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To "tyrannize by terror and terrific beauty over my dreams," Dario Argento seconds De Quincey with his most sanguinary poem. A psychedelic storm welcomes the American ingénue (Jessica Harper) to Germany, she reaches the dance academy just as a fellow student escapes, the girl is dispatched in a spiraling bit of butchery that connects spilled viscera to stained glass. A pair of harpies run the ballet mausoleum, Alida Valli with frau kommandant grins and Joan Bennett for the link to Lang's Secret Beyond the Door. Mysterious deaths and subterranean passageways, the tinkly-screechy score has an inkling, "witch witch witch." Argento's heightened mise-en-scène is a fearsome advance upon his earlier works echoed in a character's description of modernist technique, "a different, more stylized impostation." Hemorrhage on pointe, a rain of maggots on pre-Raphaelite tresses yields to a makeshift dormitory and a rasping shadow play behind infernally illuminated sheets. "Maybe there's a hex on the place." "Let's call in the exorcist." Sludgy wine replaces Suspicion's looming glass of milk, a blind pianist finds himself framed by Teutonic architecture in a deserted plaza before getting his windpipe shredded by his dog. The recognition of a malefic coven underneath the school triggers a green tinge, the camera ascends in the heroine's room until the bulge of a light bulb deforms the screen, her inquisitive colleague (Stefania Casini) meets her demise amid the metallic blues of a roomful of barbed wire. A procession of surreal signposts, a précis on the occult voiced by Udo Kier: "Magic is everywhere." The incomparable sensory onslaught builds to a clash with the strega, where cinema becomes a giant exploding cloisonné box and the dreamer steps out jangled, drained, smiling. Cinematography by Luciano Tovoli. With Flavio Bucci, Miguel Bosé, Barbara Magnolfi, Susanna Javicoli, Eva Axen, and Rudolf Schündler.
--- Fernando F. Croce |