a break from the depression

Beneath Our Very Feet a Secret World

hey this blogging thing is hard work! I have no idea if anyone can read it, sometimes it appears blank to me, Steve informs me the image on the last post was just blank... ah, and my spelling is terrible.

anyway, enough about me and what is essentially (as most blogs seem to be) a vanity project, instead I thought i'd spend a little time talking about Dario Argento's Inferno.

It's on my fave film personal profile page - though I probably screwed that up too. So I thought I'd give it a mention here too.

I had a chat some time last year or maybe the year before that with one of those Art Twins who do provocative, sick sculptural art, kids with cock-noses, hell, so on and so forth (some of it very good really) as they were thinking of developing a horror film - we got chatting about themes and I went for it as I had been drinking and I can't really stop my mouth after three pints... anyway... I started talking about what lies beneath the themes (social unrest, the family, sexuality, otherness, etc)... and I thought that what was at the heart of most GOOD horror films was the idea of a secret world - a world that exists sometimes just outside of our peripheral view... or often beneath our very feet.

This world is sometimes an arcane one, sometimes ancient, sometimes a product of our society, often mystical... it exists in our darkest dreams and imagination.

In the first of Argento's Three Mother's trilogy, Suspiria, Argento fuses a romantic sensibilty (ballet, architecture, secret passages and rooms) with an expressionist one (dramatic, psychological lighting, violent imagery, light and shadow) to create a truly mindblowing experience. In the film ballet step notes are used to follow a clue that leads inexorably to death and insanity.



But in Inferno he goes even further, buildings around us all the time, seemingly everyday, are the real stars of the film - they hold secrets. Libraries don't just reveal ancient tomes that mortals should not read, they also house alchemists in their basements... flooded cellars house hidden drawing rooms and beneath our feet underground passages lead to a building within a building.


It's as if the world we are in is a set and the real world, a world more terrifying than our own, is just beyond the flimsy walls we trust.

Inferno is a masterpiece, but it's not to everyone's taste. I can remember the dull reviews when it was released, the disappointment that it wasn't another Suspiria, the attacks that it was an empty exercise in style, or the attacks that it lacked style.

well time has been kind to Inferno - if you can take the fashions and the dubbing (and only those who can't engage their imaginations can't deal with the bad dubbing, fashion etc that appear in so many dismissed great works of cinema) - it looks beautiful, even brilliant, the story is layered and driven by emotion not cold logic, there is still an underlying intelligence to it's themes...

the film owes a lot to the work of Val Lewton - but don't think of it as art-horror, it's pure horror... it will seep into your dreams. For those who like gore and stuff there's that too - and killer cats, a heroin addicted countess, alchemy, thunder storms, stabbings, full moons, killer rats and Death herself.

see if you can see it! Try to anyway... you don't have to if you don't want mind you... but it's good I tell ya!

anyway - the art twins are still developing their horror film, I don't think I had impressed with my passion for Argento and constant mentioning of Fulci's City of the Living Dead.

I like my horror to explore this alternative place, or to play with my mind, but they have to have some kind of intelligence.

anyway, next blog will return to my depression and my chance to set the record straight as laid out on Steve's blog that Basket Case 2 REALLY IS better that Cronenbergs Dead Ringers!

Bye.