Going into this week I was very excited that our screening was Suspiria. I personally love horror movies but I had never seen an Italian horror movie until this week and Suspiria did not disappoint. Suspiria was definitely different than any horror film I have ever seen just because of its beauty. One thing that I think caught all our eyes was the color palette of the film and how they made the primary colors very vivid throughout the film. One thing that caught my eye was the blood especially. It almost looked like paint and was not like blood I had seen in other horror films due to the red being more vivid. It was said by Dario Argento that he wanted to make the movie something people could look at and not look away due to fear. I think he did great by bringing in a vibrant color palette because it made the film beautiful and very appealing to look at.

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The one reading I want to talk about is A (Sadistic) Night at the Opera. I had the pleasure of presenting this reading and I really did love it. The reading specifically went into four types of things you would see in Italian horror. The first was horror as a “bad” object. What I found that described this best was it said “good horror movies don’t show much actual horror, but the bad ones do because they lack imagination, taste and restraint.” I think this was a great line because it went with Suspiria well. While Suspiria did show horror it had the imagination (the maggots for example or the dog attacking) making it pleasing to watch and not something you were yawning at 10 minutes in. The next was exploitation/ art cinema. This section described Argento’s works and how he was different with things such as camera angles keeping you on your toes. It also talked about the different film periods and genres they went through after the war and how Italian horror was almost more explicit. The next section was the gothic and the giallo. In this section it talked about how the switch in Italian horror was more centered around women compared to Britain at the time who was working more with male leads in their horror films. It said how the giallo centered around almost making women a fetish and Argento even said himself how he’d rather see a beautiful woman being murdered than an ugly woman or man. This goes into the last section on pornography/sadism/masochism. The flesh and murder can classify into these categories. Something they mentioned was when the knife entered the body and we could see the beating heart. This was something that could fall into these categories. All in all I thought this reading was very informative on Italian horror.

Lastly, I want to end on the presentations of films. I thought both presentations were great and I could personally relate to the presentation on Grease 2. I am a huge fan of Grease and grew up watching that and the second on repeat, even though I will never personally love Grease 2 as much as Grease. Nothing will compare to the first, in my opinion of course.