The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Some of the worst acting on film! Maybe if you were tripping on acid, you would say this is a great film. The background is gorgeous. The storyline is awful and the "blood" in the movie is orange-red. The Line-up keeps recommending this movie, so I thought it must be worth watching. I was very wrong.

The lovely and appealing Jessica Harper stars in this horror classic as Suzy Bannion, an American ballet dancer who travels to Europe to study and train. Arriving at the German school known as Tam Academy, she soon witnesses various strange goings-on, and comes to a horrifying realization regarding the identities and motives of the top dogs at this school."Suspiria" ranks as the personal favorite Dario Argento film for this viewer, and is definitely one of his most famous. The story, concocted by Argento and his former partner / sometime leading lady Daria Nicolodi, isn't necessarily a great one, but then great storytelling has never been Argentos' true strong suit. It's not what you watch his films for; you watch them for the virtuoso filmmaking, and it's on full display here.One thing you notice right away is how powerful the film is visually. It's a marvel of eye-popping images, colorful lighting choices, and fluid camera work. Certainly cinematographer Luciano Tovoli plays a big part in why this film works as well as it does.Overall, it's a stunning if not perfect marriage of stifling atmosphere, the beautiful brutality that hardcore horror fans crave, the dark and twisted nature of many a fairy tale, and the sometimes overpowering but compelling music score by renowned Italian prog-rock group Goblin. It features an amazing murder set piece within the first dozen or so minutes, and rarely lets up until an abrupt but creepy finale. Some scenes in "Suspiria" are iconic and have burned their way into the minds of its audiences over the decades.The performances are generally engaging: Ms. Harper, 40s icon Joan Bennett, Italian character actress Alida Valli, the great German cult actor Udo Kier, the distinctively featured Giuseppe Transocchi, handsome Miguel Bose, Stefania Casini (playing Suzy's new friend Sara), and sultry Barbara Magnolfi as the sardonic Olga.Well worth watching for any horror fan, especially now that the film has been restored and the picture looks more gorgeous than ever.Nine out of 10.

Not to mention that it will be difficult to discover a horror film more beautiful, more engaging and more horrifying, "Suspiria" has to be called an Italian masterpiece of late 70's horror. Directed by Dario Argento, the writer of the famous "Once Upon a Time in the West" starring Henry Fonda, this has been my first Argento film so far, but most certainly not my last, considering that "Suspiria" is such a fine film - easily one of my top favorites when it comes to horror movies. Gruesome and terrifying, "Suspiria" is a movie Hollywood would never have been capable of creating, a movie which deserves more attention and should be watched by so many more people nowadays. It's hard to even describe the plot apart from mentioning that the film is set in a dancing school in South West Germany and explores the concepts of fear of the unknown and plays with our deepest anxieties, giving me so many more goosebumps than I have ever gotten by watching an American horror movie (probably except for "Psycho", "The Shining" and "Rosemary's Baby"). If you are a fan of horror movies and have not gotten around to watching it yet, then you should stop doing whatever it is you're doing immediately and start watching this masterpiece.

What makes this weird horror film of a ballet academy with murders going on non stop is the extremely artistic composition of the images using colour like an expressionist painter to make more a work of art than a regular film. The story is absurd: the ballet academy is run by two lady dinosaurs (Alida Valli and Joan Bennett) like two awesome commissars driving hard the dancing students evidently to their violent deaths, while the leading girl (Jessica Harper) gets increasingly worried as her friends disappear. Of course, the ballet academy seems to be run by witchcraft somehow, and some psychiatrists get involved. Then there is bad weather occasionally with lots of thunder and lightnings, there are problems with the telephone, she gets nightmares, and so on.There is no credibility at all to anything in this film, and yet it is fascinating and well made and worth the terrible experience if for nothing else at least for its sustained impressing colour expressionism.