SUSPIRIA (1976) Blu-ray/DVD combo
Director: Dario Argento
Cult Films

The UK's Cult Films throws its hat into the ring of 4K SUSPIRIA restorations with their Region B Blu-ray/DVD combo.

American Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper, SHOCK TREATMENT) "decided to perfect her ballet studies in the most famous school of dance in Europe. She chose the celebrated academy of Freiburg. One day, at nine in the morning, she left Kennedy airport, New York, and arrived in Germany at 10:40 p.m. local time," just in time to witness the sudden departure of expelled student Pat Hingle (Eve Axén, LUDWIG) who is soon after brutally murdered along with her friend (Susanna Javicoli, BODY PUZZLE). When she refuses the offer of vice directress Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett, THE SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR) to stay at the academy in favor of a room in town with catty classmate Olga (Barbara Magnolfi, THE SISTER OF URSULA), Suzy suddenly and mysteriously falls ill and is consigned to bedrest with the school's walls. At sea amidst a student body of spiteful and materialistic classmates, Suzy finds a friend in meek Sara (Stefania Cassini, 1900) who reveals that she was a friend of Pat's who had been snooping into strange occurrences at the school – not unlike the shower of maggots that rains from the ceilings or the murder of piano accompanist Daniel (Flavio Bucci, PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT) after a tongue-lashing by stern instructor Miss Tanner (Alida Valli, THE THIRD MAN) – before she was murdered. When Sara subsequently disappears and Suzy learns something of the history of the academy from Sara's psychiatrist friend (Udo Kier, BLOOD FOR DRACULA) and witchcraft expert colleague (Rudolf Schündler, THE EXORCIST), she decides to solve the clue left by Pat of "irises."

Dario Argento's knock-out follow-up to DEEP RED, SUSPIRIA was a rock-scored quadrophonic stereo, Technicolor fairy tale that leapt off the screen with the hellishly bold colors of production designer Giuseppe Bassan (DEEP RED), the lighting of cinematographer Luciano Tovoli (SINGLE WHITE FEMALE) and the loud, relentless, throbbing score of Goblin. The plot penned by Argento and muse Daria Nicolodi (SHOCK) is simplistic but the adventure is in the journey as protagonist Suzy drifts through a series of violent and vivid set-pieces until discovering the deep, dark secret of the Tam Academy is as simple as counting footsteps. The gore – courtesy of TENEBRAE's Pierantonio Meccacci – is ladled on thick from stabbing an exposed beating heart and faces bisected by shards of glass to throat-rippings, slashings, and puncturings, but these "money shots" always appear within the context of set pieces rhythmically-edited to the bombast of Goblin's score (the main theme of which is as influenced by Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" as it would influence John Carpenter's score for HALLOWEEN). That Harper is able to make an impression as a complex and sympathetic heroine within this maelstrom – with able support from Cassini, Bennett, Valli, and Magnolfi (whose Olga really deserved her own film) – is a testament to the actress given Argento's disdain for the actor's process. Argento had conceived the characters as much younger, and their behavior is rather sexless for a school full of women in their late teens to twenties. In one of the featurettes, Olga's overt sexuality is compared to the imitative and exaggerated behavior of a child, but even the mildest of flirtation between dancer Mark (QUEEN MARGOT's Miguel Bosé, son of BLOODY CEREMONY's Lucia Bosé) and other girls is done with the assurance that it will go nowhere (ostensibly because he has no money and is under the thumb of Miss Tanner who has him run errands to pay for his tuition and boarding). The film manages to both assault the viewer's eyes and draw them into the depth of shots and the backgrounds with the arrangement of characters across and within the frame as well as architectural accents, set dressing, and Argento's eye for faces with supporting parts by Jacopo Mariani (DEEP RED) as Madame Blanc's nephew Albert who looks like he stepped out of a German medieval fairytale illustration, Giuseppe Transocchi (WEREWOLF IN A GIRLS DORMITORY) as the academy's hulking Romanian handyman, Franca Scagnetti (TO BE TWENTY) as the academy's cook, and the fur-coated, bewigged razor-wielding killer seen from behind in a handheld tracking shot turns to the side for a split-second revealing a very Roman nose that belongs to the director himself. SUSPIRIA would become part of "The Three Mothers" trilogy when Argento followed it up with INFERNO (1980), although the third installment would not arrive until 2007 (for better or worse) with MOTHER OF TEARS: THE THIRD MOTHER.

