Suspiria

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

It 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. The cinematographer, Luciano Tovoli, used it to push saturation to extremes, flooding the frame with high-key blues, reds and greens. The score by the 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, in the same company as Bernard Herrmann's Psycho and John Carpenter's Halloween.

Jessica Harper leads the cast, with Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci, Udo Kier and Joan Bennett in support; it was Bennett's last screen role before her death in 1990. Sight & Sound returned the film to its 2022 Greatest Films of All Time list, an unusual place for a horror feature and a sign of how far academic opinion of the giallo cycle has moved since the early 2000s. Luca Guadagnino's 2018 remake renewed international interest in the original and prompted new restorations of it.