DIRECTED BY: Fritz Lang/(version prepared by Giorgio Moroder)

FEATURING: Gustav Fröhlich, Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge

PLOT: Freder, son of the man who rules Metropolis, discovers the plight of the subterranean

workers who make the city run when he falls in love with a proletarian female preacher; his new lover is replaced by a robotic imposter who intends to lead the workers to ruin.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is a powerful candidate for the List, but Giorgio Moroder’s Metropolis isn’t.  Kino’s 2010 “Complete Metropolis” restoration is now the definitive version of the film; Moroder’s re-imagining, with it’s synth-pop soundtrack and vocal intrusions by 1980s rock acts like Loverboy, Bonnie Tyler and Pat Benetar, is a curiosity.

COMMENTS:  Set in a massive, mostly underground city that’s equal parts Futurist dreamscape and Babylonian pleasure garden, Metropolis is an unqualified, iconic Expressionist masterpiece, and if you want to turn down the sound and watch it while listening to Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga mp3s, that’s not going to destroy its visual splendor.  Whatever questionable choices “Flashdance… What a Feeling!” composer Giorgio Moroder may have made with the proto-techno soundtrack that he added to this restoration (more on that score later), this Metropolis looks like it’s been struck from a pristine print, and it’s as feverishly hallucinatory as any other version.  The decision to tint most of the scenes works wonderfully (and may even have reflected Lang’s original wishes; tinting was not at all uncommon in 1927).  The colorization is tasteful and intelligent, with scenes on the surface bathed in radiant sepia, while the underground sequences utilize shadowy shades of steel blue and grey.  This process retains the film’s monochromatic scale, simply shifting the palette towards the blue or the amber spectrum.  Moroder added additional color effects for a few scenes; some of the equipment in mad scientist Rotwang’s laboratory glows with electricity, and when he transforms his robot into the image of Maria, the automaton’s eyes shine with an inhuman, metallic blue glint.  Because some segments of Metropolis were lost, Moroder also incorporated stills and concept art sketches of the sprawling city into the film; they’re mostly inobtrusive, but they are included to bridge some of the gaps in the story (such as explaining what happens after Freder sends a worker to meet Josaphat, a subplot that simply disappears in earlier cuts).  The final non-musical change that Moroder made to Metropolis was to remove most of the intertitles and replace them with subtitles, a move that noticeably speeds up the action and is arguably an improvement.  So far, so good; all of Moroder’s alterations to the print were either neutral, or minor improvements.  But here’s where things get strange: the composer decided that what this dystopian class parable from the Weimar Republic really needed to heat it up was a disco beat and Hallmark-card lyrics, so he invited some of his pop star friends like Bonnie Tyler to sing over Lang’s story.  Despite the fine, reverent work he did on the restoration, his choice of collaborators call Moroder’s taste into serious question.  Did he really believe that the music of Billy Squier was going to endure through the ages?  Were Huey Lewis and the News unavailable?  To be fair, the incidental music is not all bad; sometimes it’s even clever (as when the robots first clumsy footfalls sound like she’s stepping on Herbie Hancock’s electric piano keyboard).  And, heard today, the post-Moog synthesizer effects produce an effect that’s at the same time futuristic and archaic, making the synth-pop an odd, accidentally anachronistic complement to Lang’s future-that-never-was city planning.  What better music to illustrate a cityscape where antique biplanes cruise the between massive Art Deco skyscrapers than soulless synthetic strings backed by heavy mechanical beats?  Still, the vocal interruptions, though short and far-between, are consistently unforgivable.  Jon Anderson’s “Cage of Freedom,”  supposedly the theme of the tyrannical Master of Metropolis, sounds like it would better accompany a training montage for a Rocky sequel.  Who doesn’t cringe when they hear Loverboy sing “now it’s hit the fan!” as the proles are revolting, and who doesn’t throw up just a little bit in their mouth when Pat Benetar croons “hearts catch fire, all the time” during the love scenes?  This twaddle flatly contradicts Lang’s visual poetry, and it’s a testament to the movie’s majesty that it actually shrugs off these desecration attempts rather easily.  Freder’s symbolic crucifixion on a clock, the golden robot enveloped by floating rings of light, the fever-dream sequence where Death leads the Seven Deadly Sins on parade while piping on a leg bone: these weird wonders persist and amaze us, despite the best efforts of a small army of 1980s pop-rock stars to tear them down.

Moroder’s vision was controversial at the time of its release, but if nothing else, it was the most complete and coherent version of Metropolis available since 1937.  Mordoer also deserves credit for keeping the film’s legend alive, and bringing it to a new generation of teenagers and college students who never would have dreamed of watching a silent film without a (then) hip soundtrack.  Even today, Moroder’s fast-paced pop version of the film may prove more palatable to silent film newbies than a purer presentation.  If you’re in the camp that’s willing to miss out on some great cinema simply because it’s silent, give Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis a chance.  You can always graduate to The Complete Metropolis later and play with the big boys.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie has a plot that defies common sense, but its very discontinuity is a strength. It makes ‘Metropolis’ hallucinatory–a nightmare without the reassurance of a steadying story line….in watching the Moroder version I enjoyed the tinting and felt that Lang’s vision was so powerful it swept aside the quibbles: It’s better to see this well-restored print with all the available footage than to stand entirely on principle.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1998)

Mad Love shifted the primary focus from cursed hands to mad scientists and unrequited love.  While that film has its admirers, it is not an example of Expressionist film. As compared to its counterpoints in painting and in music, Expressionism really only existed in the art form of silent film.  The Hands of Orlac conjures up the hands of Expressionist painter Egon Schiele and composer Arnold Schoenberg.

Conrad Veidt‘s performance can only be described as expressed inner rhythm.  His acting, like the greatest of silent actors, is a visceral dance.  Later, Veidt proved to be as naturalistic an actor as Hollywood required (i.e, his next to last role as the Nazi Major Strasser in Casablanca, ironically, one of several Nazi roles played by the staunchly anti-Nazi actor who had been targeted for assassination in Hitler’s Germany); still, Veidt is, justifiably, remembered  for his earlier, eminently stylized acting.  His Orlac is almost the text book essence of Weimar Cinema (even if it was an Austrian production) and justifies the actor’s claim that “I never got Caligari out of my system.”  The hallucinatory fever billows in the veins of the actor’s brow.

