3. Suspiria (1977)
An American student called Suzy arrives at a prestigious dance school in Freiburg. However, she cannot get into the academy so she spends the night in town. Pat just got expelled from the academy and flees to her friend's house. During the night Pat is attacked and killed in a gruesome fashion. Her body smashes through a glass ceiling and her friend dies due to a massive shard of glass slicing her up. The next morning, Suzy heads to the academy where she meets the staff - Madame Blanc and Miss Tanner - and the students - Sarah and Olga. Suzy has already arranged to live off campus with Olga but after a bit of weirdness involving the school cook, she passes out and is placed in a dormitory bed. This is not what she wanted. She is made to drink a glass of wine everyday. There is fantastic maggot mayhem in the academy when the little blighters pour from the ceiling as the students are getting ready for dinner. Sarah is also staying in the dormitories and she forges an alliance with Suzy. While they go swimming, Sarah tells Suzy that Pat, before her death, was saying some pretty weird things. The two of them look for Pat's writing in her dorm, but it has been removed. Suzy is overcome by tiredness and falls into a sleep. Sarah is chased by persons unknown. She falls into a pit of barbwire and struggles in agony until some one cuts her throat. When Suzy wakes up, she is abruptly informed that Sarah has left the academy. Highly suspicious of the veracity of this event, Suzy does some snooping. She meets Dr Mandel - a psychologist and a friend of Sarah's. He tells her that that the school was founded by one Helena Markos - an evil Greek woman who practised witchcraft. He also tells her that the coven's health depends on keeping the queen alive. When Suzy returns to the dorm she discovers that all of the students have gone out for the night. She does some more snooping and finds the dance academy's staff mid witchcraft - doing a ritual to kill off Suzy. They don't know Suzy is there so she carries on with her sleuthing and runs into Helena Markos. Helena orders Sarah's corpse to kill Suzy. Suzy kills them both and the academy goes up in flames, with Suzy escaping intact. Suspiria is a relatively straight horror movie for Dario Argento. He is, more often than not, found paddling in Giallo waters. Suspiria showed the critics and his fans what heights of genius he could reach in the horror movie realm. The opening of the movie is one of the greatest ever sequences found in the horror genre. The rain, the garish colours, the pounding soundtrack by Goblin - the two girls' deaths are savage (Pat getting stabbed) and horrific (her friend having death by glass shards). The film is suspenseful and disturbing. From the beginning it is clear that the academy is not right and that Suzy is in danger, probably because like all good horror films, she engages in sleuthing to get to the heart of the sinister core. The film was shot so as to emphasise primary colours - particularly red - in order to create a nightmarish environment. It has a solid thumbs up from the film critic community - it is consistently placed very highly on critic's lists when it comes to naming the best horror films of all time. It is certainly a very unique film when it comes to vision and substance. It stands well apart from other horror movies due to Dario Argento's iconoclastic style which has rendered it a classic for the ages. Thank heavens a remake never got off the ground. You can't improve upon perfection.