Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento

Suspiria and Inferno

SUSPIRIA and INFERNO "Bad luck isn't brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds." - Dr. Frank Mandel (Suspiria) "What's that, a riddle? I'm not good at riddles." - Kazanian (Inferno) When a dreambecomes a nightmare, the average dreamerjust wants to wake up and shake off the cold grip ofnight terrors. But the history of horror literature is full of dreamers who carried over their nightmares to the waking hours, then committed them to paper. The three most famous examples gave us Frankenstein,Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Mary Shelley was vacationing in Switzerland with her half sister, lover (later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, his friend, the mad-bad-and-dangerous-to-know Lord Byron,and Byron's high-strung companion, Dr. Polidori. Her dream gave her the materialwith whichtoriseto aliterary challenge: each ofthem was to write a spooky story with which to amuse the others. Frankenstein filled the bill and more.1 Bram Stoker (who, eminent Victorianthat he was, owed his troubledsleep to overindulging at dinner) found the Lord ofthe Vampires he called Dracula in a nightmare, while Robert Louis Stevenson reprimanded his wife when she woke him from "dreaming a fine bogey tale," Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The enduring powerof all three worksis obvious:each has been adapted dozensoftimes, and has inspired hundreds ofmovies, plays, novels and short stories. Frankenstein is the atypical case, overtly philosophical and ultimately less horrifying than overwhelmingly sad. Its successful ("successful" here meaning appealing to a popular 1 Whether Polidori's story, The Vampyre (often attributed, incorrectly , to Byron), was also inspired by a dream is anyone's guess. 123 Broken Mirrors I Broken Minds audience) adaptation to the popular stage and then to the screen has always demanded radical reworking of the basic material. Shelley's intelligent, literate creature (whose soul is eventually warped by the constant rejection his ugliness inspires ) is almost invariably made mute orbarely articulate.At best the monster is child-like, as in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935). At worst it becomes - in countless sequels, updatings and variations - a violent brute, little better than a rabid animal. By contrast, the strength ofmovie versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula lies precisely in the doctor and the vampire, who've been lifted from the page virtually intact. Even in contexts that couldn't be more foreign from those of outraged Victorian propriety envisioned by Stevenson and Stoker, Dracula and Jekyll/Hyde survive and flourish, monsters from the subconscious whose iconic function can accommodateinnumerable superficialchanges. Eachgeneration gets the Dracula orJekyll/Hyde it deserves, because they're notjust the products of specific dreams, dreamed by individuals. The vampire, the manmade monster, and the shape-shifter (Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde is awerewolf story in allbut name) are the stuff of myth, folklore, and fairy tales, part of the vast collective dreams ofthe societies from which they sprang. The myth and folklore of the twentieth century, dreamed in the collective darkness ofmovietheatres, live in the cinema. And the nightmares - dark dreams ofblood and death - are horror movies, whose potent images often do not even pretend to mirror wakingreality but rather spring directly from an oneiric maelstrom. Suspiria (1977)and Inferno (1980) represent Argento's first and to date onlyforays into the realm ofthe purely supernatural horror film. What's most remarkable about both films and particularly about Suspiria -perhaps onlybecause it was made first and paved the way for Inferno - is their mind-boggling artificiality. Remarked less-than-enthusiastic John Coleman in The New Criterion, "Suspiria... is Lewis Carroll meeting Caligari, or fun and maims in a Chinese brothel," referring mostly to the outrageous decor,rather than the plot, while the 124 Suspiria I Inferno Soho Weekly News' RobBaker, more sympathetically but in the same vein,called it "gorgeouslyfilmedin bright, gaudy primary color, reminiscent ofFassbinder at his most perverse... Everything in the film is slightly cockeyed,both visually and aurally (the voice-overs,for example, have a hollow eeriness - a calculated flatness - that really got to me and that I think was absolutely intentional, like the vocals on a Kraftwerk album). It's sort of like Polanski doingAlice in Wonderland just after filming Repulsion." The references here are significant: the horror film (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) laden with references to dreams and hallucinations (Repulsion) and the self-conscious , convolutedfairytale -Alice in Wonderland, an artificial and sophisticated...