Alexandra Sorina’s performance is a suitable match to her co-star and their scenes together are, often, erotic, but in a way one might find eroticism in a canvas of Emil Nolde. Wiene’s style is far more subdued here than in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The exaggerated sets echo Orlac’s distorted vision and the film itself is ominously paced like a somnambulist walk.

Conrad Veidt gives a harrowing, anemic performance as Ivan the Terrible.  Angular and clammy, this segment is a paranoid fable which ends with a stark, memorable scene of the scourged despot forever turning the hour glass, convinced of his fate (death by poisoning).  Leni’s use of Eastern Orthodox iconography, inhabiting a shadowy world, is refreshingly and expressively idiosyncratic.  Helmar Lerski’s cinematography, which proved to be a considerable influence on Eistenstein, aggrandizes Ivan’s maniacal state.

The Jack the Ripper finale has been much discussed and is more a sketch than a climax. Werner Krauss plays the infamous Whitechapel serial killer who dominates the shadows, blade in hand, awaiting the poet and his lover.  This surreal whisper was originally intended to lead into a fourth narrative based off Vulpius’ “Rinaldo Rinaldini.”  Although the dreaded captain’s wax likeness can be seen in several scenes, budget restraints forced that narrative to be deleted.

After Waxworks, Hollywood beckoned.  Considering what was to follow in Hitler’s Germany, Leni’s departure from his homeland may have saved the Jewish artist, but, most cruelly, fate prematurely deprived him, and us, of his life and art.

Cyrus West is likened to the canary (think Tweety Bird) and his greedy relatives are the circling cats (think Sylvester), hungering for his fortune.  So incensed is the dying Cyrus that he dictates that his will be read twenty years after his death.  When it comes to money, relatives can wait.  They all show up on the twentieth anniversary of Cyrus’ passing.

To contemporary viewers, the relatives are a gang of archetypes: the bitchy, greedy matriarch Aunt Susan (Flora Finch), the sexy cousin Cecily (Gertrude Astor), the Harold Lloyd-like Paul (Creighton Hale), a seemingly insane, red-herring psychiatrist (Lucien Littlefield), death-warmed-over in the form of Mr. Crosby (Tully Marshall), and the virginal Annabel (Laura La Plante, who Whale later used in 1929′s Show Boat).  The gang is ushered in to the reading by a mysterious, somber servant named Mammy Pleasant (Martha Mattox).  The actors are a hoot, one and all, and superbly directed. Of course, there is a romance, but it is subtle and, in a rare example of silent cinema, not embarrassing to watch.

Dead bodies emerging from hidden panels, disappearing bodies, a lycanthropic hand snatching diamonds from the virgin’s neck, a cowering geek hiding under the bed and taking a peek at Cecily’s legs, a conniving aunt, and a villain (with a fake eye and saber tooth) who seems the role model for every Scooby Doo cartoon ever made all add up to something we have seen copied to death (pun intended) countless times since.  Leni’s imaginative style, however, takes precedence here.  Leni even has a good time playing with an intertitle (the film impressively keeps intertitles to a bare minimum).  The “Gosh, what a spooky house!” text shakes and shimmers as if it too is scared from being stuck in such a scary place!

The Cat and The Canary is played for laughs and it’s not surprising that Hollywood re-made it twice, first starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard in 1939 and, again in 1978 (the latter had an interesting all-star, if eccentric, cast directed by cult nasty fav Radly Metzger).  Both remakes are pleasant enough diversions, but Willard’s play becomes something unique and influential only in the hands of this German Expressionist artist. Leni’s original is finally getting its due and is part of Kino’s valuable American Silent Horror Collection (buy).

Set in 17th century England, Conrad Veidt (another Jewish German refugee) is Gwynplaine , the young son of a recently executed political revolutionary nobleman. Gwynplaine is kidnapped by gypsies and, as punishment for sins of the father, he is forever maimed when his kidnappers carve a hideous grin into his face and abandon him to the elements of a violent snow storm.  In a scene worthy of D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920), or William Beaudine’s grim Sparrows (1926), the child Gwynplaine comes upon the corpse of a frozen mother cradling her still living, blind infant daughter, Dea.  Gwynplaine takes the babe in arms and finds sanctuary for them both.

Years later, Gwynplaine is the freak star of a traveling sideshow.  The grown-up Dea (Mary Philbin of 1925′s Phantom of the Opera) is in love with Gwynplaine and is, incredibly, unaware of his deformity.  Eventually, Gwynplaine discovers his noble heritage and, now that the political tide has turned, he is tempted by rank and the possibility of a duchess for a wife in Olga Baclanova (of 1932′s Freaks).

If Veidt’s Gwynplaine seems eerily familiar to contemporary viewers, that may be because he was (reportedly) a considerable influence on The Joker as created by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson (although even the late Heath Ledger’s incarnation of the arch villain seems comparatively one-note when experiencing Veidt as the original role model). Like Lon Chaney (who was Veidt’s only real competition in the field), the actor willingly endured excruciating physical pain to realize his role.

Veidt is supported by an excellent cast.  Philbin evokes a vivid pathos as the loyal Dea (that pathos may have been a genuinely latent quality, given that she was, like Jackie Coogan, a young star who was victimized by mercenary parents who milked her for all she was worth).  Baclanova is also superb as the bewitching and genuine temptress who is erotically fascinated with the freak.  She nearly leads Gwynplaine astray in a smoldering (for its time), emotionally complex, and fetishistic scene which could have made Tod Browning smile.  Baclanova’s acting as the Duchess surpasses her later role for Browning in Freaks, and we can readily identify with Gwynplaine’s conflict of loyalty.