Released theatrically with a four-channel by Twentieth Century Fox offshoot International Classics in an R-rated edition that trimmed gore but created a nifty pulsing brain title card, SUSPIRIA was unavailable stateside after its theatrical release outside of repertory screenings with the only option being a Japanese laserdisc incompletely letterboxed at 2:1 until future Blue Underground president Bill Lustig undertook a new transfer from the Italian negative that was released on letterboxed laserdisc by Image Entertainment in 1989 as well as a letterboxed unrated VHS from Magnum Entertainment (who also put out panned-and-scanned unrated and R-rated editions). Preceding the film's DVD release was a late nineties cassette from Fox Lorber that unfortunately made use of a PAL master that was not only faded but less generously letterboxed and featuring only a mono soundtrack (this edition turned up on non-anamorphic, mono DVD in Japan shortly after). An anamorphic DVD turned up next in France but it was not English-friendly before Anchor Bay unleashed their new anamorphic transfer on limited three-disc DVD (two discs plus CD soundtrack) and single-disc editions featuring a English DTS 6.1 ES, Dolby Digital 5.1 EX, and Dolby Digital 2.0 surround as well as Italian and French mono dubs. While the colors dazzled, the multi-channel remix proved problematic, revealing some sounds and dialogue not heard in the matrixed remixing of the 4.0 track on the laserdisc while muffling some and losing others.

SUSPIRIA was a long time coming to Blu-ray as well, with Japanese, British, and Australian editions derived from an HD master approved by Tovoli in which something went wrong between the grading and the final output with excessive contrast resulting in blown-out highlights and some off colors and bleeding (a shot of Daniel's dog waiting outside the academy is as red as the wall it is in front of). Synapse commissioned a new raw scan to be made from the original camera negative which had to undergo extensive restoration, and their effort was beaten to the market by an alternate restoration utilizing the scan Synapse had paid for, resulting in a lot of bad blood and thousands of pages of forum discussion even before the screencap comparisons. With both the Synapse and TLE restorations coming to Blu-ray at roughly the same time – and the latter in more than one territory – fans of the film who have chosen sides are likely to possibly read more into the advertising claims of the authenticity of the viewing experience both editions espouse as being direct swipes at one another rather than "preaching to the converted" and region-locked newbies. As such, Cult Film's back cover claims of reinstating "the crucially distinct colour palette for the first time in accordance with Argento's original 'Technicolor Dye Transfer' specifications, finally doing justice to the director's original expressionist vision" and touting TLE's past triumphs with the Sergio Leone "Dollars" western restorations – the HD restorations done for the DVD releases last decade, not the more recent and problematic L'Immagine Ritrovata ones or those of MGM for Blu-ray – seem to fly in the face of Synapse's Tovoli-approved colors. While the TLEFilms version has been lauded by as many as the Synapse ones, I find myself also preferring the Synapse YET still glad to have an edition with this version for comparison. While the reds of the academy interiors scream at the viewer as they should, the walls of the apartment building lobby in the opening look more pink and the stained glass looks diluted by orange while the more saturated blood looks like paint. Whites seem to be deluded by green – making the black and white wallpaper pattering of Olga's apartment feel more recessed in the image – and some of the more saturated greens in the wardrobe seem to lose texture, and some of the gel lighting looks more "candy-colored" than aggressively saturated. The golds of the academy bannisters look duller, but one can better see that the gold writing on the walls of the secret chamber are more reflective than in the Synapse. Some of the changes, whether accurate or not, are pleasurable to assess even if the Synapse colors are still preferable; for instance, the academy exterior's red façade is a duller but darker burgundy, the blue wallpaper of the academy foyer is darker with a texture that looks like wrinkled foil than crushed velvet, and the dulling of the gold also makes the brown wallpaper of the locker room less striking behind Olga, Suzy, and Sara. On the whole, the film looks less fairytale and more modern (in an eighties/nineties sense rather than the more recent orange-teal push look), perfectly watchable but making some of the more subtle usages of color gels looking less intense. On the other hand, this was the first time I had actually seen the maggots dropping around Suzy before she did. The presentation runs roughly two minutes longer not because of any additional footage but because of introductory text screens that specify the materials used for restoration – the incomplete negative, dupe negative, interpositive, and internegative – and once again touting the accuracy of the restoration. Audio options include DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks in Italian and English with centered dialogue and directional music and effects that is superior to the problematic 2007 mix for the Anchor Bay release – which has shown up as an additional option on the Umbrella Entertainment Blu-ray of the TLEFilms restoration – while the directional dialogue of the four-channel magnetic stereo mix is present on a two-channel LPCM English stereo track (an LPCM 2.0 Italian track is also included). Optional English subtitles are provided.

