It's the most beautiful film I've ever laid eyes on, and also one of the most terrifying. Dario Argento's 1977 masterpiece Suspiria is a film that puts a chokehold on the senses. It then stabs your senses in the heart, wraps a cable around their throat, and proceeds to hang your senses from the ceiling. Okay, so I may have just given away one of the freakiest moments in the film for anyone who hasn't seen it, but I've always felt that's the takeaway. Even 40 years after it debuted, more than any other film, Suspiria just fucks with me.The plot is deceptively a simple one: a young American woman, Suzy Bannon (Jessica Harper), travels to Germany to study ballet at the Tanz Dance Academy. Slowly as her peers begin to die horrible deaths, she begins to realize that—SPOILER ALERT—the school is run by an evil coven of witches. No one should ever describe a murder as a thing of beauty, but the way in which Argento unfurls the aforementioned hanging and another brutal killing involving barbed wire is downright sublime.Read more on Noisey.
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