Like a true expressionist master, Leni utilizes multifarious compositions to convey human angst, pity, fear, torture, eroticism, and aspiration.  The film’s only real flaw is the studio-mandated happy ending, which does not entirely convince.  Amazingly, this was the only compromise made by Leni; otherwise, The Man Who Laughs may be the most genuinely authentic German Expressionist film made in the good old U.S.A.  It often seems like a melodramatic Rafael Sabatini tale filtered through an expressionist lens.  It is a psychologically interior film, simultaneously unsettling and mesmerizing.  The history of essential silent cinema cannot be discussed without its inclusion.

DIRECTED BY: Dario Argento

FEATURING: Jessica Harper, Joan Bennet, Allida Valli, Stefania Casini

PLOT: Suzy, an American ballet student, is accepted to a German dance academy, but when she arrives there one stormy night she is denied entrance and watches as a young woman flees the school and runs into the forest.  The next day she returns and is admitted to the academy with apologies, but she soon falls ill and becomes too weak to practice with the other students.  After a series of bizarre occurrences and disappearances, Suzy becomes convinced that the faculty and staff of the academy are not who they pretend to be.

BACKGROUND:

• Suspiria (concerning the “Mother of Sighs”) is the first and most notable of Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy.  Subsequent installments are Inferno (1980, about the “Mother of Darkness”) and Mother of Tears (2007).  The idea of the Three Mothers came from opium-addicted English writer Thomas de Quincey, who invented a myth of three witches analogous to the three Fates in his collection of fantastical essays Suspiria de Profundis (“suspiria” is Latin for “sighs”).
• Argento originally wanted the story to feature a school of girls in the 8-10 year age range, but producers balked at the idea of showing gruesome murders of children.  Although he cast adults to play the roles, Argento left in some childlike dialogue, and actually raised the doorknobs on the set so that the actress’ would have to reach up to turn them, as if they were children.
• Argento has said that the color scheme for Suspiria was inspired by Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
• In an early scene in the taxicab Argento’s scowling face can be seen momentarily reflected in the glass that separates the driver and the passenger; the effect is nearly subliminal.
• Suspiria was one of the last films made using the Technicolor process.
• Argento co-composed the remarkable soundtrack, performed by the Italian progressive rock group Goblin.
• Rumors of a remake have been circulating for years.  A project entitled Suspiria is currently listed as “in development” on the IMDB, scheduled for a 2012 release. There are reports that Italian producer Marco Morabito has confirmed that David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) will direct.  Earlier rumors speculated that Natalie Portman would play the lead.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Isolating a single indelible image in the movie is an impossible task; Suspiria shapes its surreality from the play of supersaturated colors on the baroque walls of the dance academy, and from its impossible, unnatural lighting schemes.  The colors as a whole are indelible; there are perhaps a dozen impossibly lit individual shots (scenes that look as if they were inked by a demented gnome) that together form an impression of a world gone luminescently awry.  The image of Suzy posed in front on a neon peacock as she enters the witch’s chamber, with a background column glowing an improbable scarlet from an unseen light source, is as a representative an image as any.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Although there are plenty of “weird” (in the sense of “uncanny” or

Original international trailer for Suspiria

“occult”) occurrences in Suspiria—such as the rain of maggots—it’s the stylized sensual elements, the brilliantly unreal cinematography and the relentless unnerving score, that catapult the movie out of the realm of ordinary supernatural horror and land it in its own unique fairy tale nightmare realm.

COMMENTS: Suspiria is more an assault on the senses than a narrative; it’s Gothic horror atmosphere, squared.  The occult script is somewhere between serviceable and average.  Some sequences serve little purpose other than to fill up time and give the audience a breather between the intense set pieces.  A potential love interest for Suzy is introduced, with no follow up.  The matrons who run the academy drug the aspiring ballerina at night, but it’s never clear precisely why (other than to lend a drugged, dreamlike feel to the events that follow).  One short small scene, easily missed anyway, that provides the reason behind the murder of the blind piano player, was apparently snipped from early US prints, making his slaying seem gratuitous and unmotivated.  The movie is not as weirdly senseless and thoroughly illogical as some contemporary critics initially accused it of being; but, in the best tradition of the European fantastique, it values mood and emotional effect over plotting.  If I were to lay out the story of Suspiria without the accompanying sound and visuals, it would seem simplistic and insubstantial; add in the music and photography, which converge with the film’s dark themes in a miraculous way, and the movie leaps rungs from an ordinary horror into something unforgettable.

The relentless, pounding, yowling score (by the band Goblin) is our almost constant companion in the film, and a huge part of its success.  The main theme is childishly simple, a music box fugue of fourteen repeating notes which are gradually embellished with tribal percussion; the simple progression is then layered unpredictably with mutated vocals and inhuman, hellish synthesizer effects.  Sighs and hisses alternate on the soundtrack with silences that become sinister because we are anticipating the next aural onslaught.  The noise wells up at the viewer from some crack in the earth below which a demon is throwing a dance party in celebration of the onscreen victim’s imminent demise.  Perhaps the odd spotlights of purple and green and blue and orange that appear out of nowhere, the walls that glow blood red, and the lightning that flashes lavender are just the party lights  from the same fiendish festival streaming through that same crack into our world.  Regardless, the combination of the pulsing score and the parade of unearthly color combines to create the nightmarish space that is uniquely Suspiria.

The quiet moments of the movie can be the most disquieting; that’s when Argento’s chill atmosphere gets its chance to seep into your bones.  The movie begins by touching base with reality.  Over dark credits, a narrator explains that Suzy Bannion is traveling to the Academy of Freibourg to attend the dance school, but his “normal” voice is already fading out at the end of his sentence, overwhelmed by Goblin’s screeching.  We see a shot of an ordinary arrival and departure board at the airport, but as soon as the camera pans away we notice that the faces of the travelers are bathed in an unnatural, sickly pink glow from some neon source just out of frame.  Suzy (Jessica Harper, who has a childish prettiness and a barely pubescent ballerina’s build) looks concerned as she totes her luggage; the music box theme plays in tiny snatches, blocking out the sound of the airport’s announcements, as if she is hearing it in her mind.  We see the pistons that operates the airport’s sliding glass door sliding like knives, and we’re suddenly outside in a downpour; the wind assaults Suzy’s hair and Goblin cranks up the volume.  Suzy manages to hail a cab, but the world around the young American is more foreign than Germany.  Everything is bathed in strange light; the taxi drives her past fountains whose waters spout green, yellow and purple water.  The red droplets that splash past her window look like blood; and her wet face, when it’s hit by the filtered red light, looks covered in blood, too.  Her efforts at small talk with the driver are met with indifference; subliminally, a scowling face flashes on the glass that divides the cabbie and passenger. The taxi’s headlights knife through a black forest of tall, narrow trees to he dance academy, an imposing art deco edifice gilt in gold, where she sees one of her fellow students fleeing the school.  In five minutes, Suzy has traveled from the normality of the life she once lived into an ominous new world. Almost nothing has happened, but the feeling of dread is so thick it’s almost visible as a cloud.

