Watching Suspiria for the first time is like undergoing an aesthetic assault, a synesthetic intrusion that bypasses the centers of logic to strike directly at the limbic system. Dario Argento, here at his demiurgic zenith, does not direct a horror film in the conventional sense of the term; he orchestrates a baroque and feverish work, a chromatic and sonic delirium where the plot is a mere pretext, a slender thread of Ariadne stretched across a labyrinth of pure and terrifying sensations. Abandon all pretense of verisimilitude at the entrance. The Freiburg Dance Academy is not a place on the map, but a state of mind, a nightmare architecture built on the foundations of German expressionism and repainted with the acid colors of a psychedelic trip gone terribly wrong.

The film opens with the arrival of Suzy Bannion (a perpetually lost-looking Jessica Harper, the perfect embodiment of American innocence thrown into the European wolf's den) in a stormy, nocturnal Germany. It is an opening that echoes countless fairy tales, from the Brothers Grimm onwards: the girl who ventures into the dark forest. But Argento's forest is not made of trees, but of impossible geometries and corridors saturated with a red so aggressive that it seems pulsating, alive. The choice of Freiburg, on the edge of the Black Forest, is not accidental. It is a geographical anchor to that Germanic mythopoietic substratum that generated the Gothic and fairy-tale imagery. Argento, however, takes this archetypal material and contaminates it, infecting it with a brutal pop modernity. It is as if Walt Disney, after reading Thomas De Quincey and listening to King Crimson, had decided to shoot a remake of Snow White under the influence of powerful hallucinogens.

The debt to De Quincey and his Suspiria de Profundis is more conceptual than narrative. Argento does not adapt the text, but captures its essence: the exploration of altered mental states, the evocative power of dreams, and the personification of abstract entities such as the “Our Ladies of Sorrow.” Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, is not a simple monster, but the materialization of a primordial anguish, an ancient evil that lurks behind the bourgeois appearances and Art Nouveau elegance of the academy. This duality between a facade of refined European culture (dance, discipline) and a hidden, bloody heart is the driving force behind the film. It is the same tension that can be found in Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, where terror arises from the impossibility of distinguishing between perceived reality and the projection of a psyche on the verge of collapse.

The genius of Argento and his director of photography, Luciano Tovoli, lies in the radical and anachronistic choice to shoot in Technicolor, using old three-negative color-drenched film, a process already obsolete in 1977. This is not mere stylistic affectation, but a statement of intent. The world of Suspiria must not resemble our own. The primary colors—the red of blood and violent passion, the icy blue of night and fear, the poisonous green of black magic—do not describe reality, they create it. They are Fauvist brushstrokes that define the emotional state of each scene, flooding the screen and the viewer. The initial murder, with the victim's heart repeatedly pierced while her face crashes into a stained-glass window, is a programmatic manifesto: violence will be as stylized as it is brutal, death a macabre artistic performance, a grand-guignolesque ballet. It is an aestheticization of violence that is more reminiscent of a contemporary artist's installations than a genre film, almost a preview of the most disturbing video art.

This visual assault is counterbalanced by an equally relentless sonic assault. Goblin's soundtrack is not an accompaniment, it is a character in its own right, an invisible antagonist. Whispered children's lullabies, metallic clanging, obsessive prog-rock rhythms, and the otherworldly scales of the Moog synthesizer create a cacophony that anticipates, underscores, and expands the horror. The music often precedes the action, generating an almost unbearable tension, a violation of the acoustic space that lays bare the viewer's nerves even before the threat becomes apparent. It is the exact opposite of Hitchcockian suspense, based on the unseen and the suggested. Argento shows everything, floods the senses, practices a cinema of hypertrophy, of sensory maximalism. The effect is deeply disorienting, a fever that rises inexorably.

Narrative logic is sacrificed on the altar of this all-encompassing experience. Why are the blind girl and her German shepherd attacked in a deserted square? Why is a room filled with larvae falling from the ceiling? Seeking a rational explanation is a futile exercise, the mistake made by anyone who attempts to decipher a nightmare with the tools of wakefulness. Suspiria operates according to a dreamlike, associative logic, where the deepest fears manifest themselves without the need for a causal chain. In this, the film is closer to Buñuel's surrealist cinema or David Lynch's hermetic universe than to traditional horror. It is a film to be felt, not understood. The dance academy, with its corridors decorated with geometric patterns that seem to be taken from an Escher engraving and its doors that open onto secret rooms, is not a building but a map of a sick subconscious. Each door is a threshold, each room a different chamber of fears.

Meta-textually, Suspiria is also a perverse reflection on female power. It is an almost entirely matriarchal universe, ruled by a conclave of powerful older women, the teachers and the director, who literally devour the youth and vitality of their students. There is no trace of sisterhood; it is a ruthless hierarchy based on magic and terror. Men are marginal, powerless figures (the psychologist, the blind pianist), destined to be eliminated with brutal swiftness. The film explores an archetypal, ancestral femininity, linked to chthonic and irrational forces, which contrasts with the (powerless) rationality of the modern world. Suzy, the American, represents an almost Apollonian principle of order and logic that clashes with the Dionysian chaos of the coven. Her final victory is not a triumph of good over evil in a moral sense, but the survival of rationality in the face of the onslaught of primordial chaos, a sudden and violent awakening from a malignant dream.

Decades later, Suspiria remains a unique, inimitable, and deeply influential cinematic object. It has spawned an entire aesthetic, leaving its chromatic and sonic DNA in countless subsequent works, from Nicolas Winding Refn to Panos Cosmatos. But no imitator has ever managed to replicate its crazy, sincere, and almost childish cruelty, that ability to transform fear into a dazzling and deafening art form. It is not a perfect film, if by perfection we mean narrative coherence and psychological depth. But if we mean it as the full realization of a singular and uncompromising artistic vision, then Suspiria is an absolute masterpiece. An immersive and terrifying experience, a monument to the power of cinema to draw us beyond the looking glass, to a place where beauty and horror dance together in a hellish waltz.