I want to tell you something. I used to wonder about Rose's ravings, her nervousness, her fear of death, the myth of the three mothers. What's that? She has a fixation.
Three Latin names. Mater Suspiriorum, the mother of sighs. Mater Lacrimorum, the mother of tears. And Mater Tenebrorum, the mother of darkness.
Hello and welcome to Hello This is the Doomed Show. I am Disco Richard. I am here with Disco Simon and we're going to be burning it up at the Disco Inferno. Hi Simon.
Yes, it's an A24, 420 blaze it. Oh, wait, it's not back then, is it? No, I have a bit of crepitation here. I know we're going to...
started on this podcast we have a lot to talk about but i know about you man i do not know what price we may have to pay for uh what is it breaking what we podcasters call selentium what do we call it mute um it's muddy
yeah yeah that'll do i don't know um but we need to talk about rob zombies the third motherfuckers oh boy yes
But seriously, folks, it's Inferno 1980. We're continuing to talk about the Third Mother trilogy. Thanks to our pal Glenn Del Rossi for inspiring.
making this happen. Uh, six hours from now and we're done with this episode, we'll probably be less grateful. Whoops. Uh, but.
This is Dario Argento's Inferno, written by Dario Argento. Dardano Sacchetti, which we'll talk about his actual involvement later. Good old Thomas De Quincey.
You know, the confessions of an opiometer guy. But more importantly, our uncredited pal, Daria Nicolotti, who decided not to fight for her actual credit on this.
But I think she should have. Maybe they had said, okay, you have to fight a bunch of cats, but if you lose, you go uncredited. And then it looked like she lost. Or rather, her stunt double lost.
Yes, quite. Yes, so spoilers if you haven't seen Inferno, because, oh my god, I have to play this trailer that I found. Oh boy, it's going to take me about a month to recover from this.
This is two minutes. Two minutes of VHS trailer. I don't know what company. I have no idea what company this is that did this nonsense. But both, it just shows every surprise.
and the whole movie in two minutes. Here's this insanity. If she had only known, Rose would never have moved in here. Rose never would have known.
if she hadn't read that book. Is that story just made up? Or is there some truth to it? Did it upset you?
It's nothing more than a book written by some alchemist. Lots of books have been written for the damned. But Rose knows now, and she's trapped here in a deadly inferno.
I used to wonder about Rose's ravings, her nervousness, her fear of death, the myth of the three mothers. What's that? Rose read about them in an old book.
It talks as if it were a true story. Rose thinks that someone living in this building... No, I can't explain it. She'll have... Leave us bones beneath this house of hell.
the land upon which the three houses have been constructed, will eventually become deathly and plagued. And that is the first key to the mother's secret. That book mentions a horrible odor, for example.
And all around here, there's a very strange, bittersweet smell. You got the first clue, Rose. Want to try again?
The second key is hidden alive. Two for two, Rose.
Now your brother's search leads him to the third and final secret. You are looking for me. Just like this, sister. This is what you wanted. I'm coming to get you.
Haven't you understood? But men call us by a single name. A name which strikes fear into everyone's heart. Death! Death! Death! Didn't your mother tell you never to play with...
Inferno, if you can't stand the heat, stay out. Okay, speaking of VHS, I have a VHS plot description.
which I don't know where I got it from. I have no idea. I forgot which tape I got this off of, off the World Wide Web. The master of screen horror, Dario Argento, directs his most controversial work to date in Inferno.
Unavailable since 1982, written and directed by Argento, this classic movie plunges deep into suspense and terror as a young woman becomes involved in the occult, which inhabits the crumbling neo-gothic mansion in which she stays.
Did you like how I pronounced a cult there? Love it. Thank you. And it continues. The terrifying descent into unseen horror. Wait, it's unseen. How did they film it? The terrifying descent into unseen horror.
also affects her brother in Italy and friends and neighbors of them both. These people have friends?
The most disturbing movie from the director of such horror classics as Cat of Nine Tales, Deep Red, Suspiria, and Creepers is a long-awaited addition to the Master's work available on video.
I know the tape from Key video, it was two long columns of text. I'm like, I'm not reading that shit. I'll do the short one. No, thanks.