The killings, though heart-pounding, almost feel like a relief from the oppressive atmosphere: it’s a comfort to know that there’s a reason to fear.  There are only three murders in the movie, though they’re weighty enough that we end up thinking we see a lot more carnage than we actually do.  The first assault, which caps the intense opening 15 minutes, is considered one of the most terrifying kills in horror movie history (it ranked #24 on Bravo’s “100 scariest movie moments” list).  With its closeup of a knife slicing into a beating heart, no gorehound can complain it’s not explicit enough.  The second murder, involving a blind man hearing fluttering wings while transversing an empty Gothic square with his guide dog in the middle of the night, is equally atmospheric and perhaps even more memorable.  When Suzy’s nosy school chum flees unseen presences in her sheer white nightgown and lands in a conveniently placed pit full of razor wire, the homicides are complete.  Each one of the trio stands out in the memory as an expertly realized shock set piece, but although the kills are sadistic and extreme, Argento shows a paradoxical restraint and taste in limiting himself to these three episodes: there’s just enough grue to satisfy the audience’s bloodlust, but not so much that the killings blur together or stroke the slasher mentality.  The slayings are almost an interruption to the far more disturbing mysteries Suspiria is plumbing in its quieter moments; they’re conventional scares that help the viewer put a face (of sorts) to the otherworldly dread.

Critics tend to point out the fairy tale structure of Suspiria: the ingenue ballerina is a Gretel tricked into a gingerbread house where a hungry witch awaits her.  That’s a rich symbolic vein, but often overlooked is the mythological motif of the journey into the labyrinth.  Suspiria invokes the name M.C. Escher, the artist of labyrinths, impossible geometries and mental paradoxes (at one point the famous Escher print where birds turn into fish serves as wallpaper, and the academy itself is located on “Escherstrasse”).  Suzy embarks on two significant journeys in the film: one near the beginning where she travels from the outside world (the airport) to a hermetic interior world (the academy); at the end of the movie she takes another trip from her dorm room through a maze of corridors to a secret room deep at the core of the labyrinth  where evil awaits.  Both these journeys are filled with dread and foreshadowing of the horrible discoveries that await.  The action in Suspiria takes place almost entirely in enclosed spaces, in rooms and hallways.  (In dramatic contrast, the blind man’s killing at the midpoint of the film takes place in a magnificently open public square; but the heroine isn’t with him at the time).  Suzy rarely journeys outside the walls of the academy (the staff strongly discourages such transgressions by its students); the only scene she acts in the out in the open air and natural sunlight is purely expository, and in fact the most cinematically conventional sequence of the movie.  Suspiria depends on its interiors, the carefully controlled and decorated environments dreamt up by Argento.  This intense internalization suggests a drama inside the mind of the heroine.  When Suzy takes her final journey near the film’s end, moving from the exterior rooms inward to through a maze of secret windowless rooms and corridors, the suggestion is she’s traveling inward to confront a hidden malignancy.

The trip begins with Suzy wandering out of her room, following the memory of the footsteps she hears at night.  She opens many doors, passes through many corridors, sneaks past many guardians (butcher knife wielding cooks and an ogreish Romanian handyman).  She finds herself in the odd drawing room where a mural of an Arabian skyline full of arches and winding stairs, a lost city, is sketched on the wall; brilliant multicolored irises of blue, yellow and red are painted on top.  Suzy finds a secret door and suddenly she’s in another corridor lined with blue velvet drapes; behind these she finds yet another winding hallway with occult symbols in gold leaf on the walls. There is silence, then the soft tinkling theme, then demonic whispering.  She goes deeper and deeper, penetrating the labyrinth, and eventually finds her way into the very center, where she stumbles upon the diseased core of evil at the heart of the academy.  Her journey has taken ten minutes of screen time; but she has walked from reality to the maw of Hell itself.  Almost nothing has happened, in a plot sense, and yet these are ten of the most mysterious and frightening minutes ever put on film.  The fear engendered by this journey eclipses the finale that occurs when Suzy confronts the ancient undead witch Helena Marcos.

The ending of Suspiria is an anticlimax, one of the few complaints that hold the film back from being an undisputed masterpiece.  (Other complaints involve the acting, which is a valid criticism but not a fatal one, and the fact that the loosely handled plot points don’t always add up, which may not count as a negative if you’re looking for a weird outing).  But the raw visceral power of the film is difficult to deny; Goblin’s pulsating drums and chants sweep you away on waves of sound into a nightmare.  Argento caught lightning in a bottle with this movie; the visuals, music, and dark psychology merge unforgettably, and he never managed to successfully recreate this magical atmosphere in subsequent attempts.  But Suspiria remains as the apex of Seventies Eurohorror and as one of the classic examples of the mysterious illogical power of the fantastique.

Eric Gabbard’s dissenting opinion: I had a hunch 366 would put Suspiria into his List of the 366 Weirdest Movies of All Time. Quite frankly, I was hoping I was wrong. At the risk of alienating Argento fans and initiating a slew of hate-filled comments, I have to say Suspiria and Dario Argento in general are vastly overrated. I know, I know… Argento is a horror icon and Suspiria is a masterpiece in horror cinema… blah, blah, blah. For the life of me I cannot figure out why! I’ve watched the movie three times now, trying to force myself into appreciating its godlike status. Well, its three strikes and you’re out at the old (horror) ballgame.

