Suspiria is Argento at his most Italian, his most visual: yellow cat’s-eyes peering in through the window at night, Snow White’s bleeding heart stabbed through with a knife, crimson dripping down a virgin’s pale legs like the crucified Christ, an iris in the mirror, a silhouette of lightning, undead fingers wrapping round a door, blood oozing out her mouth, maggots pouring down from on high like manna from heaven...
One of the ironies of Suspiria is that, although it is Argento’s most beloved work, it is also the work that is most unlike himself. Two of his favourite themes—the gaze and transvestism/homosexuality—are absent. Moreover, after the gore of Profondo Rosso, Suspiria appears to be almost constrained in its violence. The initial kill leaves a lingering impression, yes, but nothing that follows rivals being boiled alive in bathwater or a car-tire pulverizing a person’s head. Yet Suspiria lingers, the afterglow of neon light refracting through its viewers’ minds fifty years on.
Suspiria’s primary influences include Thomas de Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis, Argento’s previous film, Profondo Rosso, and Disney’s Snow White (1937). Argento asked the film’s cinematographer, Luciano Tovoli, to watch Snow White because he wanted to achieve a similar Technicolour splendour in Suspiria. The neon primaries that wash over the characters in Suspiria are intended to recreate the colours of Snow White’s dress.
The story of Snow White and the plot of Suspiria are also similar as both are about intergenerational conflict: the aged hag versus the innocent maiden. The name Madame Blanc (that is, Madame White) recalls Snow White’s name. Perhaps Madame Blanc is Snow White all grown up, now an Evil Queen in her own right? Both films contain revelatory mirrors: the Evil Queen learns that she is no longer “the fairest of them all” from her Magic Mirror in Snow White, and Susie experiences her epiphany about the “secret of the iris” when she views the flower’s reflection in a mirror.
Besides Snow White, Argento builds on his previous work, most noticably Profondo Rosso. Like Suspiria, Profondo Rosso features a love affair with the colour red and the evil architecture of a haunted Art Nouveau house:
A decaying corpse, the elegant exterior of which belies its rotting insides. The house signifies the hidden dysfunctions of the family who abandoned the home, dysfunctions which are the key to a string of serial killings. While the invocation of Art Nouveau in Profondo Rosso symbolises decomposing nostalgia—the memory of murder—and the presence of the past, Art Nouveau in Suspiria represents form chasing formlessness: writhing maggots, twisting metal wires, a young maiden’s hair dancing in the breeze. In short, the impossibility of witches. (Likewise, the presence of neon light in Suspiria symbolises witchcraft because it is as illogical, impossible, and disorienting—a cacophony of colour.)
Suspiria perhaps also draws from the Symbolists. Serusier’s painting The Snake Eaters recalls its visuals, from its overwhelming redness to its eclectic cast of characters:
Symbolism was a reaction against the rise of materialism and rationalism. Per Nicole Myers, it “proclaimed the validity of pure subjectivity and the expression of an idea over a realistic description of the natural world.” Rather than name, Symbolism suggests through colour, line, and composition—a potential thesis statement for Suspiria itself.
The witch is a potent symbol. Witches as female empowerment, witches as what happens to bad little boys and girls, witches as female pariahs, outcasts, the lesbian: “every woman sitting in darkness, without love to shelter her head, or hope to illumine her solitude, because the heaven−born instincts kindling in her nature germs of holy affections, which God implanted in her womanly bosom, having been stifled by social necessities, now burn sullenly to waste, like sepulchral lamps amongst the ancients; every nun defrauded of her unreturning May−time by wicked kinsman, whom God will judge; every captive in every dungeon; all that are betrayed, and all that are rejected; outcasts by traditionary law, and children of hereditary disgrace,all these walk with Our Lady of Sighs.”
In Suspiria, the witches are ballerinas. The ballerina, the female embodiment of the Apollonian, and the witch, the female embodiment of the Dionsyian, brought together as one sign. An impossible existence, like Polanski. Witches as the inexplicable, an oppressive force beyond all law and logic.
Suspiria is Argento’s anti-capitalist fairy tale. When Susie arrives at the dance academy, she is thrust into a world of debtors and creditors, sellers and buyers. A girl is quick to sell her ballet slippers to Susie and shows disappointment when the deal falls through. Sara tells Susie, “I hope that talk of money didn’t shake you up.” The witches are creditors. Olga informs Susie that Miss Tanner has Mark slaving away for her because he is her debtor. Most damning, however, is the scene where a scholar explains to Susie that the sole goal of witches is to accumulate great wealth at other’s expense. The witches are perfect capitalists—remorseless and relentless in the pursuit of profit. The witches are capitalism itself, an oppressive force that consumes all.
The anti-capitalist theme explains the uncanny element of Edwardian illness which pervades the picture. From the wallpaper in Olga’s apartment when she advises Susie to avoid Mark because he is poor, to creepy kid Albert, the injury of whom reveals the pianist’s dedication to realities outside capital (for which he is swiftly punished), Suspiria presents an uncanny Edwardian visual theme. Caught between Jack the Ripper and the First World War, the Edwardian era was a time of sociopolitical upheaval and dissolution. The anti-colonialism movement continued to grow with the foundings of Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone) and the Indian Home Rule Society. The suffragette movement also became more militant as Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union. Britain also saw its worst economic depression in a decade. The upheaval of the Edwardian era makes it an ideal comparison for Italy’s then-present troubles during the Years of Lead. Like the Edwardians and the Tanz Academie, Italy was plagued by inexplicable violence. The political body had taken ill.
A psychiatrist advises Susie that “bad luck isn’t brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds.” The image of broken minds and broken mirrors recalls the tale of the Snow Queen. Another intergenerational struggle between queen and maiden. In The Snow Queen, a shard of broken mirror is caught in the eye of a young boy, who undergoes a dramatic change in personality. He becomes cruel and abandons his childhood friend to serve the Snow Queen. In Suspiria, a spell is cast on Susie with the reflection of light; like the young boy, she is trapped. Further, the young boy’s service to the Snow Queen recalls Mark’s servitude to Miss Tanner. In real life, of course, a dramatic personality change would be explained by mental illness, not a magic mirror. Broken minds, not broken mirrors.
The most famous mirror of all is Alice’s looking glass. Wonderland is a world of strange logic, word games and puzzles. Argento’s Tanz Academie, in contrast, represents the breakdown of verbal logic (the law, the objective god’s-eye) into the primitive realm of the audio-visual and its promise of the global village (One day, at nine in the morning, she left Kennedy airport, New York, and arrived in Germany at 10:40pm local time). The breakdown of all sense and logic, on a global scale. The young hero, who must venture into the unknown and retrieve the dragon’s gold / kiss the princess / outwit the witch. The mirror, a glimpse of ourselves and a passage into another world: nowhere / now here. Argento forgoes the gaze for the glaze of a mirror. Flawed sight, the world seen through a shard of looking glass.