But yes, what are we else? Oh, we'll run through our characters real quick before we jump into this plot. First up is, of course, Leigh McCloskey, who plays Mark Elliott.
Oh, and that reminds me before I forget, shout out to Mark. Thank you. Oh, yes, that's right. We have the other Mark. Hopefully he doesn't have ants in his apartment. Yeah, totally. Don't follow him.
Lee McCloskey, they keep saying he's known for his work in soap operas. Seen Dallas? He was a TV actor. Couple of Star Trek.
credits uh that you know when you get thumbnails on imdb first things jumping out but sorry carry on but it wasn't until well after um inferno that he was actually on santa barbara santa barbara it was on for
Like less than two years. And he was in 249 episodes. Oh, wow. That's like one of those you work every day of the week, probably. Yeah. Oh, my God, Simon. Oh, my God. So Santa Barbara.
Okay, it was on for nine years. He was just on it for two years. Brain just exploded. In nine years, there was 2,400 episodes. Or 2,100 episodes. What the fuck?
He was in the 80s sort of classic called Just One of the Guys from 1985, which for some 80s kids was their sexual awakening. The poster, I think I can see why.
But he was also in a little horror movie I haven't seen for many years called Cameron's Closet. Oh, this rings a bell. Yeah, very unusual little movie. But Mark is our music student, and he is brother to...
Rose Elliott, played by Irene Miracle, she was in Puppet Master, 1989, Watchers 2 from 1990. But her first Italian film...
was a little movie called Night Train Murders. Oh, boy. It's back again. Oh, boy. Telling you, man, don't make a fat Christmas episode.
Oh, folks, let's do our Suspiria episode for that story. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, she's going to be the one who is studying about the third, the three witches, and she's going to cause a lot of people's deaths. Maybe she shouldn't have done that. But yes, he's in Rome.
In music school. She's in New York in, um, fuck around and find out school. Yeah. Sounds like it. We've got Sarah played by Eleonora. Eleonora. Oh my God.
Eleonora Giorgi. I'm glad you tried saying that before me. And yeah, rest in peace. She passed away just at the beginning of this month, actually, aged 71.
She had a bit part in Black Belly of the Tarantula from 1971. I need to rewatch that. I've only seen it one, so I didn't catch her at the time. According to some trivia I read that she was a big get.
for uh this movie she was in a bunch of stuff that was um very popular in italy so that was a a big deal um and irene miracle was just coming off of um what was her big movie that she did right midnight express
Yeah, Midnight Express. Hey, there's a fun one. I'll tell you a weirdo double feature I had after I'd been at a wedding all day. Went back to my friend's house who picked me up after I've been day drinking all day. We went back and watched.
the house by the cemetery on his projector, which he'd never seen, the mutual friend of ours, and followed it with that, even though I was trying to push them to watch The Shining instead because, well, that made more sense. But it was an interesting experience. I'm glad I saw it. It's not something I would have gone out of my way.
to watch if he hadn't sold the system. I'm glad I saw it and that score is fucking great. Totally. Oh my god. It's cuckoo.
Speaking of pronouncing names, I'll let you go this one. Although we're actually here in the film, so it's probably easier than the previous one to pronounce the character played by Daria Nicolodi. Oh, yes, we'll do that. I can't think of a character from...
Oh, I don't know, like fucking Rebecca or something like that. Is it Elise de Longval? Elise de Longval Adlai? Yeah. But on the interview with Daria on the Arrow Blu-ray, she...
I think she says, oh, you're actually meant to say it, and I've slept since then. Sorry, so I totally forgot. Dude, I have no idea. I was going to say Longvale. Longvale. But yeah, she's our very delicate neighbor.
who's got some strange illness, unknown. She seems like a...
a character out of like a Victorian, like a swooning kind of like a character, but she's awesome in this. Oh my God. She's always awesome.
Yeah, I was thinking, and we'll get to when we get to it, but she appears in the film pretty much halfway through it and then she's in it for about 15 minutes and she's gone. But it just, you know, what a great fucking actor she was. You look at her in this compared to like Deep Red.