Before I begin to trash the film, I’ll tell you what I do like about it, because it isn’t all bad. First and foremost, it has one of the best musical scores ever put to film. The Goblin (credited here as “the Goblins”) soundtrack is fantastic! The eerie, relentless pounding and shrieks the band provides is the weirdest element of this film. The music is so effective that I think many people remember this film as being “scary” just because of it. It is demonic-sounding music, made much more frightening when a whispered chant of “WITCH” echoes through the speakers.

As far as Argento’s directorial talent is concerned, Suspiria is by far the most accomplished and taut work he has done. I have not seen any of his more recent pictures, but of his older “classics” I have seen five. Suspiria is the most polished and aesthetically pleasing. Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) has more going for it in the weirdness realm, but I didn’t care for that movie either.

The first sequence depicting a victim falling through a stained-glass ceiling with an abrupt hanging by telephone wire is a well-executed execution. The various Art Deco sets are a thrilling look at one of art history’s most visually arresting architectural periods. (I would personally decorate my entire home in the Art Deco style if I could). Lastly, Argento’s use of colored lighting is a nice achievement: he drenched many scenes in red and shoots one particularly innovative scene through a light bulb submerged in green. However, I must point out Mario Bava’s later color films such as Blood and Black Lace (1964) and Kill Baby, Kill (1966) came first and looked just as lush, if not more so.

Now, please hear me out as to why Suspiria does not deserve its praise and cult following. The acting is atrocious in many scenes. Sometimes bad acting works in favor of horror films by pushing it a campy or weird direction; here, it is just distracting. Jessica Harper, who plays the main character Suzy Bannion, is obviously trying hard to be convincing, but more often than not she is just ridiculous. Case in point is her first dance practice. She has just been blinded (cursed?) by a shiny object, and at first it makes her head jolt around awkwardly. Then she takes to feeling ill. She tells her dance instructors that she feels too weak to perform. Yet, those witches insist. So the stilted, feverish dance transpires and the bad acting comes through in her body language. Amazingly, she retains her balletic pirouette stance during this shoddy performance. The other actors give equally second-rate performances, and they all seem like they are trying their damndest not to stumble over the English language. In later scenes it drove me crazy when a few of the cast said the word “occult” as if it were two separate words (Ock-Cult).

Finally, I’ll pick on what makes Suspiria truly awful: the weak scare tactics involved. Good horror movies are remembered for inventive creepiness, the ability to make the audience jump or cringe, or for evoking an “oh my God” response when displaying physical or psychological evil. Many horror films from the 1970’s were excellent examples of this. Vintage Universal Studios monster movies exemplified what horror films should be, and their British equivalent, Hammer Studios, picked up where Universal left off. Italian giallo films, which originated with Bava, had an artful flair that gave birth to more gory exercises, eventually evolving into Euro-trash horror. Suspiria has nothing relevant to offer and Argento apparently never bothered to take cues from what was good about previous classic horror films that came beforehand. I’ll offer some examples of his folly: Maggots raining from the ceiling; gross for sure, but rather boring (at least until I heard a character off screen amusingly shouting “one got in my mouth!”). The mysterious headmistress of the dance academy, first seen behind a red curtain, sleeping. The silhouetted figure does seem a bit ominous behind that curtain until Argento decides to focus on… her evil sounding snore. “Listen to how she wheezes!” A death scene where a character inadvertently falls into a room full of barbed wire—no wait, it’s not barbed wire after all, it’s just plain old wire! She looks as if she is writhing in a mass of stretched-out Slinkys.  Oh, and there is the ever-present cliché bat scene.  It is slightly more convincing than the one in the (superior) The Abominable Dr. Phibes, but only because I couldn’t see the wire.

The logic to parts of the story is also baffling.  Suzy and her roommate try to solve the mystery of where the coven of witches (I mean, dance instructors) go at night by listening to their footsteps.  Just follow them!  If they are that curious I’m sure they could attempt some sneakiness and trail them.

So as you can see, I am not a fan of this movie.  These are just opinions and I’m fully aware that I’m not going to change the minds of fervent Argento followers; I just needed to vent because I feel foolish giving this movie three separate viewings looking for justification for its greatness. Once should have been enough to decide I wasn’t going to find any.  I think I do want to own that soundtrack though.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a horror movie that is a horror of a movie, where no one or nothing makes sense: not one plot element, psychological reaction, minor character, piece of dialogue, or ambiance.”–John Simon, New York Magazine (contemporaneous)

“Mr. Argento’s methods make potentially stomach-turning material more interesting than it ought to be. Shooting on bold, very fake-looking sets, he uses bright primary colors and stark lines to create a campy, surreal atmosphere, and his distorted camera angles and crazy lighting turn out to be much more memorable than the carnage.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Argento’s deliriously artificial horror film owes as much to Georges Méliès and German Expressionism (specifically The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) as it does to Jean Cocteau and Grimm fairy tales.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Suspiria (1977)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Dario Argento’s Suspiria: A Visual and Aural Masterwork – an excellent essay full of background information on Suspiria by J. Rhodes, written for an Indiana public television station

Edgar Wright on “Suspiria – International Version” – director Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) analyzes Suspiria‘s European trailer for Trailers from Hell

The “mother” of all horror movies: Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) – academic article on the film by Linda Schulte-Sasse of Macalester College discussing the film’s “gothic spaces,” the movie’s inverted relationship to Disney, and (less convincingly) it’s references to Nazism

The Buried Pleasures of Suspiria – Tim Lucas highlights a few almost subliminal images from the film, along with hidden references to earlier Argento movies

DVD INFO:  Suspiria has had a long life on home video and has gone through many incarnations.  The single disc edition released by Anchor Bay in 2001 (buy) contains only TV and radio spots, a “Suspiria” music video by a group called “Daemonia,” talent bios and a posters and stills gallery. They also released a 3 disc special edition (buy) containing with all the original featurettes plus a full-disc “25th Anniversary” documentary collecting interviews with director Argento, star Harper, Goblin, and many other cast and crew members; the third disc was a CD of the original Goblin score. In 2007 Blue Underground obtained the rights and released the current 2-disc edition (buy), which is equivalent to the Anchor Bay 3 disc special edition, minus the Goblin soundtrack. The import soundtrack can be purchased separately (buy soundtrack) but is an out-of-print collectible and therefore a bit pricey; if you want the music, looking for a used copy of the 3-disc edition may be your best bet.

