Some weeks into the shoot of Suspiria, American star Jessica Harper was approached by Italian director Dario Argento and handed a brown paper bag. “Inside was this mound of wriggling maggots,” she recalls, a look of horror twisting her finely drawn features. “I just about vomited.”
There is no horror, only glee, on Argento's face when he recalls filming Harper brushing her hair only for a maggot to fall from her tresses, and then another, and another, until she looks up to see the ceiling undulating with thousands of writhing worms just as the cascade begins. “She was scared!” he grins. “That was good! Many hours of maggots.”
Eleven hours of maggots, to be precise, and it made for just one of many grotesque, grandstanding set-pieces that punctuate a movie that now, 44 years on, is a perennial fixture on lists of the 10 Greatest Horror Movies Ever Made. Just ask Italian actress Stefania Casini, who has worked with Andy Warhol, Bernardo Bertolucci and Peter Greenaway, and yet was dealt a particularly cruel death in Suspiria by falling into a room full of barbed wire. “The more I moved, the more the wire closed in on me and pinched me,” she shudders. “It really hurt. I went home looking like I'd been bitten by thousands of ants.”
OCCULT MOVIE
In the mid-’70s, Dario Argento was the hottest name in horror since Alfred Hitchcock had galvanised the genre with (1960) and (1963). Argento's 1970 directorial debut, , had proved a (1971), (1971) and, especially, (1975) had established him as the guru of giallo – lurid murder mysteries that accentuated their characters’ grisly deaths. Now he was ready for a new challenge, channelling his own brand of chic cruelty into the “fantastique”.
