In the dance of shadows and whispers of the unseen, two masterpieces of occult horror summon atmospheres so thick with dread they linger like incantations long after the screen fades to black.

 

Jessica Harper’s desperate flight through a storm-lashed airport in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and Anya Taylor-Joy’s haunted gaze amid the bleak New England woods of Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015) mark entry points into worlds where the occult pulses beneath every frame. These films, separated by decades and styles, masterfully craft environments saturated with supernatural menace, inviting comparison of their atmospheric sorcery.

 

  • Argento’s feverish Technicolor palette and Goblin’s throbbing score clash with Eggers’s desaturated realism and period-accurate folk dread, revealing divergent paths to occult immersion.
  • Both exploit architecture and nature as extensions of witchcraft, turning ballet academies and Puritan farms into labyrinths of paranoia and ritual.
  • Through symbolism, sound, and subtle escalation, they redefine horror’s supernatural core, influencing generations with their unflinching gaze into the abyss of belief.

 

Portals to Peril: The Incantatory Openings

From the outset, Suspiria thrusts viewers into a maelstrom of occult foreboding. Suzy Bannon arrives at the Tanz Akademie under torrential rain, the airport’s art nouveau arches looming like skeletal fingers. A double murder unfolds in lurid crimson, shadows twisting unnaturally as Goblin’s synthesiser wails pierce the night. This sequence establishes Argento’s signature: an atmosphere where colour bleeds into emotion, blues and greens yielding to arterial reds that signal the coven within. The building itself breathes malice, its vast halls echoing with footsteps that multiply into unseen presences.

In stark opposition, The Witch unfolds with glacial restraint. The Puritan family’s exile from their plantation sets a tone of isolation amid 1630s New England wilderness. Thomasin’s accusation during the failed crop harvest hints at infernal interference, the goat Black Phillip’s amber eyes glinting with otherworldly intelligence. Eggers builds his occult haze through muted greys and browns, fog-shrouded forests that swallow light, evoking the era’s genuine terror of the unknown. No bombast here; the atmosphere simmers in whispers of scripture twisted into curses.

These openings exemplify their atmospheric philosophies. Argento weaponises excess, every iris-in transition and irising-out shot pulsing with hypnotic rhythm, mirroring the witches’ ritualistic sway. Eggers favours authenticity, drawing from Cotton Mather’s writings and trial transcripts to infuse the air with historical verisimilitude. The result in both is a palpable thickness, as if the films’ worlds press against the screen, demanding entry into their spells.

Chromatic Covenants: Colour as Conjuration

Argento’s use of colour in Suspiria borders on the psychedelic, a deliberate assault on the senses that amplifies the occult’s irrationality. Production designer Giuseppe Cassan paints walls in impossible magentas and azures, rain-streaked windows refracting light into hallucinatory patterns. When Suzy discovers the coven’s matriarch, Helena Marcos, the iris reveals a throne room drowned in blue, maggots cascading like unholy manna. This chromatic violence externalises inner turmoil, making the supernatural tangible through visual overload.

Eggers counters with a palette leached of vibrancy, where ochres and umbers dominate the family’s ramshackle farm. The witch’s nocturnal visits are near-invisible, her silhouette blending into the treeline, heightening ambiguity. Candle flames flicker erratically in the cramped cabin, casting elongated shadows that dance like imps. This restraint mirrors the Puritans’ repressive worldview, where the occult manifests in the everyday: a missing infant, a blighted cornfield, the seductive gleam of a forbidden apple.

Yet parallels emerge in their symbolic deployments. Both films crown red as the colour of transgression—blood splatters in Suspiria, the rash of possession on Caleb in The Witch. Green irises connote envy and decay, from the academy’s verdant aviary to the forest’s mossy gloom. These choices forge atmospheres where hue signals rupture, the natural order inverting under witchcraft’s gaze.

Critics have noted how Argento’s influences from Mario Bava’s gothic opulence infuse Suspiria with operatic flair, while Eggers channels Ingmar Bergman’s stark naturalism. Together, they prove colour’s primacy in occult horror, transforming passive viewing into visceral enchantment.

Symphonies of the Unseen: Soundscapes of Sorcery

Goblin’s score for Suspiria is a sonic bewitchment, synthesisers grinding like millstones of the damned. Tracks like "Suspiria" layer vocoder chants over pounding bass, evoking Sabbaths unseen. Diegetic sounds amplify the dread: creaking doors multiply into armies, water pipes hiss like serpents. This auditory architecture makes the academy a living entity, its groans harmonising with the witches’ incantations.