Due to a yellowish cast on the print, Word on the web is to stay away from the 2007 “remastered” DVD issued by the Italian outfit CDE (visit Land of Whimsy to see comparative stills of the two prints).

[This movie was nominated for review by reader “Ropin’ Rodeo Nate,” who said “There are a lot of weird Italian horror movies that end up seeming kind of surreal (Pieces, The Beyond, Zombi 2) but Suspiria is the really notable one.”  Suggest a weird movie of your own here.]

DIRECTED BY: Edgar G. Ulmer

FEATURING: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi

PLOT: A young couple find themselves caught between the machinations of a doctor bent on

revenge and a mad engineer in the latter’s Art Deco mansion, built on the graves of the soldiers he sold out in a World War I battle.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  The Black Cat has the cadence of a nightmare.  Its shadows haunt the mind long after the DVD clatters out of the tray. Still, as impressive as the movie’s evocation of corruption masked by civility is, it’s highly creepy but only mildly weird; it remains to be seen whether it’s eccentric excellence will overcome it’s somewhat suspect surreality and catapult it onto the List.

COMMENTS:  Today, The Black Cat looks like a cult film.  In the popular memory it’s almost never mentioned alongside the Universal horror classics Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1932), and The Wolf Man (1941), but “those in the know” sing its praises to the uninitiated: The Black Cat is a forgotten Expressionist classic, too cool for the masses, a film that had to be resurrected from oblivion by the cinematic savants at Cahiers du Cinema who recognized its neglected genius.  Truth be told, however, The Black Cat, which teamed up terror titans Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff for the first time, was a huge box office hit in 1934.  Despite reviews from The New York Times, Variety, and Time that ranged from dismissive to near-scathing, the film was a blockbuster, Universal’s highest-grossing release of the year.  Through modern eyes—with its daring pre-code perversity and its disjointed, dreamlike rhythms—The Black Cat looks like an ahead-of-its-time oddity we assume musty old timers would have misunderstood, but perhaps audiences in 1934 were hipper than we give them credit for.

At the time, the two rising horror stars were the main draw, and they acquit themselves admirably.  Returning to wreak revenge on the man who wronged him after spending 15 years in a WWI prisoner-of-war camp, Lugosi’s Dr. Vitus Werdegast makes an unlikely, suspect hero.  He’s a raw and damaged bundle of obsessions and phobias hidden underneath a suave, aristocratic exterior and filtered through a thick Hungarian accent.  Lugosi has his impressive moments, as when he loses his mind (and, temporarily, his grasp of the English language) in the film’s startling climax, but Karloff outshines him, turning in one of his finest performances as villainous architect Hjalmar Poelzig.  Initially glimpsed as a menacing shadow rising mechanically from his bed, when he steps into the light we see a frowning, grim faced man with a diabolically angular haircut, draped in black robes.  Karloff’s every motion is cold and calculated, detached and almost inhuman: he hangs back, animated only by the occasional spasm of evil (as when he reveals his hidden lust for the heroine by thrusting forth his hand and tightly gripping a nude figurine in the foreground while watching her kiss her husband).

Vitus and Poelzig play a cat-and-mouse game, dramatically demonstrated in an oddly conceived chess match for the soul of the heroine.  The backdrop before which they fence—Poelzig’s gleaming Bauhaus mansion, full of odd angles, deep shadows, and hidden rooms, including one with twisted crosses and jutting angular pillars before which he conducts his rites dedicated to Lucifer—lends their jousting an aura of  strangeness.  Karloff’s haircut is almost an Expressionist set of its own.  There’s no literary connection to Edgar Allan Poe’s psychological horror story “The Black Cat,” but the beautiful, flitting imagery and tone of repressed evil evokes Poe’s opiated style, and there is a literal black cat who pops up inexplicably on occasion, almost as an afterthought, to terrify the phobic Lugosi.

The Black Cat is full of arresting images: corpses preserved and encased in glass boxes, Lugosi recoiling before the giant shadow of the black cat, Karloff conducting a Black Mass.  The plot, on the other hand, is fragmented; it lurches forward without clear explanation  (the company hardly reacts when Lugosi launches a conveniently placed throwing knife at the pesky feline; the unexplained swoon of a female Satanist allows Lugosi to turn the tables on Karloff).   At one point Poelzig asks Vitus, “of what use are all these melodramatic gestures?,” a question he could well address to the movie itself.  The answer, of course, is to provide pure atmosphere: an atmosphere of psychic repression and elegant perversity, full of hints of necrophilia, sex slavery, incest, mass murder, and other European decadences.  The combination of powerful images and loose narrative connections gives the film a choppy, nightmarish feel that works even better in the memory than it does while you are watching it, and accounts for the weird feeling The Black Cat generates in susceptible viewers.

Director Edgar G. Ulmer apprenticed under F.W. Murnau and worked as an uncredited set designer for Fritz Lang on Metropolis, among other projects.  Set to be a big name helmer after the success of The Black Cat, rumor has it that Ulmer indulged in an affair with the wife of a powerful Universal producer and was exiled to the poverty row studio PRC.  There, he turned out workmanlike B-movies with titles like Girls in Chains and Isle of Forgotten Sins before creating another minor classic, the grimy and effective low-budget noir Detour (1945).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…nutty, nightmarish melange… a crepehanger’s ball.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (retrospective)

For another opinion and further background on the film, see Alfred Eaker’s Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat.

