "Suspiria," like "Dr. Caligari," contains exaggerated architecture that helps in blending reality and fantasy. The ballet dance school has intricate and stylized designs that feel like it comes straight from a fairy tale. Madame Blanc's office which consists of these hand-painted floral designs works as a similar effect to the geometric backgrounds in Caligari - they are flat, but stylized and sophisticated.
Both films create psychological unease with their environments and thematically balance between sanity and madness. In "Suspiria," the dance academy involves a descent into the witch cult's madness, a parallel to the nightmarish carnival of aberrations conceived by Dr. Caligari.
The ethereal dance sequences, both beautiful and grotesque, mirror the thematic disintegration of the film's reality. When the dancers perform, Tovoli's camera tracks their rhythmic movements, echoing the chaotic, dreamlike setting they exist in.
Snow White (1937) and Suspiria
Figure 1: Poster of Snow White (1937)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/193855152079
Figure 2: Image displaying screenshots of both movies, showing their similarities in characters, composition, and narrative action
https://www.behance.net/gallery/113831927/Suspiria-Snow-White
The choice to incorporate elements from fairy tales aligns with Argento's desire to create a film that taps into primal fears and archetypal imagery, evoking a sense of timeless horror. By incorporating fairy tale elements, Argento could blur the lines between fantasy and reality. This intentional blending enhances the disorienting and nightmarish atmosphere, immersing the audience in a world where the supernatural and the mundane coexist in unsettling harmony.
Taking inspiration from Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," Argento finds the Queen's dark, menacing personality as a movie villain to be the most intriguing blueprint for a character like Miss Tanner.
The theme of witchcraft and malevolence is central to both "Suspiria" and the Snow White narrative. the presence of a coven of witches at the ballet academy introduces an element of dark magic and danger. This aligns with the malevolent character of the evil queen in "Snow White," who resorts to witchcraft to harm the innocent princess.
Crossing the Threshold: To the Dance Academy
The enchanted and mysterious setting of the ballet academy in "Suspiria" shares similarities with the dark and foreboding forest where Snow White finds herself lost in. The eerie and atmospheric backdrop in both sets the stage for fantastical elements and contributes to a sense of impending danger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDyAiiIsbMs
Suzy frighteningly looks out the window with reds predominantly tinting the scene
In Suspiria, Suzy in a passenger seat looking at the forest through the window limits the interaction between her and physical setting but meanwhile invites a deeper analysis with the car ride's parallax and the tension build-up that comes along with the transportation.
Crossing the Threshold: Through the Forest (Snow White)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2zrs7Irzuw
Snow White's animation is energetic and lively, amplifying the terror with exagerrated expression
The way faces appear - overlaying from low to high opacity - over the trees, gives the impression that she may be hallucinating, maybe not. The forest by default, is disorienting by design, providing the Disney animation team a wide array of options to play with when coming up with the horror elements.
Suspiria's threshold sequence gives us an immediacy that feels almost palpable as Suzy looks through the rain-covered window and her vision is obscured. She senses through the forest trees that something may be lurking beneath but it is unclear what it is. Snow White, however, is putting the protagonist in physical conflict with the the trees of the forest. Animation allows for an exaggerated expression, meanwhile the live-action in Suspiria is grounded and colder.
Mirrors as Story Devices
Figure 3: Screenshot of the Queen's mirror from Snow White
https://disneyfanon.fandom.com/wiki/Magic_Mirror
Figure 4: Screenshot of Suzy and a mirror
https://x.com/GIALLO_GIALLO/status/761204984935542784
Mirrors play a significant role in both stories too, serving as portals to other worlds or revealing hidden truths through its reflectivity. In "Suspiria," mirrors are used in visually striking and symbolic ways, reflecting the supernatural occurrences within the academy. In "Snow White" The magic mirror used by the evil queen strengthens its themes of ugliness and beauty and how physical beauty is a tool for power. We automatically intuit how in both cases, mirrors has us intuit the exploration into identity theme and this increases an inner psychological terror as both narratives' fantastical imagery amplify its frightening sequences.
Transformation and Deception
The theme of transformation and deception is present in both narratives. In "Suspiria," characters undergo transformations and the true nature of the academy is shrouded in deception. Similarly, the evil queen in "Snow White" uses magical transformations to deceive and harm the princess. The witch being mostly invisible in Suspiria works beautifully within the tonal framework and it teaches us how minimalist fantasy allows for more grounded transformations in live action to occur.
An example is in how, despite Suzy's fear, she shows courage towards the end in walking up to Madame Blanc's office despite the deaths of the ballet dancers. From being a naive outsider to actively finding out the secrets of the academy, the transformation is caused by the horrors of the witch.
