event The Watching Hour: Suspiria

With Technicolor sights and aggressive sounds that aim for sensory overload, Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic Suspiria converts the vulgarity and excess of the slasher genre into high art. As distinctive in its painterly colors as Val Lewton’s horror films were in their expressive swaths of black and white, the film serves up a gorehound’s feast of explicit mayhem, but rarely has bloodletting seemed so ornately beautiful. The doe-eyed Jessica Harper stars as an American ballet student who enters a German academy with a secret history of witchcraft. The night she arrives, she witnesses a young dancer fleeing the academy in terror and discovers the next morning that the woman was murdered in a neighboring dormitory. Her suspicions are heightened by the school’s strange, conspiratorial atmosphere.

With Technicolor sights and aggressive sounds that aim for sensory overload, Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic Suspiria converts the vulgarity and excess of the slasher genre into high art. As distinctive in its painterly colors as Val Lewton’s horror films were in their expressive swaths of black and white, the film serves up a gorehound’s feast of explicit mayhem, but rarely has bloodletting seemed so ornately beautiful. The doe-eyed Jessica Harper stars as an American ballet student who enters a German academy with a secret history of witchcraft. The night she arrives, she witnesses a young dancer fleeing the academy in terror and discovers the next morning that the woman was murdered in a neighboring dormitory. Her suspicions are heightened by the school’s strange, conspiratorial atmosphere.