Carried over from the earlier Nouveaux Pictures Blu-ray is an audio commentary by film critics Kim Newman and Alan Jones who recall the EMI theatrical release (on a double bill with ZOLTAN, HOUND OF DRACULA) and how the film seemed to come out of nowhere to general audiences but Jones suggests that the Argento films in order of release do anticipate it with the supernatural elements of DEEP RED and the way in which SUSPIRIA is structured like a giallo. They compare the "horror musical" to the works of Powell & Pressberger, particularly THE RED SHOES, and its palette to the later eighties MTV look while also suggesting that Argento and Nicolodi as Italian intellectual left-wingers coming from wealth had a need to demonstrate their grasp of culture in the film's literary sources and references. "The Restoration Process" (57:03) is an interesting look at the 4K restoration process even though it spins the story that TLEFilms was sent a 4K Arriscan because the rights owners were reluctant to ship the negative out of Italy with no mention that the scan had been commissioned by another party. The featurette looks at a number of sequences playing the 4K squeezed full aperture raw scan, the Technovision 2.35:1 formatted version, and the final versions of the scenes to reveal the presence of tearing, negative shrinkage, sprocket damage, film cement stains, and finger prints as well as the differences between how the film looked as overlit on Eastmancolor stock before the Technicolor palette was digitally recreated (based on reference materials), stabilization was applied (being careful not to obliterate slight camera movements that might be mistaken as jitter), and other subtle adjustments.

"Argento Presents His SUSPIRIA" (27:14) is an interview conducted by Variety magazine's Nick Vivarelli covering the De Quincey source story, his search of Europe for witches, and his interest not in the witches of the countryside but the "gliteratti" witches of the city who pursue money and power, as well as the choice of Germany and Munich locations associated with Nazism. More interesting is his discussion of choosing Tovoli for the cinematographer after visiting the set of Antonioni's THE PASSENGER and their exploration of various film stocks and how they rendered various colors before settling on a very low sensitivity Eastmancolor stock and the Technicolor process. The remaining two extras are rather disappointing in that "SUSPIRIA Perspectives" (40:30) is a series of interviews with Australian genre academic Dr. Patricia MacCormack, filmmaker Norman J. Warren, and Simonetti which are all excerpted at length in "Fear at 400 Degrees: The Cine-Excess of SUSPIRIA" (34:57) with interstitial contextual comments by academic Xavier Mendik. MacCormack puts the film both in the context of the real life violence of Italy in the late sixties and early seventies with the Red Brigade and sympathies from the Italian south, students, and the working class, the predominantly industrial northern setting of gialli versus those set in the south and their use of superstition and the "lack of capital" breeding horror, as well as how SUSPIRIA was a bridge between the early Italian gothics of Riccardo Freda (THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK), Mario Bava (BLACK SUNDAY), and Antonio Margheriti (THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH) and the later neo-gothic horrors of Lucio Fulci (THE BEYOND). Warren discusses the influence of the film on his film TERROR, the impact of viewing the film and how it also separately inspired his colleagues, and the idea of structuring a film around a series of set pieces. Simonetti discusses his admiration of Argento from THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL onwards before their meeting, the founding of the group Goblin, and their collaboration on DEEP RED followed by SUSPIRIA before launching into a discussion of his own impressions of the film as a viewer and its influence. The "Fear at 400 Degrees" featurette should have been included with the "Perspectives" one just feeling like it was included to fill out the disc with more imagination and effort going into the crowdfunded 4K UltraHD Blu-ray that was recently released with a host of brand new extras on the Blu-ray copy while the UltraHD disc is identical to the Italian Blu-ray of the film was released by Videa which features both Italian and English audio tracks and subtitles. (Eric Cotenas)

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