Ranked among Dario Argento’s total career output, 1980’s Inferno often doesn’t rate very high, dismissed as a rote retread of its immediate predecessor, the far-better-received Suspiria. This assessment isn’t entirely unfounded. Following on the heels of the biggest international success of his career, Argento clearly saw an opportunity to rustle up some speedy financing, setting out to replicate the formula of that previous hit with a few minor tweaks. Yet this kind of narrative quick-hustle really only presents a problem if you’re interested in Argento movies for their plots, which generally seem beside the point. What the director does best, elevating psychosexual nightmare fables into transcendence with brash aesthetic aplomb, is on full display here. Paired with some still-sturdy carried-over aspects of atmosphere and construction, and removed from the context of its time, Inferno safely stands among his finest work.
Another reason for the film’s middling reputation is the fact that it was barely released, shelved for years in the US and appearing solely on home video, not receiving a theatrical screening until a one-week NYC run in 1986. Inferno deserved better from the city of its setting, even if it doesn’t make much use of Manhattan as a location. As New York entered the decade of its steepest decline, its dodgy, decaying environs exploited by schlock-meisters like William Lustig (who served as production coordinator for Inferno’s on-site shoots), Argento was aiming his eye elsewhere, despite a noted penchant for hulking ruins.
Befitting its status as a symbolic sequel to Suspiria, Inferno keeps things mostly indoors, fixated on the dark allure of secret passageways and restrictive spaces. It’s story concerns another loosely-connected passel of young students and innocent bystanders, all menaced by the same secret cabal of sinister witches from the previous film. Here the main antagonist is the so-called Mother of Shadows, who’s set up shop in the bowels of an old, imposing Manhattan apartment complex, likely modeled after The Dakota as featured in Rosemary’s Baby. Like that historic structure, it’s also located just off Central Park, as seen in the scene where a crutch-bound antiques dealer, attempting to dispose of a sack full of rabid cats, is taken out by a teeming swarm of sewer rats.
This killing, an exercise in over-abundance in which nearly every aspect of the landscape seethes with malevolence, is typical of the film’s gory set-pieces, despite being the only one shot outdoors. As in Suspiria, the primary focus is the twisting interiors of the cursed building, which becomes a wicked playground for both its resident enchantress and the director himself. This stifling setting grants a deep, claustrophobia-inducing ambience, which at times embarks on elaborate recreations of German expressionist-style dreamscapes, stacking up piles of old junk to hallucinatory effect. The best of these oneiric set pieces is the first, which achieves a sensation exclusive to great horror, revealing a creepy nightmare scenario most viewers would have never imagined themselves. Here, a hole in the floor of the cellar leads to a flooded sub-basement filled with antique furniture laid atop thick carpeting, with a door from which rotting corpses tumble out, bobbing up like bubbles to the surface.
The action makes little sense when considered rationally, but goes a long way toward establishing the dream logic that defines the rest of the film. Pushing even further into abstraction than its predecessor, Inferno plays like a clear stylistic and narrative forerunner to David Lynch’s fractured phantasmagorias, as an initial bad omen envelops itself in an increasingly thick penumbra of dread. As a post-giallo thriller, it builds off the hallmarks of that genre while further reducing plot to a mere armature of psychological explorations, expressing states of paranoia and fear in a distressingly lucid fashion. As one character notes: “the only true mystery is that our very lives are governed by dead people.”
Like Suspiria and many of Argento’s other works, Inferno effectively communicates the crushing weight of a stiff, cadaverous past upon the youth of the present, impeding any effort to move forward. This is achieved by garish literalizations of such confinement, via cramped sets loaded chockablock with ridiculous mementos of the past, shot in a fashion that further accentuates their tightness. The skin-crawling feelings this atmosphere arouses are perfectly complemented by the continued focus on a tenebrous, string-pulling network of villains, capable of dispatching armies of gloved, faceless killers, humans reduced to mere appendages of an all-powerful evil. This allows everything to be turned into a threat, as in the aforementioned scene where the antiques dealer, not quite vanquished by the rats, is finished off by a nearby hot dog vendor, who appears to be offering help but plunges in a knife instead. The cumulative effect of all this random menace is uniquely disturbing, communicating a paranoid, pitch-black view of contemporary society with a singular sense of style and panache.
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