Italy

Dario Argento, one of Italy's most exotic film-makers, has produced a really wild horror movie in Suspiria (1976) (the title refers to the 'breathy' noises that punctuate the action). It starts off pianissimo, with apologetic statements like 'One of our students who was expelled yesterday for improper conduct has been murdered by a madman," and then works up to a pitch with stark utterances like 'Poor Daniel - torn to pieces.' The setting is a German Ballet school, in the present day, where the students suffer worse mishaps than a mis-step at the barre. Among the terrors not on the curriculum are an invasion of maggots from the attic, bats in the boudoir, pits filled with horrible enmeshing wire coils and a staff -room coven of witches among whom Joan Blondell's principal coos like a pigeon with predatory instincts. Argento is a talent who gets - and gives - fun by loading his movie to excess and making the plot run second to a series of absurdist set-pieces. But he is also a considerable technician and his style runs the baroque gamut from coloured filters - some scenes are so red-hued that one could develop snapshots while anatomising corpses - to a fiendish stereo electronic-rock score which sounds as if 500 cats are having their tails tramped on in unison. The cast is bizarrely international, with Udo Kier as a vampirical psychiatrist, Alida Valli as a formidable ballet mistress, and Jessica Harper as the innocent Suzy, who arrives fresh from America at an airport where doors open automaticaaly [sic] and let the passengers disappear into a storm that seems generated by a hellish inferno. Suspiria is a deliberately overblown bit of Gothic ghoulishness that makes other tales of terror look anaemic. ALEXANDER WALKER