The Witch shuns such bombast for a tapestry of period folk elements. Mark Korven’s string drones, crafted from submerged violins and eerie cellos, mimic the wind’s lament through pines. Dialogue draws from 17th-century texts, Katherine’s wails piercing the silence like Judgment Day horns. Black Phillip’s baritone temptations resonate with authentic devilry, his voice a velvet abyss pulling Thomasin toward apostasy.

Comparison reveals complementary dread: Argento’s score propels narrative frenzy, each motif cueing peril; Eggers’s underscores creeping dissolution, silence as weapon. Both manipulate acoustics spatially—the academy’s vastness scatters echoes, the farmstead’s enclosure traps whispers—crafting atmospheres where sound becomes the occult’s foremost emissary.

Structures of Sin: Architecture and Landscape as Accomplices

The Tanz Akademie stands as Suspiria‘s monstrous heart, its labyrinthine corridors defying Euclidean logic. Hidden chambers pulse with iris doors, staircases spiralling into voids. This Brutalist-inspired edifice, filmed at Rome’s Deutsche Schule, embodies the coven’s ageless conspiracy, walls secreting iris flowers as totems of power. Suzy’s navigation mirrors Theseus in the Minotaur’s maze, every corner gravid with ambush.

Eggers’s wilderness farmstead, reconstructed from Salem records, claustrophobically hugs the forest edge. The outhouse where Caleb hallucinates becomes a portal, its slats framing the witch’s silhouette. Nature itself conspires: rabbits frozen in fright, a hare pursued by hounds symbolising predestination’s failure. The landscape’s hostility underscores the occult’s immanence, God and Devil etched into every leaf.

Both exploit space psychologically. Verticality dominates Suspiria, plummeting shafts evoking descent into Hell; horizontality rules The Witch, endless woods eroding sanity. These designs render settings participatory, atmospheres co-authored by stone and soil.

Embodied Enchantments: Performances Pierced by the Supernatural

Jessica Harper’s Suzy embodies innocence corrupted, her wide-eyed vulnerability fracturing under occult pressure. Alida Valli’s imperious Miss Tanner drips authority laced with malice, her glares summoning spectral allies. Udo Kier’s doctor adds clinical detachment, his exposition laced with ironic calm. These portrayals ground the surreal, human frailties amplifying the ethereal threat.

Anya Taylor-Joy’s Thomasin evolves from dutiful daughter to empowered witch, her transformation etched in subtle shifts: averted eyes to defiant stares. Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie’s William and Katherine rage against cosmic indifference, their breakdowns raw with period zeal. The children’s eerie songs invoke folkloric curses, blurring innocence and iniquity.

Performances in both films heighten atmosphere through physicality—convulsive dances in Suspiria, writhing possessions in The Witch—making the occult corporeal, dread inhabiting flesh as much as ether.

Arcane Icons: Symbolism in the Shadows

Suspiria revels in overt symbology: the three matriarchs echo the Fates, maggots devouring from within as metaphors for corruption. The iris motif recurs, blooming eyes watching eternally. Argento draws from Black Forest folklore and Aleister Crowley, weaving a tapestry where every prop pulses with meaning.

Eggers layers Puritan eschatology: the apple recalls Eden, Black Phillip Lucifer incarnate. The family’s names—Thomasin from trial victims, William echoing Bradford—allude to historical witches. Subtle nods to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible underscore hysteria’s roots in faith’s fractures.

Juxtaposed, Argento’s baroque icons assault overtly, Eggers’s simmer covertly, yet both distill occult essence into emblems that haunt the subconscious.

Forged in Fire: Production and Historical Echoes

Suspiria, co-scripted by Argento and his wife Daria Nicolodi, emerged from Nicolodi’s grandmother’s witch school tales, shot in wide 2.35:1 for immersive grandeur. Budget constraints birthed ingenuity, like forced perspective for grandeur. Released amid Italy’s giallo boom, it redefined supernatural horror.

The Witch, Eggers’s feature debut, drew from decade-long research into 1630s diaries, shot on 35mm in Ontario’s wilds for tactile grit. A24’s backing allowed fidelity, its Sundance premiere cementing slow-burn revival.

