2 a.m.: Suspiria (1977)
ER: A lot of people watch Italian horror films, and they go, "Why is the dubbing so bad?" But that was the style of how the movies were done. Everything was dubbed in Italy because the movie studio—Cinecittà —was right by the airport, and when the movies started getting made, they would record stuff silently and dub it, and Italian audiences just got used to it that way. So everything is dubbed. To American audiences, it seems kind of strange.
Suspiria, like all Dario Argento films, at a certain point, you realize that you don't know what's going on. But it's okay. You're loosely following this plot of the girl who goes to this dance school, and then you kind of know what's going on. But it's all this horrific imagery. Whereas Lynch uses the stark black and white to create this horrible, industrial wasteland, Argento uses beautiful, operatic color. His films aren't meant to look like reality; his films are meant to look very operatic, almost theatrical. He comes from a family of composers and photographers and opera composers, and he loves opera. It's highly stylized, where it'll be a giant wide shot of someone walking across a courtyard, but all you'll hear are the tiny footsteps. It's all designed purposely that way. After Eraserhead, you're already in the mood and expecting something that's not reality.
4 a.m.: Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
ER: Cannibal Holocaust is an Italian horror film directed by Ruggero Deodato, that The Blair Witch Project stole its formula from. These filmmakers have gone to film this cannibal tribe and they've disappeared, and this professor from NYU goes and tracks down what happened to them. The whole first half of the movie is him going through a series of tests getting to these people—the tree people, the Yanomama tribe—and he trades with them and gets the film cans. He finds the film cans and the skeletons of the guys. And the second half of the film is him going through the film. All these little clues that we've seen set up, we see exactly what happened.
It is one of the most brutal, relentless, violent, realistic films ever made. It's so unbelievably disturbing. After the movie was made, the director got brought up on charges of murdering his actors, and he had to bring them into court to prove they were still alive. But he was also smart enough to have the actors sign nondisclosure agreements that they wouldn't appear in public for a year. The actors did it! This was the '70s—he sent them to New York, so they'd disappeared and didn't do any movies, and he said that this was all real, had all really happened, but then he got brought up on charges and had to admit that it was all fake. But there are shots in this movie where people still don't know how he did it. They're convinced.
That's why I put the director of Cannibal Holocaust in a cameo in Hostel: Part II as a cannibal. He was the assistant director to Roberto Rossellini, the great neo-realist director from Open City. So it's interesting that Deodato was able to take the Roberto Rossellini neo-realism and apply that aesthetic to a '70s ultra-violent cannibal film.
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