FEATURING: Brigitte Helm, Gustav Fröhlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Alfred Abel

PLOT: The futuristic city of Metropolis is divided into a wealthy, hedonistic, and patriarchal

above-ground, and the beaten-down workers who serve them below.  When the son of the city’s leader falls in love with a revolutionary worker, a chain of events is set in motion that ultimately sways the balance of power.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: While its story is standard allegorical fare and the performances are often melodramatic, the sheer inventiveness and visual splendor of Metropolis warrants its status as quintessential science fiction.  It set the standard for a host of weird films that came after it and has several iconically bizarre scenes and characters.  Taking into account its importance in film history, it is certainly worthy of the Weird Movie List.

COMMENTS: In a futuristic society functioning solely on a complex network of machines, the workers are beaten down to the point of exhausted submission, while the leaders squander their riches on pleasures of the flesh.  Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), the son of the “Master of Metropolis” Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), leaves the pleasure garden cultivated for the spoiled sons of the elite and discovers the horrific conditions threatening his subterranean “brothers and sisters” who operate the machines.  His instant fairytale ardor for the saintly revolutionary Maria (Brigitte Helm) encourages him to become the prophesied Mediator, a man who will act as the “heart” between the brain above and the hands below.  When Joh Fredersen fears a workers’ rebellion, he enlists mad scientist and former romantic rival Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) to disguise his newly-fashioned robot into a replica of Maria, so that the automaton can destroy their faith in a mediator.

Settling into my usual stage-right balcony seat at Cambridge’s historic Brattle Theatre, I felt privileged to see such a landmark early film on a big screen, and in its complete form, no less!  An introductory title card explained that the 30 minutes or so of missing footage found in a Buenos Aires museum were shot on 16 mm and would appear in different format than the rest of the remastered film.  The few scenes still unaccounted for would be described in similar title cards.  As the music swelled over a series of pumping pistons and grinding machinery, I was once again whisked away into the simultaneously dark and resplendent world of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

The new footage details much of the subplot involving the “Thin Man”, a devious fellow hired by Joh Fredersen to spy on his son.  In the prior version of the film he was a forgettable, barely relevant character, relegated primarily to expository title cards for his missing scenes.  Now he is integral to the stories of the stalwart Josophat (Freder’s assistant) and Georgy/11811, a worker who trades places with Freder.  One of the most impressive new scenes is a montage of Yoshiwara, the city’s pleasure district, in which Georgy traipses about the brightly-lit saloons with pearl-draped multi-ethnic women.  It’s a visually memorable scene with several shots merged together in a mosaic to capture the Las Vegas-like over-saturation of the place.

Unfortunately the new footage was not remastered before theater release, and while I appreciate the speed with which it was put together, I did bemoan the grainy, darkened quality of the restored scenes.  The main advantage is that it makes them noticeable so any viewer can ascertain what was missing from the more familiar version.  It’s also lamentable that the film was shown in a digital presentation, but I’m not sure if that applies to all theater screenings or just the Brattle’s.  All told these are minor complaints, and the overall effect of seeing a visionary classic in its near-complete form (about 5 minutes are still lost) is breathtaking on a big screen and required viewing for any fan of science-fiction, silent film, or just great movies in general.

Riddled with shifting loyalties and a large number of characters, Metropolis spreads its complex narrative across two and a half hours of ornate sets and meticulously-planned shots.  The lively orchestral and onomatopoetic score captures the mood of each moment perfectly, magnifying the enthusiastic performances.  Helm is mesmerizing in her dual role as Maria and her robotic doppelganger: alternately a glass-eyed saint and twitchy, devilish rabble-rouser.  Klein-Rogge is the other standout as the manic inventor Rotwang, twisting his metal hand into a claw and arching his eyebrows with mad fervor as he slithers around catacombs and dingy laboratories.

It could benefit from better pacing and a more organized plot structure, and the added scenes don’t help the already dragging and plot-holed story, but the sheer wonder and imagination with which Metropolis is filmed combine with intense performances and a heartfelt message to establish it as a true masterpiece of filmmaking.  Now that it is available in its most complete form, its weird visuals and ambitious story can be fully appreciated for all their muddled religious iconography, forward-thinking mechanics, impressive effects, and allegorical implications.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…adds even more depth to a delirious, dreamlike class parable whose dystopia still feels exhilaratingly modern.”–David Fear, Time Out New York (restored version)

DIRECTED BY: Henry Selick

FEATURING: Voices of Chris Sarandon, Danny Elfman, Catherine O’Hara, Ken Page

PLOT: Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloweentown, discovers Christmas and tries

to recreate it, with ghoulish results.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: As a children’s film, The Nightmare Before Christmas has a high hurdle to overcome.  Since it’s aimed at kids, the movie is permitted to indulge in imagination and fantasy, so long as it uses a conventional story framework and takes a stab at conveying a useful moral lesson.  Nightmare has a great, morbid motivating idea and is a triumph of macabre art design, but at heart it doesn’t stray very far from the childrens’ film format.  If it’s eventually to be counted amongst the weird, it will be solely for its incidentals and visuals.

COMMENTS:  The opening song introduces us to the ghastly denizens of Halloweentown, including the expected assortment of witches, vampires and ghosts, but also a creature with black and white striped snakes for fingers, the “clown with the tearaway face,” and a two-faced mayor with a spinning top for a head and a freakishly phallic stovepipe hat.  This legion of scary weirdos are ruled over by Jack Skellington, an elegant but spindly skeleton in a pinstripe suit.  A grim gray pallor hangs over the town, which features an Expressionist pumpkin patch/boneyard with slanted tombstones and a curlicue hill permanently posed before a giant yellow moon.  Bored with the repetitive routine of  Halloween, Skellington seeks new vistas and finds one when he stumbles onto Christmastown, an eye-popping festival of lights and toys set among blinding white snowbanks ruled over by a jolly fat man; the town provides the perfect visual and spiritual contrast to gloomy Halloweentown.  A holiday architect looking for a new challenge, Jack decides to “take over” Christmas (incidentally kidnapping Santa Claus).  After futile attempts to ferret out the meaning of Christmas by dissecting teddy bears and placing crushed ornaments in boiling beakers, Skellington hatches a plan to pose as Kris Kringle and deliver toys himself, which leads to the film’s keystone sequence: a horrific Christmas Eve sleigh ride through a doomed village, where the Santa-suited skeleton leaves ghoulishly inappropriate gifts for Christmastown’s tots, including a severed head and a tannenbaum-swallowing snake.  It all ends in disaster, as Jack, who began with the best of intentions, realizes that his amateur staging of Christmas was a Nightmare and that he has to set things right and reaffirm his devotion to the Satanic rites of All Hallow’s Eve.  The moral seems to be, attempts to understand other cultures are doomed to failure; stick to your own kind.

