Beauty gleams like a sharpened blade in the hands of horror’s most visionary filmmakers, slicing through illusions to reveal the rot beneath.

In the pantheon of horror cinema, few concepts mesmerise and terrify as profoundly as beauty transformed into monstrosity. Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon (2016) and Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) stand as twin pillars in this exploration, each wielding aesthetics as a weapon. These films plunge viewers into worlds where perfection devolves into predation, envy festers into murder, and the female form becomes both idol and predator. By dissecting their shared obsession with beauty as horror, we uncover how visual splendor amplifies existential dread.

  • Both films construct seductive milieus – a modelling underworld in Los Angeles and a clandestine dance coven in Berlin – where ambition curdles into atrocity.
  • Hyper stylised cinematography turns colour, light, and composition into instruments of unease, making beauty a visceral threat.
  • At their cores lie meditations on feminine power, consumption, and the male gaze inverted, leaving indelible marks on horror’s evolution.

Portals to Perdition: The Worlds Within

The narratives of The Neon Demon and Suspiria unfold in environments that promise transcendence through beauty yet deliver damnation. In Refn’s film, Jesse (Elle Fanning), a wide eyed ingenue, arrives in Los Angeles chasing modelling dreams. The city’s nocturnal pulse, drenched in electric blues and pinks, envelops her. She poses for photographers like Jack (Desmond Harrington), whose flashes capture her ethereal allure. But beneath the glamour lurks a savage hierarchy: Ruby (Jena Malone), a makeup artist with predatory hungers; Sarah (Abbey Lee), a fellow model scarred by rejection; and Bert (Charles Baker), a motel lecher. Jesse’s rapid ascent – crowned ‘the most beautiful’ – ignites jealousy that culminates in hallucinatory horrors: a necrophilic tryst, a cannibalistic feast, and resurrection amid mirrors. Refn’s script, co written with Mary Laws and Polly Stenham, builds a fever dream where beauty’s currency buys oblivion.

Argento’s Suspiria, by contrast, transports American dancer Susie Bannon (Jessica Harper) to the Tanz Akademie in 1970s Freiburg. Rain lashed nights frame her entry into this labyrinthine edifice, alive with whispers and shadows. The academy, facade for an ancient coven led by the iron fisted Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett) and the decrepit Mater Suspiriorum, demands perfection through torment. Students like Patricia (Susanna Javicoli) unravel under irises poisoning and maggot infestations, their screams echoing Goblin’s prog rock frenzy. Susie’s initiation reveals the witches’ matriarchal reign, sustained by ritual murders and arcane sorcery. Argento, with co writer Daria Nicolodi, weaves fairy tale motifs into giallo savagery, making the academy a womb of wonders and wickedness.

What binds these portals is their function as microcosms of societal vanities. Los Angeles incarnates capitalist commodification of flesh; Freiburg, patriarchal suppression of feminine mysticism. Both protagonists embody innocence corrupted, their beauties magnets for destruction. Jesse’s motel death, illuminated by lightning, mirrors Susie’s storm swept arrival, signalling thresholds crossed.

Chromatic Carnage: Light as Lethal Palette

Cinematographers Larry Smith for The Neon Demon and Luciano Tovoli for Suspiria elevate colour to narrative force, saturating frames until beauty bleeds. Refn’s film pulses with synthetic neons – cyan motel glows, magenta club hazes – evoking synthetic perfection. Jesse’s debut shoot, skin glistening under strobing lights, fetishises her as blank canvas. Mirrors multiply her image infinitely, suggesting narcissism’s infinite regress. Slow motion catwalks stretch time, beauty suspended in hypnotic stasis until shattered by violence.

Argento assaults with primary excesses: crimson corridors, emerald bathes, sapphire irises. The academy’s art nouveau interiors, stained glass fracturing light, create jewel box prisons. A murder scene bathes in blue, victim’s blood arterial red, composing tableaux vivants of agony. Goblin’s synthesisers sync with these hues, percussion mimicking heartbeats, strings swelling like encroaching shadows. Tovoli’s wide angle lenses distort space, beauty warped into baroque nightmare.

This chromatic carnage weaponises the gaze. Viewers, like characters, succumb to visual seduction, only for it to curdle. In both films, light reveals decay: Jesse’s corpse, luminescent; Susie’s reflection, coven encircled. Beauty’s palette proves double edged, illuminating horrors it conceals.

Envy’s Embrace: The Feminine Devourers

Central to both horrors is envy, catalysing beauty’s barbarism. In The Neon Demon, Sarah’s obsession with Jesse’s youth drives her to devour the dead girl’s lips, tasting stolen vitality. Ruby’s bath time assault, water swirling pink, literalises consumption. These women, products of industry’s mill, internalise competition, turning sisterhood to savagery. Refn critiques fashion’s disposability, where beauty’s shelf life demands renewal through atrocity.

Suspiria‘s coven embodies collective envy, ancient witches sustaining power by preying on youthful vitality. Helena Marcos, the crone Mater, hides behind Helen’s mask, her rasp commanding obedience. Students serve as fodder, their dances choreographing ritual. Blanc’s maternal facade veils matriarchal tyranny, envy of Susie’s purity fuelling conspiracy. Argento draws from Thomas De Quincey’s covens, inverting fairy godmothers into gorgons.

These devourers invert horror’s virgin final girl trope. Jesse and Susie survive initially through allure, but survival demands complicity. Jesse’s rebirth as demon; Susie’s ascension as Mater – beauty evolves into bewitchment, envy transcended through domination.

