My Life In Pictures DARIO Argento

Exploding on to the scene in the 1970s with a series of grisly murder mysteries punctuated by killer set-pieces, Dario Argento then made Suspiria, a supreme supernatural suspenser that is now a fixture on every Greatest Horror Movies Ever Made list. Ahead of a new season at the BFI Southbank, the Italian maestro talks Total Film through seven of his most magnificent movies. Be afraid, be very afraid...

- JAMIE GRAHAM

SUSPIRIA 1977

Argento embraces fairy tales and the fantastique with a vivid tale of an American ballet dancer attending a German academy run by witches.

‘After Deep Red [1975, marking the fourth giallo movie Argento had made in five years, starting with his debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage], I really wanted to change something. I wanted to give a twist to my storytelling. So I found myself looking at the horror movies that I used to watch when I was in high school in Paris and I used to go to the Cinémathèque Française to see all these antique horror movies with the display of shadows and lights. I really wanted that to be reflected in Suspiria. I really wanted the atmosphere, the sorcery and the witches to be reflected in this movie, which I wanted to be completely different from the other ones, but still with a Dario Argento feeling.

‘I wanted colours, gore and flamboyance – a magical acid trip. I love things on the border of reality and fantasy – the supernatural. Witches were something special. As a child, I would have liked, maybe one time, to meet a witch. I used to think my headmistress was a witch. It didn’t scare me. Witches are interesting…

‘The opening set-piece [Jessica Harper’s Suzy Bannion takes a hellish taxi ride through a rain-lashed forest to arrive at Freiburg’s ballet academy just as an elaborate double murder takes place] was not particularly hard for me to shoot, because I knew I wanted to shoot in the German Black Forest. So I went scouting for locations there. I was looking for the little villages, the little houses. So the set was there. I mean, I didn’t have to do anything special to the set because it was naturally there.