Inferno (1980)

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) As regular readers of these reviews already know, I despite slasher movies — for their creative laziness, for their cheap nihilism, for their low production values. But I’m willing to make exceptions when these movies veer toward the supernatural, when they’re stylishly made, when there’s something in there that goes beyond the obvious. And that does describe Dario Argento’s Inferno rather well. The second of the “Three Mothers” trilogy inaugurated by Suspiria (but articulated here), it’s a horror film that largely (and wisely) confines itself to a New York City apartment building where there are strange things on, in, between and under the floors of the building. Faithful to his mastery of giallo at the time of its release, Argento goes for bright red blood, striking visuals, unsettling mythology and an audacious mid-film protagonist switch. I really liked the sense of increasingly uncanny discoveries within an ordinary-looking apartment building: it takes a demented imagination to mix fire cauldrons and submerged ballrooms in the same location, and that’s what sets Inferno apart from Argento’s later, far more mundane work. The expressionism of his visual style is still a cut above most other horror films, and the entire thing often plays like a nightmare. Inferno is deservedly overshadowed by many of Argento’s work (particularly Suspiria, a comparison made even worse by their belonging to the same rough cycle) but it’s a serviceable horror triller that may convince even those who are dubious about the whole giallo slasher trend.