Ten Days of Terror!: Inferno

Film: Inferno
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.

Dario Argento’s Suspiria is not only thought of as the quintessential Italian horror film, it’s also surprisingly divisive. There are those (like me), who see it as one of the great visions of its decade within the genre and those who, not without reason, find it kind of silly. Inferno, Argento’s film from 1980, builds on much of the world created in Suspiria, and at the very least is its visual sister. In a real sense, Inferno is the middle film of a trilogy starting with Suspiria and concluding with The Mother of Tears, which Argento made within the last decade.

Sad to say, this is also lesser than Suspiria for a number of reasons. Primary in this is that the plot is a lot more opaque than in the first film. Here, we appear to be introduced to people specifically so that Argento can have them killed off, admittedly in inventive ways some of the time. Still, there are multiple characters who exist here just long enough for us to get a name before someone stabs them or does something else nasty to them. More or less, Inferno is an excuse for Argento to kill off a bunch of people in a variety of inventive ways and to show us some gore without worrying too much about such niceties as a story that makes a lot of sense.