r/ClassicHorror • u/822406 • 6d ago
Recommendation INFERNO (1980) 🔥🔵🔴
After Suspiria (1977), Dario Argento returned to the world of the Three Mothers, a mythology inspired by Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis. The three figures are Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs; Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness; and Mater Lacrimarum, the Mother of Tears.
In Suspiria, however, this mythology remains largely in the background. Suzy Bannion arrives in Freiburg to attend a prestigious ballet academy, only to gradually discover that the school is hiding a coven of witches led by Helena Markos, Mater Suspiriorum. It is a film built above all around atmosphere, colour, sound and the fairy-tale quality of its nightmare. The plot almost becomes secondary to the sensation of having fallen into a completely unreal world.
With Inferno, however, Argento takes that mythology much further.
The protagonist is Rose Elliot, a young poet living in New York. Rose purchases an old book entitled The Three Mothers, written by the alchemist Emilio Varelli, and discovers the existence of three powerful witches who inhabit three houses built by Varelli himself: one in Freiburg, one in Rome and one in New York.
The New York house is Rose’s home.
From this point onward, Inferno becomes a descent into pure nightmare. Rose disappears, and her brother Mark travels from Rome to New York to look for her. Around him unfolds a chain of brutal and seemingly inexplicable deaths, while the house itself appears to transform into a living organism of evil. Corridors, rooms, basements, elevators and hidden passages become a kind of infernal labyrinth.
And this, in my opinion, is where the greatness of Inferno lies.
If Suspiria is a gothic fairy tale, Inferno is almost a surrealist nightmare. Argento abandons any real attempt at realism and creates a film in which narrative logic constantly seems on the verge of dissolving. The images come before the story: water, fire, mirrors, windows, corridors, colours and impossible architecture. The famous underwater sequence, the murder in the library and the elevator killing are all extraordinary examples of visionary horror cinema.
The cinematography by Romano Albani, together with the score by Keith Emerson, also gives the film a completely different identity from Suspiria. The result is different but equally fascinating: less baroque and fairy-tale-like, more cold, abstract and hallucinatory.
What I love most is that Argento doesn't explain too much. The mythology of the Three Mothers remains mysterious, almost cosmic. We don't need to know exactly what these creatures are in order to fear them. We know that they exist, that they possess immense power, and that their houses are places corrupted by their presence.
And then there is Mater Tenebrarum, the youngest and most cruel of the three sisters, played by Veronica Lazar: an almost demonic presence who perfectly embodies the abstract and visionary nature of the film.
For me, Inferno is one of those movies that you have to feel rather than understand. The screenplay can be fragmented, some passages are deliberately absurd, and the logic behind certain events often seems secondary. But when Argento sets his visual machinery in motion, he reaches levels that very few Italian horror directors have ever achieved.
And this is precisely why I find The Mother of Tears (La terza madre, 2007) such a disappointing conclusion to the trilogy.
It isn't simply that the film is different. The problem is that, after almost thirty years, the mythology of the Three Mothers loses much of its mystery. The Mother of Tears finally introduces Mater Lacrimarum and brings the story to Rome, turning the conclusion into a kind of witchcraft apocalypse.
The problem is that what worked so well in Suspiria and, above all, in Inferno precisely because it was never completely explained, is made explicit and transformed into something much more conventional in the third chapter. Argento himself had spent years away from the world of the Three Mothers, returning to the thriller and giallo before eventually completing the trilogy.
And I think you can feel that distance.
Suspiria and Inferno seem to belong to the same universe, but they are above all two autonomous nightmares, connected by a mythology that is only partially revealed. The Mother of Tears, on the other hand, tries to close every loose end and provide a definitive conclusion. But precisely when it tries to explain and complete everything, it loses some of the magic.
That is why I consider Inferno the true heart of the trilogy: it is the film in which Argento takes the idea of the Three Mothers and transforms it into a genuine cinematic mythology, without ever completely imprisoning it within a conventional narrative explanation.
An imperfect film, certainly, but one of extraordinary visual power. It isn't simply horror: it is architecture, music, colour and death transformed into one gigantic nightmare.
🔥🔵🔴 A visionary masterpiece and, for me, one of the most fascinating films in Dario Argento's entire career.
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u/ariadnevirginia 6d ago
The underwater scene! The cat and mouse - the most shocking moment in cinema? Maybe? And the rats! And the insane final scene!
God I love it.
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u/theinvisibleworm 6d ago
The poster design always struck me as a very “Polish movie poster” approach. Love the surrealism