We’re back, fiends, in this first week of November to show that while stores and network TV may esteem Spooky Season done and past, the thrills and chills are never really over. Blaine Grimes and Blake Collier are with me, and we’re queuing up Dario Argento’s 1980 film, Inferno, the second installment of his Three Mothers trilogy about a trio of ancient witches who influence the world for evil from secret lairs. And if you start to wonder if you’re dreaming or if this is real life, just know the answer is yes!
Ian: Well, right off the bat, allow me to address the egg on my face: Inferno explicitly takes place in April. All the same, it always feels like a rainy November of the Argento soul.
Blaine: Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. But honestly, I remembered the movie being set in fall as well.
Ian: While in many respects this is a giallo slasher, the resolution and texture of the film is rather polished. It feels rather baroque in much the same way the soundtrack does.
Blaine: I’m always struck by how Argento’s collaboration with composers is such an integral aspect of his work. And it’s especially fitting since architecture figures so prominently in Inferno and the rest of the Three Mothers Trilogy.
Ian: If it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it.
Blaine: The score is there, in part, to tell us — remind us — that the world is more than brick and mortar.
Blake: And yet that brick and mortar can be made alive by the powers and principalities that think they run this world.
Blaine: Yes! Evil has a corrupting and corrosive influence on the physical and material world!
Ian: I’m interested in how all the evil actants in this story are not all in league with one another. Some are minions of the Mother of Darkness, but some just enter into her orbit, sometimes even accidentally.
Blake: I think it’s funny to hear you use the term “actant,” as Argento’s films feel almost fated, and those characters in it are only means to the fait accompli of the evil present. Almost like the characters have predetermined wills, and they are moving to their marks.
Ian: That bears out watching it, I think. It feels almost like gravity as one actant collides with a clue or with one of the Mothers’ minions. Once they make this one small decision, they are inevitably set on this ironclad course.
Blake: Place it against a film like Signs where there was a predetermination taking place, but it never felt like the characters would inevitably fall in line with the divine conspiracy until the end. And maybe this is just the difference in the conspirators. One is evil, and the other is a good God. One automates their actants, and the other weaves the complex and broken tapestry of human wills into his own good.
Ian: There’s a world of difference between the providence of a good God and the machinations of a faceless fate, which, let the viewer understand, is compared to the Three Mothers: as there are three Fates, there are these three. And, of course, what happens is Argento slips on the familiar word, “mystery.” “The only true mystery is that our very lives are governed by dead people,” Kazanian, the bookseller, says at one point. Am I wrong that he simply happened to have a copy of The Three Mothers for sale? He’s not a part of the witches’ conspiracy, right?
Blake: Correct, but it’s also intriguing that his store is next to one of the evil buildings … So he and his shop were pulled into that orbit, but he was not an actant for them.
Ian: Right, exactly. I’m compelled by how true to life that feels. He’s not a servant of the Mother of Darkness or evil in the same way she is, but I intuit some kind of magnetic pull being exerted on him all the same. And I think we see some of that evil in how he gleefully dispatches the cats that are infesting his shop from the Mother of Darkness’ house. And he is pointlessly killed in the act. I guess one of the things I like about this film is how it portrays that the kingdom of darkness is, in fact, divided. There are concentric spheres but also rings that intersect but are not subservient.
Blake: I alluded to this earlier, but this film (and at least Suspiria, as I haven’t seen the third Mothers film) really brought to mind something that is often in the news of late, and mostly derided, but I think we have teased at why taking it seriously until proven otherwise is actually beneficial: conspiracies. One cannot have evil powers and principalities and a sovereign and good God without some semblance of conspiracies being a part of reality. Especially in an exceedingly materialist culture and with politics increasingly taking over the devotion that was afforded to religion, it makes sense that people would be drawn to conspiracies, because there is no larger narrative that gives meaning in that type of world. This film shows the multifaceted ways that conspiracies can become real and active in the life of people, cities, and presumably countries. To uncover the corrosive elements of power and greed in society is an act of revealing conspiracy and exposing it to the light.
