The Chauvel cinema in Sydney is having a mini-horror film festival with a focus on the movies of Dario Argento. First up was Argento's 1977 classic Suspiria , followed by George A. Romero’s zombie flick, Dawn of the Dead (1978).
I'll get to the films below, but the main disappointment of these screenings is that they seemed to be projected digitally, which is frankly blasphemous. The images were astonishingly clear, but with no visible grain or tangible film quality, one feels the experience was more clinical than it should have been and, especially for Argento, that the deep colours of 35mm would have added to the experience. A disappointment, but it's still a rare treat to be able to appreciate these movies on the big screen with other film fans.
Next week I'll report on the screenings of Tenebre (Argento, 1982) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974). Following that are Phenomena (Argento, 1985) and The Last House on the Left (Craven, 1972), and finally Deep Red (Argento, 1975) and Eaten Alive (Hooper, 1976).
Details can be found on their website under the events and festivals tab.
SUSPIRIA (1977) trailer
Before these screenings I had never seen an Argento film and I hence approached his most famous creation with great anticipation.
A surreal mind-trip of a movie, Suspiria has laughable dialogue, virtually not plot and some atrocious acting. But it’s also one of the most artful, beautiful and frightening horror movies I have seen. Argento has a way of making ever frame look like an opulently coloured painting, with vibrant use of the primary colours, especially (not suprisingly), red. Not afraid to pile on the blood (as in the famous opening slaying which involves a close up of a knife entering a girl’s heart), the scare quota is somewhat muted by the low-budget effects and too-red-to-be-real blood.
But these characteristics help give the film its disturbing hyper-real atmosphere. Instrumental is the setting of the freakish dance studio - one that could only ever exist in the movies - with its unnerving hallways and dream-like trimmings.
While the acting fluctuates between the stilted and the camp, our American heroine played by Jessica Harper, has the right mix of curiousity and vulnerability. Also in the cast is genre favourite Udo Kier, who turns up in a perfunctory and absurd exposition scene in which he explains the psychology of witches (or something).
But never mind that, with some frightening suspenseful sequences, beautiful photography and a demonic repetitve score, Suspiria is a legitimately great horror film from a period when filmmakers were not afraid to take risks.
In contrast with the beauty of Suspriria are the low-budget thrills of George A. Romero's second zombie movie (the first being Night of the Living Dead). Classic zombies don't exactly make for interesting or scary villains with their trademark slow hobble and groans. Hence, despite the occasional intestine-spewing gore, much of Dead plays more like a comedy, replete with aspirations of social satire.
Four survivors of the global outbreak hole up in the ceiling of an abandoned shopping mall. With the entire complex as their playground and an impressive arsenal of weapons at their disposal (some obtained from the convenient gun store in the mall; only in America, you think...), hundreds of zombies are dispatched as the three men and one woman argue over their next move.
There's a wonderfully rebellious tone and some great one-liners that could only have come from the 70s: when discussing Franciene's pregnancy, the tough self-appointed leader Peter says proudly, "Do you want to abort it? It's not too late, and I know how."
The wacky analogies of zombies to shoppers and consumer culture set to innocuous musak is also a nice touch, as is the latter incursion by bikies that suggest the greater threat my still lie in the land of the living (an aspect also explored in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later).
I'm no zombie movie expert, but Dawn of the Dead has clearly earned it's stripes as a seminal film of the genre. A very enjoyable, bloody piece of work.
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