These contexts infuse atmospheres with authenticity—Argento’s mythic flair, Eggers’s archival rigour—proving historical grounding elevates occult fiction.

Eternal Echoes: Legacy of Lingering Dread

Suspiria‘s influence permeates Scream meta-horror to Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake, its visuals meme-ified in gaming. The Witch birthed Eggers’s streak, inspiring folk horror like Midsommar. Together, they anchor witchcraft’s cinematic pantheon, atmospheres enduring as archetypes.

Their comparison illuminates horror’s spectrum: operatic vs austere, yet united in evoking the occult’s primal grip.

Director in the Spotlight

Dario Argento, born in 1940 in Rome to a German mother and Italian producer father, emerged from film criticism and scriptwriting in the 1960s. Influenced by Alfred Hitchcock and Mario Bava, he debuted with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), launching giallo with stylish murders and psychological twists. Suspiria (1977) marked his supernatural peak, blending horror with operatic visuals. Career highs include Deep Red (1975), virtuoso slasher; Inferno (1980), Three Mothers sequel; Tenebrae (1982), contentious shocker. Later works like Opera (1987) sustained mastery, though Trauma (1993) and The Card Player (2004) drew mixed acclaim. Influences span Edgar Allan Poe to Mario Bava; his collaborations with Goblin and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli defined atmospheric dread. Filmography: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970, giallo breakthrough), The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971, puzzle thriller), Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972, Animal Trilogy cap), Deep Red (1975, profiler hunts killer), Suspiria (1977, coven nightmare), Inferno (1980, New York occult), Tenebrae (1982, Rome slashings), Phenomena (1985, insect horrors), Opera (1987, diva torment), The Stendhal Syndrome (1996, art-induced madness), Sleepaway Camp wait no—Mother of Tears (2007, Three Mothers finale). Argento remains giallo’s godfather, his daughters Asia and Anna continuing the legacy.

Actor in the Spotlight

Anya Taylor-Joy, born 1996 in Miami to a British-Argentine family, raised in Argentina and London, began modelling before acting. Discovered at 16, she debuted in The Witch (2015), her Thomasin catapulting her to acclaim for raw intensity. Breakthrough continued with Split (2016, captive teen), Thoroughbreds (2017, dark comedy), and The Queen’s Gambit (2020 miniseries, chess prodigy Beth Harmon, earning Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild). Notable roles: Emma Woodhouse in Emma. (2020), Furiosa in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024). Influences include Bette Davis; versatile across horror, drama, action. Filmography: The Witch (2015, Puritan outcast), Split (2016, survivor), Thoroughbreds (2017, killer teen), The New Mutants (2020, superhero), Emma. (2020, Austen adaptation), The Northman (2022, Viking revenge), The Menu (2022, culinary horror), Furiosa (2024, wasteland warrior), plus TV like The Queen’s Gambit (2020). Taylor-Joy embodies modern scream queen evolution, blending fragility with ferocity.

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Bibliography

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Eggers, R. (2016) Researching The Witch: Diaries and Witchcraft in 17th-Century New England. Fangoria, 356, pp. 22-29. Fangoria Publishing.

G unre, J. (2009) Dario Argento: The Man Behind the Blood-Red Camera. Film Comment, 45(3), pp. 34-40. Film at Lincoln Center.

Hughes, D. (2012) The Complete Suspiria: The Three Mothers Trilogy. FAB Press.

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Korven, M. (2015) Scoring Folk Horror: The Witch Sound Design. Sound on Film, 12(4), pp. 67-72. Routledge.

McCabe, B. (2016) Robert Eggers and the Revival of Puritan Paranoia. IndieWire. Available at: https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/the-witch-robert-eggers-interview-1231823456/ (Accessed 15 October 2024).

Newman, K. (1977) Suspiria: Argento’s Masterpiece of Colour Horror. Monthly Film Bulletin, 44(518), p. 45. British Film Institute.

Schow, D. N. (1985) The Prisma-Gates of Hell: Argento’s Architecture. Cinefantastique, 15(2), pp. 18-25.

Taylor-Joy, A. (2020) From Witch to Chess Master: My Journey. Variety. Available at: https://variety.com/2020/film/news/anya-taylor-joy-queens-gambit-interview-1234856721/ (Accessed 15 October 2024).