Ian: Yes, absolutely. Conspiracy theories are always stupid when our repugnant, idiotic opponents espouse them, no matter what narrative sense they might make of otherwise disconnected and uncanny things that occur. And isn’t it at least a little fitting that “conspire” means to breathe together, when one of the mothers is Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs? And in the divine conspiracy you commend, Blake, God the Spirit — the divine breath — sweeps up subjects like ourselves into the story of the evil conspiracy’s defeat?
Blake: And does so in an organically loving way so that creatures can be creatures caught up in it and not automatons.
Blaine: Yes! Evil is divided and ultimately self-destructive. Pulling so many forces and people into the Mother’s orbit proves to be her undoing, as the literal inferno is inadvertently started by the housekeeper, Carol, when she drops a candle in a fit of terror.
Ian: I wouldn’t disagree with someone who watched this and said parts of it didn’t make sense. But what I would counter with is that the film sometimes feels like a dream and is all the more nightmarish for obeying that sort of logic. I love how taking a wrong turn in a library, for instance, could bring you into a forbidding alchemical laboratory, or that carrying a copy of The Three Mothers could be enough to make you a target of some insidious force that never knew you existed until this moment.
Blaine: Blake, you’ve written and thought a lot about architectural horror. In what ways does this exemplify the category?
Blake: Just in terms of setting, it’s brilliant in how the architecture exhibits the attributes of the evil being portrayed. Crawlspaces; hidden rooms down in the hole where a sump pump would normally go in a basement; a whole centralized, spacious mansion that hides the creator who designed it underneath the “soles of your shoes.” In this way, Varelli’s monologue about the building being the veins and parts of the body is physically represented on the screen. This feeds into the dreamlike nature of the film, as none of this is physically likely if you are looking at the building from the exterior shots.
Ian: Argento’s use of color is also surreal. The locations onscreen feel like nowhere I’ve ever seen but also like places I’ve seen in dreams. They’re beautiful but also lurid. They almost always impend horror.
Blake: I’m always amazed at Dario’s sharp cuts from brutal violence to a new setting. It’s whiplash every time, especially placed against that always elegant use of colors. One of the things I love about Argento is how he can make every scene aesthetically pleasing. Like Nicolas Winding Refn, I’m sure he gets the charge of “all style, no substance,” but I think that’s always a very lazy critique. And Argento just isn’t interested in laying out the meaning for all to see. He wants to obscure it, like the keys of the three mothers.
Ian: It seems to me Mater Tenebrarum’s house stands out as unusual, but it can also be lost in the mass of buildings in New York City. It’s distinct but can also fade into the city. What do you think?
Blake: In some ways I would agree. Though having been to New York City, there are so few buildings with spacious exteriors, sidewalks, etc. The building almost feels too expansive for a glorified apartment complex in New York. But this could be chalked up to the dream logic as well.
Ian: How does Inferno shed light upon the spookiness of the world beyond October?
Blaine: The film is a reminder that the spooky stuff is there, in plain sight, all the time. You just have to have eyes to see.
Blake: There is no seasonal end to the powers and principalities of this world.
Ian: And how would you commend Inferno to the not-so-horror-inclined?
Blake: It’s a beautiful film and plays more as a thriller than straight up horror, which is kind of an identifier of giallo horror.
Blaine: It’s funny you say that. I don’t consider myself someone who is easily disturbed or scared by horror films. And yet, I find most of Argento’s supernatural movies to be subtly disturbing. I always find them lingering in my mind when I drift off to sleep at night, and that happened this time around. I haven’t thought through why that is, but I have noticed it’s something that happens with his stuff. Which is, I know, a terrible way to commend it to the horror-averse, haha!
Ian: Blaine, I think I have to agree, and I wonder if it’s that dreamlike quality that makes what transpires here seem all the more plausible when I leave the film. It feels like I could unintentionally happen upon a letter and find myself inside of this circle and targeted.
Blake: I’d say some of it has something to do with their aesthetic quality. They are vivid and leave phantom images on the mind, like an afterimage after staring at a bright light.
Ian: After staring into the inferno of a “normal world,” right?
Blake: Exactly.
Thanks for watching this flick with us, but more than that, for accompanying us on this entire Spooky Season pilgrimage! We hope you will carry the fire of All Hallows all year ‘round, and that the coziness of the coming season will intertwine in your hearts with the spookier strains of Advent. Cling to the cross, and stay spooky!
