I said it before (mainly in my glowing five-star review of the hallucinatory shocker "Suspiria"), but Dario Argento is my single favorite horror film director.Whereas some directors get caught up in social messages (*cough* George Romero * cough*) and others openly admit that the horror genre was not their preferred career choice but rather a viable option after their first scary flick proved to be a success (think John Carpenter and Wes Craven), Dario Argento is a horror film-maker through and through. Yes, his movies are very short on plot. Yes, some of the dialogue is downright painful to listen to. And yes, these are European horror films, which means that you MAY just have to read some subtitles to understand the questionable English coming out of the actors' mouths.
But when it comes to images, scenes, and characters that have the power to really stick in your mind, nobody can top Argento. Simply put, the man is a brilliant director. He knows how to use color, shading, and camera angles to imprint pictures into your cerebral cortex with the force of a ride in the electric chair. Case in point: murder scenes. There is nothing in a horror film quite like the Dario Argento murder scene. Whereas other directors before him left the worst stuff up to your imagination, Argento lingered and lingered on the carnage, spraying pools of red stuff out at the audience to deal with, the repeated stabbings and plentiful screaming giving the various disquieting shades of red and green on the screen an even more chilling tinge.
So here we are - another IHR induction. "Inferno" is the 1980 sequel to an earlier IHR induction, the aforementioned masterpiece "Suspiria." Not a sequel in the sense that it directly follows the story of "Suspiria"; rather, "Inferno" actually gives some background information on what were some incredibly shadowy mythos in the earlier film, and acts as the second part in what came to be known as Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy. For an indication of how well writing the eventual third movie went, again, this movie was released in 1980. "Mother of Tears," the third film in the series, came 27 YEARS LATER in 2007. As Tom Petty once said, the waiting is the hardest part...
The film opens with a voice-over explaining the history of the Three Mothers - three extremely powerful, evil witches who once ruled the world. The Mother of Sighs, the Mother of Tears, and the Mother of Darkness. We can surmise from this voice-over that the Mother of Sighs, a.k.a. Mater Suspiriorum, was the invisible villain during the horrific closing scenes of "Suspiria." As the camera pans out, we see a young woman (Irene Miracle) reading a book by an architect named Vorelli, and we, the audience, again surmise that the voice-over is acting as the text.
The voice-over continues telling us the mythology of the Three Mothers - the author of the book, as an architect, explains that the Mothers came to him, each demanding a house be built for them. Of course, the incredibly creepy dance academy in "Suspiria" was one of them. The other is in New York City. And the third is in Rome.
Well, as it turns out, the young woman reading this text believes that she is residing in the very same building that houses one of the Mothers - the Mother of Darkness, the youngest and cruelest of the sisters. As this long introductory segment continues, the young woman first writes a letter to her brother in Rome, then goes in search of the resting place of the Mother of Darkness within her apartment building. In one of the early harrowing, chilling sequences in this film, she finds herself trapped underwater with several rotting corpses before escaping to her apartment.
From here, the action switches to Rome. Mark Eliot (Leigh McCloskey) has just received the letter from his sister Rose - the young woman from the prologue. After noticing a mysterious but beautiful woman staring at him in his music class, Eliot runs off, dropping the letter behind, where a fellow music student named Sara (Eleonora Giorgi) picks up the letter and is very intrigued by the story of the Three Mothers. And hey, wouldn't you know it, one of those is right here in Rome...
With the letter acting as the impetus, "Inferno" begins happening. I can't really say that it unfolds, because as is customary with Dario Argento's films, nothing about the plot of "Inferno" unfolds. It's just THERE, for us to see, for us to wonder about, and for us to interpret in any way we see fit. All we need to know about the story of the film occurs within the opening voice-over, and given that our characters are up against such a powerful, ancient evil force, one can guess where this is headed. Bodies begin turning up. Sara is murdered in an absolute masterpiece of a sequence, combining fear, paranoia, darkness, and classical music, four elements which would later be explored in Argento's film "Opera." Meanwhile, a full continent away in New York City, Rose Eliot, whom we were led to believe was the heroine of the film, is also dispatched; the witch occupying her particular building seems to have truly awesome power, as she watches her apartment hallways turn to an ancient cobwebbed derelict in the moments before her death.
Another thing I loved about this movie is that while it answers some aspects of the questions we had about "Suspiria," it still leaves some of the big ones up to our imagination. For example, in the first murder sequence of "Suspiria," all we see of the murderer is a pair of arms and hands sporting very long, creepy fingernails; we see these same arms and hands in this film, telling us that the same murderer is present in both films. An assassin for the Three Mothers, perhaps? Of course, in "Mother of Tears" we would eventually see this character...and yeah, he was a big disappointment. Some things are just better left UNSAID, as they are here.
As the murder and mayhem of "Inferno" builds, the character of Mark Eliot - the brother of a murdered sister - is left to wrap up the plot. From here, "Inferno" becomes the story of following breadcrumbs leading to the Mother of Darkness herself, and it is also here where "Inferno" flounders a little. In some ways, "Inferno" is in fact superior to "Suspiria"; in its first three quarters, it's even more hallucinatory, bizarre, and unforgettable than the movie that's on pretty much every horror aficianado's top ten list. But in its closing thirty minutes, the momentum that the movie had built begins to lag; while McCloskey is a good actor, the character is not given much depth, and as we watch Mark dig further and further into the depths of the New York apartment building that houses an evil force a step below the devil himself, I found myself strangely detached from the action. And the ending? "Suspiria" had an ending that truly had the power to make you scream; "Inferno" features a denounment that is so abrupt that it seems as if Argento ran out of film.
It matters little. This is Dario Argento at the top of his game; after years of making gory murder mysteries (known to fans as "giallo" thrillers), "Suspiria" and "Inferno" were his long-awaited breakthroughs into supernatural horror. And man, do they ever deliver. It's undoubtedly a BIGGER film than "Suspiria"; it takes place over two continents, and features plenty of gore, location scenery and plot cogs on both sides. Also much like "Suspiria," it features outstanding use of music augmenting Argento's disquieting color palette, as Keith Emerson's piano chords resonate with a vengeance.
It is these same elements - the backgrounds, the music, the sound, and, of course, the trademark Argento kill scenes - that make "Inferno" one of the best movies to watch at this time of the year. 'Cus in case you didn't know, it's Halloween season, truly the best time of year for any horror fan. Sure, AMC MonsterFest isn't what it used to be - it seems that nowadays all the network is interested in showing is "Halloween 4" and "5" (which feel like the EXACT SAME DAMN MOVIE to me), along with "Pinata: Survival Island", on repeat. I managed to catch "Inferno" for the first time a few years back on, I believe, the 2003 edition of the annual horror-a-thon. I distinctly remember that year's Fest being incredible, with all of the big names (Freddy, Michael, Jason, etc.), but also plenty of more obscure and foreign horror flicks - this one included. For a Halloween horror fix, look no further. Of course, it's also one of the most underrated horror movies of the '80s and, of course, worthy of IHR induction.
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