Suspiria Review

The Italian maverick directs a gruesome story (the first film in the never-completed 'Three Mothers' trilogy) about an American dancer Susy Banyon (Harper) who travels to Europe to enrol at a famous ballet school. Settling in at the academy proves increasingly difficult, as she is greeted with bizarre noises and even stranger occurrences, eventually realising that the establishment is a facade concealing a dark world of sinister witchcraft, in which throat slashings are commonplace.

Hailed as a European horror classic, Suspiria's bloody charm resides in its technical triumphs and visual style. Argento's skilful use of unsettling, intense colour and stunning set designs adequately obscure the film's numerous structural flaws. Death is portrayed with aesthetic abandon - most memorable is the scene where one woman in a negligee escapes a predator by crawling through a window, only to tumble onto a mat of razor wire. Argento's confident conjuring of hallucinatory terror and all-pervading evil sends a spell-binding chill through every frame. The bloody mark of a fine horror picture.