Stuff You Glitch On While Trying To Write
Okay, so...this isn't going to make a lot of sense if you haven't seen Dario Argento's Inferno, the second film in his "Three Mothers" trilogy. It's a loose sequel or companion-piece to Suspiria, continuing from the initial premise that there are three all-powerful and malign witches who control most of the world's evil from three houses built by the architect/alchemist Varelli--Mater Suspiriorum/Helena Markos, Mother of Sighs, who lives in Freibourg, Germany; Mater Lachrymarum, Mother of Tears, who lives in Rome; and Mater Tenebrarum, Mother of Darkness, who lives in New York (natch!). The Freibourg house is the same Tanzakademie that our ballerina heroine Suzy attends in Suspiria, which ends up being consumed by fire after she sticks a knife through Markos's invisible neck; I think the Rome house collapses during an earthquake at the end of Mother of Tears, after Mater Lachrymarum is impaled by a falling beam, but don't quote me. (Also, why do the other mothers, both apparently younger than Ms. Markos, not have actual names? It's a mystery.)
Inferno begins with a poet named Rose Elliott who's slooowly starting to realize that the apartment building she lives in is one of Varelli's three houses. In an insane early sequence, she goes down to the basement to poke around and finds a puddle that leads into an entire sunken, flooded room complete with floating corpses and a waterlogged portrait of Mater T. Naturally, she writes to her brother Mark--who happens to be studying musicology in Rome, leading to an interesting classroom encounter with sexy, cat-stroking Mater L.--to come help her, and is then murdered. When Mark arrives, no one can tell him what's happened to Rose, and everybody he talks to for more than a minute ends up similarly butchered (though I don't think he ever quite twigs to this fact; dude's pretty oblivious, really.)
At any rate: One of the people who ends up dead is a pretty Comtesse who lives across the way, and was Rose's BFF. Her butler realizes she's not coming back, so he pokes around in her shit and discovers a bunch of cash and jewels, which he and the building's sinister landlady plan to run off with. Now, up to this point, I'd thought the landlady must surely work for Mater T., but apparently not; the butler ends up with his eyes pulled out, while the landlady wraps herself in a curtain, sets herself on fire and careens out the apartment window, falling into a greenhouse below.
Throughout the movie's final half-hour, meanwhile--as Mark Elliott doggedly figures out there's a secret passage under his sister's floorboards, follows that into a man-sized stairwell, then through another tiny door into a similarly tiny crawlspace, then into the ridiculously huge apartment of an old dude in a wheelchair who turns out to be Varelli himself, then ducks into a freakin' closet which turns out to give into a massive room apparently carved out of stone, twice the size of the building itself, which also happens to look remarkably like the flooded room under the puddle, minus the water--we keep cutting back to the landlady's corpse, still going up like Hiroshima. Pretty soon the greenhouse is on fire, then the adjacent wall, then the apartment inside the wall, then the hallway, then the first floor...and by the time Mark squares off against the old wheelchair dude's nurse, who turns out to be Mater T. herself, the whole building's pretty much a write-off.
"We have to get out of here!" Mark says, stating the obvious, as is his wont.
Mater Tenebrarum, not even lifting her head off the table: "So, it's on fire! Well, let it burn...just like before..."
And I'm just sitting there thinking: Bitch, you hired a guy to build you this ridiculous tesseract knot of a house, then kept him alive for God knows how long, killing everybody who even comes close to guessing you live here like it's going out of style--and now you're just going to let it burn, because...why, exactly? You got so distracted you forgot to turn off the landlady's corpse, and now you don't want to admit it, because it'll make you LOOK bad? Is that it?
The moral of Inferno, folks: Witches be crazy.
Amended to add: Interestingly, it turns out that Argento contracted hepatitis during Inferno, which meant he had to direct some scenes while lying down, and now remembers the film with not a lot of affection, because it's forever identified in his mind with pain and suffering. In order to finish on time, he got his mentor Mario Bava to come in and shoot a couple of key sequences. Which is hilarious to me because just the other day, I was thinking: "Man, there's a lot of pink and blue and green in this movie, for an Argento film. It almost looks like Bava!"
Inferno begins with a poet named Rose Elliott who's slooowly starting to realize that the apartment building she lives in is one of Varelli's three houses. In an insane early sequence, she goes down to the basement to poke around and finds a puddle that leads into an entire sunken, flooded room complete with floating corpses and a waterlogged portrait of Mater T. Naturally, she writes to her brother Mark--who happens to be studying musicology in Rome, leading to an interesting classroom encounter with sexy, cat-stroking Mater L.--to come help her, and is then murdered. When Mark arrives, no one can tell him what's happened to Rose, and everybody he talks to for more than a minute ends up similarly butchered (though I don't think he ever quite twigs to this fact; dude's pretty oblivious, really.)
At any rate: One of the people who ends up dead is a pretty Comtesse who lives across the way, and was Rose's BFF. Her butler realizes she's not coming back, so he pokes around in her shit and discovers a bunch of cash and jewels, which he and the building's sinister landlady plan to run off with. Now, up to this point, I'd thought the landlady must surely work for Mater T., but apparently not; the butler ends up with his eyes pulled out, while the landlady wraps herself in a curtain, sets herself on fire and careens out the apartment window, falling into a greenhouse below.
Throughout the movie's final half-hour, meanwhile--as Mark Elliott doggedly figures out there's a secret passage under his sister's floorboards, follows that into a man-sized stairwell, then through another tiny door into a similarly tiny crawlspace, then into the ridiculously huge apartment of an old dude in a wheelchair who turns out to be Varelli himself, then ducks into a freakin' closet which turns out to give into a massive room apparently carved out of stone, twice the size of the building itself, which also happens to look remarkably like the flooded room under the puddle, minus the water--we keep cutting back to the landlady's corpse, still going up like Hiroshima. Pretty soon the greenhouse is on fire, then the adjacent wall, then the apartment inside the wall, then the hallway, then the first floor...and by the time Mark squares off against the old wheelchair dude's nurse, who turns out to be Mater T. herself, the whole building's pretty much a write-off.
"We have to get out of here!" Mark says, stating the obvious, as is his wont.
Mater Tenebrarum, not even lifting her head off the table: "So, it's on fire! Well, let it burn...just like before..."
And I'm just sitting there thinking: Bitch, you hired a guy to build you this ridiculous tesseract knot of a house, then kept him alive for God knows how long, killing everybody who even comes close to guessing you live here like it's going out of style--and now you're just going to let it burn, because...why, exactly? You got so distracted you forgot to turn off the landlady's corpse, and now you don't want to admit it, because it'll make you LOOK bad? Is that it?
The moral of Inferno, folks: Witches be crazy.
Amended to add: Interestingly, it turns out that Argento contracted hepatitis during Inferno, which meant he had to direct some scenes while lying down, and now remembers the film with not a lot of affection, because it's forever identified in his mind with pain and suffering. In order to finish on time, he got his mentor Mario Bava to come in and shoot a couple of key sequences. Which is hilarious to me because just the other day, I was thinking: "Man, there's a lot of pink and blue and green in this movie, for an Argento film. It almost looks like Bava!"