“Witches always fascinated me; I don’t believe in the devil, in the movies he always makes me laugh… What’s more, Suspiria is heavily influenced by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; in an early draft I even planned to have the action take place in a child’s school where the witches were teachers who tortured the children.” – Dario Argento

Dario Argento used to really turn my crank and I sought him out everywhere. In the the late 1980′s it was hard to be a completest – but I tried. I’d watch him on VHS, bootlegs, laser-discs, (later DVD’s), plus – of course – the occasional film screenings. Mostly, later, it was in my basement on laser-disc (I’m dating myself – but that’s the way it was). Either way, back then Argento delivered the goods. His films were synonymous with both the visceral and the cerebral. He’d show a guy losing his teeth as he face-planted onto a glass table from many different angles, but he’d also construct a mystery on par with something I always imagined Edgar Allan Poe would get a kick out of as he revealed a trump card in the third act that could still shock the audience. And then there was the music: wasn’t it always The Goblins cranked up to 11?

A few years ago I made a trek to Denver to watch a theatrical screening of Mother of Tears (2007). This final installment of the Three Mothers trilogy was (finally!) being brought to the screen by Argento and featured his daughter, Asia, in a prominent role. I have to admit to enjoying it on a distinctly campy level. But I also felt like a silly adult who dropped money to squeeze into an amusement park ride meant for teenagers. I was also left wondering what had changed – the medium or the subject? That is to say: was Argento still being Argento while I, his viewer, had grown older and jaded? Either way, Mother of Tears struck me as an overwrought mess with too many  jaw-droppingly stupid head-slappers. Sure, some guilty-pleasure moments, but overall I was left feeling like a middle-aged adult who was still trick-or-treating despite not even enjoying the candy any more. It was enough to make me question  my original fascination with Argento. Had my younger self been too easily charmed by the visceral, colorful, and aggressively surreal trappings of some other culture?

Tonight I will revisit that question by watching what many people agree is one of Argento’s finest moments with Suspiria (1977). Suspiria is the first part of his Three Mothers trilogy, with Inferno (1980) being the second. What’s on tap is this: a 35mm imported print from the U.K. whose colors are still strong – and this is important because, among other things, while Argento shot the film on Eastman Color Kodak he then printed it with one of the last remaining 3-strip Technicolor processors around. Maitland McDonagh gets even more specific in her book Broken Mirrors / Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Argento.

The consistency of Suspiria‘s colour stratagey, in which the riotous dayglo colours embody the hysterical, hypersensitive world of witchcraft and sorcery, is truly marvelous; it was both rigorously planned and meticulously executed. Suspira wasn’t just designed and lit according to a complicated visual scheme, but was also manipulated in the laboratory to achieve its final extreme effect. “With (Director of Photography Luciano) Tovoli, we used the same procedures as they did in the fifties with Technicolor, with very vivid colours,” Argento remarked. “It’s a matter of using three film matrixes for the three base colours: red, green, and blue, and then superimposing them while each time stressing the colour you want to have stand out. Kodak didn’t even have more than a few thousand meters of this type of stock.” The success of their endeavour is evident in virtually every frame of Suspiria.

Then there’s that cranked up crazy music. Not only did Argento help compose The Goblins score, he also blasted the track on the set to rattle his actors. Also, it was to have starred his girlfriend at the time, Daria Nicoladi, who both co-wrote it and was inspired by stories of her grandmother who fled a German educational institute because of the supposed witchcraft that was being performed there. The lead role was even written for Nocoladi, but for marketing reasons the studio insisted on an American actress.

McDonagh discusses Argento’s inspiration behind the Three Mothers trilogy as coming “not from authentic folklore, but rather from a passage in a short essay by Thomas De Quincey, best known as the author of the autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” On several occasions McDonagh points to Argento’s surreal excesses as tapping into the grammar and iconography of our unconscious: “Suspiria and Inferno, with their pervasive images of fire and water conflated into an apocalyptic mandala, beg discussion in terms of Jungian archetypes.” Given the source material used from De Quincey, this makes total sense due to the many hallucinatory and feverish dreams that De Quincey had that were fueled by his opium addiction. McDonagh adds these important notes about De Quincey:

University-educated, bookish as a child, and morbidly romantic as an adult, he had visions of heaven and hell, dreams of classical deities and wholly self-generated wraiths. One such dream (or rather, literary construct that may have been inspired by an actual dream; it’s far too elegantly coherent to be the direct transcription of some welling up of subconscious concerns) is recounted in De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis (Sighs from the Depths), a collection of essays intended as a follow-up to the Confessions. Its title is Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow, and it contains the essential notions that underlie Suspiria and Inferno and that will equally shape the third film – tentatively referred to as Mother of Tears – yet to be made.”

McDonagh’s book came out in 1991 – a full 16 years before Argento finally put out his third installment to the trilogy. As I wondered how McDonagh reacted to Mother of Tears, I flipped around in her essay and found an interesting section where she notes that although Suspiria “proved to be Argento’s greatest ever box office success in the United States,” this was to be despite some very scathing reviews. Many critics harped on it for not making sense. McDonagh argues that “Well, no it doesn’t precisely make sense… not in any conventional way, but then neither does the story of Little Red Riding Hood; what kind of a stupid little girl can’t tell her grandmother from a great hairy wolf? Does the situation call for complicated solutions involving associative mental disorders? No. That isn’t the point.”

Since one of my complaints with Mother of Tears was that it made no sense, I caught myself wondering if perhaps I’d been too harsh. Was I missing the point? Now I’m doubly interested in how McDonagh reacted to Argento’s last installment of the Three Mothers and what I find is a June 2008 quote on Film Journal.com with the following:

Maitland McDonagh hated the film, describing it as “sadly lacking in the baroque atmosphere and visual aesthetic that elevated Argento above the horror hacks—it’s flatly lit, indifferently staged, coarsely violent and brutally straightforward. The English-language dubbing is the final indignity: even the voices are ugly.”

Phew! That gives me the succor to believe that my original fascinations with Argento were not simply the bong-water enchantments of an immature mind. I have a feeling tonight’s screening will still grab me from the grave of yesteryear. There does exist, of course, the chance that I have outgrown my youthful appreciations for widescreen compositions with startlingly vibrant colors that visually scream alongside jangly electronic music at  every impending death… but I doubt it. Especially during this month, when so many boogeyman come back to the fore and scare up my inner-child. Speaking of Three Mothers and the boogeymen, let’s not forget that three of our most infamous American slashers – Michael Myers from Halloween, Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th, Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street – all owe a tip of their hat (or mask, or glove) to various Italian horrors of the sixties and seventies, but that’s conversational fodder for a future talk around the campfire. Right now I’ve got to get ready for my date with my favorite of the three witches. Today’s date being 10/10/10 I’m reminded that three is a magic number.