Suspiria

Suspiria is the strongest argument in cinema that a horror film does not need a functioning plot. The story is thin and told badly: Suzy arrives, girls die, an exposition scene in a square explains witches, Suzy finds a corridor, the end. Characters behave according to no psychology. Dialogue is dubbed into flatness. None of it matters, because Argento is not making a narrative. He is making a pressure system out of colour and sound.

The colour is the thing people remember and it is not an effect — it is a decision about stock and process. Argento shot on Eastmancolor and had it printed by the Technicolor imbibition process, one of the last films to use it, and lit interiors through coloured gels and stained glass so that reds and blues are not accents but the actual air of the room. There is no establishing shot in which the Tanz Akademie looks like a building where people live. It looks like a diagram of a nightmare.

And then there is Goblin. The score is credited to Argento and the band and was written before the shoot, played on set at volume, and mixed so high it competes with dialogue. Bells, a prepared piano, a whispered "witch", and a four-note progression that is functionally the film's monster. We score the soundtrack separately, and it is one of the few records in the index that frightens people without a film attached.

What it does better than anything since

Set-piece construction. The first murder — two deaths, a stained-glass ceiling, a drop — runs ten minutes and has the shape of a music video made in 1977 by somebody who had not seen one. The maggots, the room of razor wire, the blind man in the square: each arrives with no narrative justification and total formal confidence.

What it does badly

Everything else. The acting is a dub, the mystery is not a mystery, and the final confrontation lasts about ninety seconds and resolves by stabbing. If you need a film to hold together, this will read as an extremely beautiful mess — a fair description.

Luca Guadagnino's 2018 film is not a remake so much as an argument with it, and is worth seeing afterwards rather than instead.

The short answer: Suzy finds the academy's hidden rooms by following a half-remembered instruction, discovers the coven's founder Helena Markos — the Black Queen — alive and invisible in a bedroom, and kills her by driving a decorative glass feather through her throat. With Markos dead the coven collapses, the building begins to tear itself apart, and Suzy walks out into the rain, smiling, as it burns behind her.

Who is Helena Markos?

A Greek emigrant, exposed in the film's exposition scene as a witch who founded the academy in 1895 as a school of dance and occultism. By 1977 she is supposed to be long dead, and is in fact alive, ancient and able to make herself unseen. She is one of the Three Mothers — the Mother of Sighs — and the academy is her house.

What are the Three Mothers?

Argento's own invention, borrowed loosely from a Thomas De Quincey essay: three ancient witches, Mater Suspiriorum (Sighs), Mater Tenebrarum (Darkness) and Mater Lachrymarum (Tears), each presiding from a building in a different city. Suspiria is the first of a trilogy that continues in Inferno (1980) and concludes, badly, in The Mother of Tears (2007). You need none of that to watch this film.

Why does killing one witch destroy the building?

Because the film's logic is that the coven is sustained by Markos rather than by its members — a claim the exposition scene makes explicitly. The dependence is total, which is also why the academy's architecture starts failing as soon as she does. It is a fairy-tale rule rather than a thriller's, and the film has been operating on fairy-tale rules from the first frame.

Why is Suzy smiling at the end?

Partly relief, and partly the one moment the film grants her agency. She has been passive for ninety minutes — drugged, moved around, told what to do — and the smile is the first thing she chooses. There is no suggestion she has become anything. She simply got out, which in a film this hostile is a win.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

The threat at 012 is the signature and it is near the floor. Only 6 works in the index score lower, which makes this about as purely supernatural as horror gets. There is no human antagonist worth the name. The danger is witchcraft, operating by its own rules, and the film never gestures at a rational explanation.

Reality anchor 088 is near the ceiling — 95 works score lower. Nothing in the Tanz Akademie obeys ordinary space or ordinary behaviour, and the film does not present this as a twist.

Viscera 070 is high — 84 works score lower. The murders are extended, explicit and stylised, and the blood is famously the wrong colour, which does nothing to soften them.

Era bias 012 is deep analog, with only 21 works lower. Technicolor imbibition printing, gels, dubbing, and a score recorded to tape and played on set. Nothing about this film could be made now.

Tone 035 is less bleak than you would guess — 86 works score lower. It is a cruel film but not a despairing one, and it ends with a survivor walking away.

On jump scares: a few, and the score does the work. The music arrives before the threat does, consistently, which is the opposite of a sting.