Suspiria

Dario Argento's Suspiria arrived in 1977 as the most fully realised expression of the giallo style Argento had been developing through The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Deep Red. The film was the first part of his so-called Three Mothers trilogy, completed by Inferno (1980) and the much-later The Mother of Tears (2007).

The film was photographed in Technicolor on stock the Italian distributor had managed to source from one of the very last surviving runs of Eastman 5254 — the Technicolor dye-transfer process that Hollywood had effectively retired by the mid-1970s. Cinematographer Luciano Tovoli used the format to push saturation to extreme levels, with high-key blue, red, and green washes filling the frame. The score by Italian progressive-rock band Goblin (Claudio Simonetti, Massimo Morante, Fabio Pignatelli and Agostino Marangolo) is one of the most-discussed and most-imitated horror scores of the twentieth century, regularly cited alongside Bernard Herrmann's Psycho and John Carpenter's Halloween.

The cast is led by Jessica Harper, with Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci, Udo Kier and Joan Bennett in support; Bennett's appearance was her last screen role before her death in 1990. Sight & Sound returned the film to its 2022 Greatest Films of All Time list, an unusual placement for a horror feature and one that reflected the substantial academic reappraisal of the giallo cycle that has taken place since the early 2000s. Luca Guadagnino's 2018 remake renewed international interest and triggered new restorations of the original.