Suspiria and The Red Shoes: Dancing for Emotional Extremes
Figure 6: Still from the Red Shoes (1948)
https://www.oregonlive.com/movies/2012/01/also_opening_this_week.html
Both "The Red Shoes" (!948) and "Suspiria" uses ballet to evoke emotions rhythmically and to ensure that narrative beats synchronize well with the sound and music, or in contrast to normal, walking footsteps.
"The Red Shoes," and "Suspiria," share a fascination with the transformative power of dance. In the Red Shoes, dance is treated as a foreground element as the dance shoes in the Andersen play that the protagonist plays has cursed ballet shoes that thematically ties together the protagonist's real-life obsession with theatre and perfection. Suspiria treats dance as more of a background element to evoke passion and bodily expression, which greatly contrasts or 'competes for attention' if you will with the film's darker, violent sequences. the dance academy becomes a place where the dance is somewhat rhytmic with the story bearts.
The Casting to Produce Nostalgia
The casting director masterfully assembled his acting team here like he already did his homework on precursors in horror and gothic-themed films.
Joan Bennett, in her supporting role as Madame Blanc, offers some nostalgia to the darker films she had been typically casted in, having previous worked with gothic-themed films and television like The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlett Street (1945).
Figure 7: Barbara Magnolfi as Olga
Figure: https://www.instagram.com/p/Co8HmGWPvkT/
Barbara Magnolfi as Olga contributes to the film's Gothic vibe as well, having already starred in previous horror films such as The Suspicious Death of a Minor (1975).
Their physical presence alone - with their dark hair and pale complexions - visually supports the contrast between light and dark throughout the film,. In order to evoke and symbolize something ghostly, whites and blacks have to be placed evenly and proportionally. The above screenshot displays this, as Magnolfi's Olga is seen talking on the telephone. In the background is the usual Argento-stylized trademark which echoes the Giallo tradition in stylizing horror with something extravaggant like this floral wallpaper.
Goblin's Score
Goblin's haunting score intertwines with these vibrant visuals, providing, eerie and dissonant melodies that increases the tension and meanwhile adds cohesion to radically different set pieces and color schemes. The soundtrack becomes a character by itself with the synchronizers as the main force.
There's an emotional build-up in the end as Suzy goes from Madame Blancs' office to Helena Markos' room. The main title theme synchronizes with her footsteps, even as each scene is drenched in a new set of hues or features an entirely different set piece. Heavy breathing overlays some tracks, adding more of a witchlike tone and a stronger sense of atmosphere.
What went wrong with Inferno (1980)?
Even when the horror feels dramatized to operatic extremes, the film never loses its consistency of tone. The surreal nature in the way the actors' lips never fully sync in with their voiceover dialogue creates a strange gravitational pull, blending seamlessly with the ghostly, supernatural atmosphere.
Other Argento films, such as Inferno (1980), have been made to capture a similar hyper-stylized, nightmarish ambiance." However, none have reached the same heights that Suspiria has with its unsettling backdrops and vibrant visuals. One main reason is the way an empathy is generated more easily towards dancers that are essentially performance artists. We, the audience can anticipate that these types of characters can take terror and possibly turn it into something creative or meditative in a matter of footsteps. Inferno's characters consist of a poet named Rose and a musician named Mark but their artistic talent isn't showcased with as much emotion Suspiria's dancers are - the detail is there to build up texture, more-or-less. Then again, its easier to showcase the way dancers exaggerate emotion through movement rather than how a musician or poet relying on verbal language or sound rather than the motion of the body. still, Argento finds a more noticeable cohesion in Suspiria where sound and physical interaction becomes one, and its this quality that puts it on another level above so many horror films.
References
[image]
https://ew.com/movies/2018/10/26/suspiria-jessica-harper/
[image]
https://www.oregonlive.com/movies/2012/01/also_opening_this_week.html
[IMAGE]
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61Bf6f68DcL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg
[IMAGE]
https://www.ebay.com/itm/193855152079
[IMAGE]
https://www.behance.net/gallery/113831927/Suspiria-Snow-White
(2021, Oct 21) How Disney's Snow White Influenced Suspiria
https://collider.com/how-disney-snow-white-influenced-suspiria/
(2022, Aug 24) SUSPIRIA "Opening Scene" Clip (1977) Classic Giallo [Video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDyAiiIsbMs
(2011, Nov 12) Snow White & the Haunted Forest [Video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2zrs7Irzuw
[IMAGE]
https://www.instagram.com/p/Co8HmGWPvkT/
[IMAGE]
https://disneyfanon.fandom.com/wiki/Magic_Mirror
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