Inferno (1980)
HORROR-THON 2022 • HOUSE PARTY
9/10
DIRECTOR: Dario Argento
STARRING: Leigh McCloskey, Irene Miracle, Eleonora Giorgi
RELEASED: 1980
RUNTIME: 1 hour, 46 minutes
WATCH ON: Prime Video, Tubi, Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home
SCARE LEVEL: Medium
TRUSTING CATS: Never again
A woman drops her key into a flooded room under her New York apartment building and dives in after it. It’s a whole ballroom underwater, with chandeliers and portraits, and something floating toward her in the dark. That’s ten minutes into Inferno, and it only gets stranger.
Rose is a poet living in New York. She reads an old book about the Three Mothers, three powerful witches who each live in a building designed for them by the same architect.
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She becomes convinced she’s living in one of them. She writes her brother Mark, a music student in Rome, to ask for help.
By the time Mark gets to New York, Rose is gone. People who get close to the secret keep turning up dead in increasingly baroque ways. Mark keeps searching the building, and it starts to feel like the building is alive and paying attention.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
This is classic Argento: gorgeous colors, a plot that’s mostly an excuse, and death scenes staged like opera. If you liked Suspiria, this is that movie’s stranger, moodier sibling.
The music is from Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and it’s a great synth-and-prog score. It’s huge, dramatic, and a little bit insane, which is exactly right.
There’s a decent amount of gore. Enough to satisfy, never so much that it’s the point. And then there are the cats. In this movie, cats commit murder. They’ll hiss, they pounce, and they help take out a victim. I have never trusted a cat less.
No notes. Would watch a million times.
FUN FACT FOR YOUR NEXT DINNER PARTY
Assistant director Lamberto Bava said he handled and wrangled so many cats during the shooting of this film that afterward, he couldn’t stand to be in the same room as a cat and has avoided them ever since.