Suspiria (1977)

Director: Dario Argento


Review:

An attractive young girl get admitted to a ballet school, which has strict discipline and two bitches as teacher and directress. She saw a student escaped from the school on the night she arrived, and next day heard the news of that student was murdered. Do I really need to mention that the teachers are evil?

The plot that a traveller went into a place, and discovered the dark secret over there is so old, I remembered watching it so many times. The oldest example on film maybe House of Usher (1960, adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 story), or The Old Dark House (1932). Hell it was even parodied in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). However, the mysterious killer thing does resemble a slasher film, which was not too well established in 1977. The popular consensus of the first slasher film is (John Carpenter's) Halloween (1978), but arguably Black Christmas (1974) is the first film to employ the slasher formula, so Suspiria caught in between.

Stabbing a beating heart. I have to admit you dont see this too many times

Plot aside, the amount of gore does be ahead at its time. Movie gore started from the shower stabbing scene in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), and developed to Night of the Living Dead (1968). Suspiria, in its time, contains quite amount of gore. Young girls get cut open till seeing her beating heart, girl bleeds to death in barb-wires (yeah Saw might referenced this), would be shocking in 1977, but man, I have seen Braindead (1992) and Riki-Oh (1991).

Caught in barbwires. Saw?

All history aside, this is an enjoyable movie if you havnt seen so many horror movies. You cant really blame the movie since it was still early in the horror genre, well at least modern horror. But for me this film is more a history in horror than horror movie itself.