The character designs and intricate, almost hidden gruesome details (like the skeletal Halloween cock that crows the dawn) are the triumph of Nightmare.  With a couple of exceptions—the bubbly, Broadwayesque “What’s This?” when bemused Jack first discovers Christmastown (“There’s children throwing snowballs instead of throwing heads/They’re busy building toys and absolutely no one’s dead!”) and a deviant number sung by three mischievous trick or treaters who plan to kidnap “Sandy Claws” (“Kidnap the Sandy Claws, throw him in a box/Bury him for ninety years, then see if he talks”)—Danny Elfman’s songs are flat and unmemorable, advancing the plot but not thrilling the ear.  The story is also exceedingly thin, even at its trim running time of under 80 minutes.  The original concept came from a Burton parody of Clement Moore’s “Twas the Night Before Christmas;” to pad out the running time, a romantic subplot and an antagonist were added.  The love interest is Sally, a stitched-together female Frankenstein forever losing her limbs.  She’s constantly scheming to escape her creator, a duck-billed mad scientist with a detachable brainpan who wants to keep her locked in his castle, and she acts as a cautionary voice for Jack, trying to warn him off his insane Yuletide scheme.  There’s no spark to their relationship, though, and though their romantic ending is pretty, it’s also pretty meaningless in story terms.  The villain, Oogie Boogie the Boogeyman, is another wonderful character in search of a plot function.  A burlap sack stuffed with creepy crawlies, gruff Ken Page gives him a 1920s boogie-woogie singer’s voice, and he makes a hell of a hellish impression.  But he’s introduced late and has no real motivation: it’s unclear why he thinks that bumping off Santa Claus will help him unseat Skellington as king of Halloweentown.  He pads the film, but his main purposes are to set up an unnecessary, anticlimactic action sequence for the finale, and (more importantly) to provide Selick the opportunity to build another magical set.  And Oogie’s lair is it’s own freaky, fun world: his hideout is casino themed, with living gunfighter slot machines and worms crawling through the pips of dice, and it’s bathed UV lights to give the puppets an eerie glow.  Though the script could have done much more to make him a meaningful antagonist, the awesome visuals this boogeyman inspires are reason enough for him to take up space in Nightmare‘s world.  The entire story takes a back seat to the cute, Gothic animation, so why should Sally and Oogie Boogie be any different?

The idea for Nightmare was originally sketched out by Tim Burton at Disney Studios, before they fired him for “wasting company resources” by making Frankenweenie.  After the director found success outside the Magic Kingdom, Disney was willing to work with him again, and he served as Nightmare‘s producer and even got his name in the title.  In a case of history repeating itself, the studio again found the finished work too morbid and were afraid it would frighten young children, so they released it under their Touchstone subsidiary.  Despite rave reviews, Nightmare was not an immediate success, but it has found a cult audience on video.  Disney has since fully re-embraced the movie, removing all traces of the old Touchstone logos and prominently slapping the Disney name back on the prints, just as if they had been 100% behind it before it became a hit.

Related: Alfred Eaker’s A Few Odd Yuletide Favs.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[Burton] pulls adult minds down to the surreal darkness of childish imagination — where the real nightmares are. But through Burton’s eyes, these dark dreamscapes aren’t bad places at all. In fact, they’re quite wonderful.”–Desson Howe, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Tim Burton

FEATURING: Vincent Price

PLOT: A seven year old boy wishes he could be just like the Vincent Price he sees in old

movies.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  It’s not quite weird; more mildly macabre.  But it sure is cool.

COMMENTS:  Vincent is a 5 minute poem, narrated by the mellifluous Vincent Price, about a morbid boy (also named Vincent) obsessed with emulating the horror icon’s tormented screen persona.  It’s told in a singsong, storybook cadence and given a superlative reading by Price (who was so flattered by the tribute that he proclaimed it a greater honor than a star on Hollywood Boulevard).  There are some specific references to Price’s work for the actor’s fans, though the short prefers to evoke their general atmosphere than to cite specific movies. Young Vincent’s daydreams involve dipping his aunt in wax, turning his dog into a zombie, and slowly being driven mad by his guilt over his unspeakable crimes.  A representative stanza: “Such horrible news he could not survive/For his beautiful wife had been buried alive!/He dug out her grave to make sure she was dead/Unaware that her grave was his mother’s flower bed.”  Vincent is visually impressive, deliberately shot in luminous black and white and drawing on the gloomy Gothic style of the old Universal horror movies with a powerful dose of German Expressionism.  (Burton denied being directly influenced by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but he’s the only one who doesn’t notice the similarity to the silent psychological horror classic in the geometrically warped sets).  The look and childishly ghastly tone bring to mind a lighter version of the macabre black and white lithographs of Edward Gorey (who once created a primer where each letter illustrates the death of a tot).  Burton’s visual sensibility is already fully formed here, and the elements of his classic style—his comic, cathartic synthesis of fresh childhood innocence and the must of the grave—are already in evidence.  In fact, there may be no better example in the director’s entire body of work of than this crisp five minute exhibition of his talent for mixing the chuckle with the shudder.

Disney has traditionally made Vincent and Burton’s other pre-fame short Frankenweenie as extras on all their editions of The Nightmare Before Christmas.  The film is also included on the anthology Cinema 16: American Short Films (buy) alongside  Maya Deren‘s “Meshes of the Afternoon” and works by Andy Warhol, Todd Solondz and Gus Van Sant, among others.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a pastiche of styles lifted from the writings of Dr. Seuss and Edgar Allen Poe, and a range of movies from B-horror films, German expressionist works and the films of Vincent Price.”–Michael Frierson, Animation World Magazine (DVD)

[(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Maxwell Stewart.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)]