Reflections of Ruin: Mirrors as Metaphor

Mirrors dominate iconography, fracturing psyches. The Neon Demon‘s climax unfolds in reflective hell: Jesse’s corpse reflected endlessly, cannibal feast amid shards. Her final strut, naked and necrotic, weaponises vanity’s gaze. Makeup scenes, faces rebuilt layer by layer, parody restoration.

In Suspiria, stained glass and polished floors multiply horrors: Patricia’s flight past reflections, Susie’s iris confrontation. The coven’s iris motif – eye as mirror – symbolises surveillance. Beauty reflected distorts, revealing true selves: witches’ decay, victims’ terror.

This motif indicts spectatorship. Films mirror audience voyeurism, beauty’s horror in our consumption.

Flesh Forged in Fury: Effects and Excess

Practical effects ground supernatural stylings. The Neon Demon‘s motel murder, ants crawling from orifices, evokes David Cronenberg’s body horror. Necrophilia sequence, prosthetic precision, horrifies through intimacy. Cannibal pie, ingested amid glamour, blends disgust with desire. Smith’s lighting caresses gore, beauty undiminished.

Argento’s effects dazzle: maggot deluge from ceiling, practical storm of writhing masses. Bat swarms, glass impalements, irises exploding in blue smoke. Giannetto De Rossi’s work revels in excess, wounds blooming like flowers. Goblin’s score amplifies, effects visceral symphonies.

These spectacles affirm beauty in brutality, effects elevating pulp to poetry.

Sonorous Spells: Sound as Siren Call

Cliff Martinez’s synth pulses in The Neon Demon, Cliff Martinez’s drones underscoring alienation. Catwalk beats mimic heart palpitations, beauty’s rhythm lethal.

Goblin’s Suspiria score, wah wah guitars and choral moans, incantatory. Dance sequences sync percussion to steps, coven pulsing as organism.

Sound immerses, beauty’s horror auditory assault.

Legacy’s Lustre: Enduring Enchantments

Suspiria birthed Argento’s Mothers trilogy, influencing Inferno, Mother of Tears, remade by Guadagnino. Neon Demon echoes in fashion horrors like Climax.

Both redefine beauty’s horror, inspiring queer readings, feminist critiques.

Refn and Argento prove aesthetics eternal weapons.

Director in the Spotlight

Dario Argento, born in 1940 in Rome to a German mother and Italian father, emerged from film criticism and scriptwriting into directing with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), igniting giallo’s golden age. Influenced by Alfred Hitchcock and Mario Bava, his oeuvre blends operatic violence, virtuoso camerawork, and supernatural intrigue. Argento’s career peaks in the 1970s-80s, with collaborations like Goblin and daughter Asia’s acting. Challenges included Trauma (1993)’s critical panning, health issues post-2019 stroke, yet cult status endures.

Key filmography: The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971), procedural giallo with blind protagonist; Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), rock drummer ensnared in conspiracy; Deep Red (1975), investigative masterpiece with David Hemmings; Suspiria (1977), coven horror benchmark; Inferno (1980), New York nightmare; Tenebrae (1982), meta slasher; Opera (1987), diva stalked; The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), art induced madness; Non ho sonno (2001), serial killer revisit; Three Mothers finale Mother of Tears (2007). Argento’s legacy: horror’s poet of crimson dread.

Actor in the Spotlight

Elle Fanning, born Mary Elle Fanning in 1998 in Conyers, Georgia, followed sister Dakota into acting at age three. Early roles in I Am Sam (2001) and Babel (2006) showcased precocity. Breakthrough in Super 8 (2011), then We Bought a Zoo (2011). Fanning’s range spans whimsy to darkness, earning acclaim for The Neon Demon‘s vulnerable seductress. No major awards yet, but Venice Film Festival nods. She directs shorts, advocates mental health.

Comprehensive filmography: Leatherheads (2008), child spectator; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), infant Daisy; Somewhere (2010), precocious Pola; Super 8 (2011), alien witness; Ginger & Rosa (2012), Cold War teen; The Great Gatsby (2013), Daisy; Maleficent (2014), Aurora; The Neon Demon (2016), doomed model; 20th Century Women (2016), coming of age; The Beguiled (2017), Confederate captive; Mary Shelley (2017), titular author; Galveston (2018), hurricane survivor; The Girl from Plainville (2022, series), Michelle Carter; The Hunting of the Snark (voice, upcoming). Fanning embodies ethereal intensity.

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Bibliography

Argento, D. and Nicolodi, D. (1977) Suspiria. 20th Century Fox.

Glover, J. (2012) Attack of the Giant Killer Tomatoes: The Films of Dario Argento. Creation Books.

Jones, A. (2016) Neon Aesthetic: Nicolas Winding Refn and the New Extremism. Salt Publishing.

Knee, M. (2003) ‘Suspiria: The Mother of All Witches?’, Italian Horror Cinema, edited by I. Conrich, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 121-135.

Newman, K. (2011) Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s. Bloomsbury.

Refn, N.W. (2016) ‘Interview: The Neon Demon’, Sight & Sound, British Film Institute. Available at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-sound/interviews/neon-demon-nicolas-winding-refn (Accessed 15 October 2023).

Schubart, R. (2007) Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970-2006. McFarland.

Tovoli, L. (2018) ‘Lighting Suspiria: An Interview’, American Cinematographer, ASC Press. Available at: https://theasc.com/magazine/oct2018/suspiria (Accessed 15 October 2023).

West, A. (2020) ‘Beauty and the Feast: Cannibalism in Contemporary Horror’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 48(2), pp. 78-89.