Now she embodies such a more timid character in this compared to somebody who is the complete opposite of that in Deep Red, and both so convincingly. And either way, you can't take your eyes off her. She's just incredible. Yeah, absolutely.
Next up is Sasha, I'm going to say Pitof. He plays Kazanian, the Kazanian bookseller. He's amazing. This is a Swiss actor.
He needs crutches. He's not doing well. He looks very sickly and old and grumpy. He's the bookseller.
This is where we're going to find yet another copy of this third mother book. Good lord. What a distribution deal they had for this stupid book. Fuckers. He has like three copies, I think, still left until somebody pinches it, obviously.
that's that's not even the overstock he has like three boxes of them in the back probably uh but this actor was in a movie i i just i had to tap out on because of the sleaze oh same year yeah patrick still lives 1980
uh i need to just get over it and finish it but it's just i haven't seen it but i'm aware of its reputation i've not seen the original either so uh i know of the vigilance in it so i'm very hesitant
Oh, is it with that poor lady who's the name I'm forgetting now who has horrible faces in every movie she's in? Is it her? Oh, I have no idea. I'm going to have to look this up now because I'm pretty sure it is. Do it.
Next up is Alita Vallee. Plays Carol, the caretaker, or as I call her, the carotaker. Sorry, I was right. Yeah, it's Maria Angela Jordana. Okay, and she gets...
I'm guessing it's, sir, because who else would it be, really? Sure, sure. Poor lady. But sorry. No, no, no. I was curious. So she gets her face melted off in every movie? Yeah. Or something equally hideous, yeah. Poor thing.
So yeah, Alita Valley, as we know, she's in good old Suspiria. And she's back just doing her thing. She's so unique. Such a freaking...
like presence on screen. She's incredible. Even just like kind of a flashing her teeth in her eyes. That just like, we'll just like cut through everything else in the shoppers, bro. Oh boy. Yeah. Next up is Veronica Lazar.
She plays the nurse and she has a very important other role in this, which we'll get to that when we get to that. Unless you watch the trailer, then you fucking know. I know her best from, of course, the beyond.
and Last Tango in Paris from 1972. But I forgot that she's also briefly in the Stendhal Syndrome, 1996. Right, yeah, I just sent this on here. It's a long time since I've seen it, so I never...
call her either speaking of fun movies hey uh but yeah i love her i could watch her do anything she's just so and there's something about her i can't take my eyes off her just like freaking daria nicolodi
Absolutely. Was it after she'd passed away, I think, in one of the Fangs of Joy zines? You wrote a tribute to her, I think. Yes, there was a tribute to her. I can't remember if I wrote it or somebody else did. I'm pretty sure you wrote it.
Oh, it's been a long time. Folks, my old zine has been gone for a very long time. It was a lot of work. It was a lot of work. Next up, we have our boy, Gabrielle Lavia.
He plays Carlo, and when I say our boy, he's not me and Simon's son. Simon and I have yet to produce an heir. Hello? Yeah, Gabriel Olavia, he was a get-to because he...
This is his first acting gig on film in five years. He'd become a very renowned stage actor by this time. So he gets to play a very thankless role.
You know, he's fun as always, but I could see him like in the makeup and doing his big death scene. Like I came back for this.
Well, I didn't seem to put him off because after – sorry, after a couple of TV credits after this, his next film was – and I never know how to say this – was Zader? Yeah, Zader, dude. Oh, man. Which may come up again while we're talking about this. It might.
I'm excited. Love that movie. It's one of my all-time favorites.
Of course, I'm going to skip some people because I want to get through every single person, but we got to give a shout out to Ania Pieroni, the music student. And I put in parentheses from hell. Her big scene is incredible.
She has no dialogue, but she's absolutely magical. Love her. From House by the Cemetery, of course. Of course, yeah. Yeah. This cast is not epic. I'm like jumping all over the place here. But what do you want to mention just in relation to?
And forgive me if I sort of as an appendix to this episode, people might want to, if you've not heard it already, go and listen to our episode on the church, which will come up. Oh, yeah, do that. And I'll try not to repeat myself too much, hopefully. I've not listened.
to that in a while. Oh, don't worry about it. That was years ago. The guy who plays, he's got two names in this. It's introduced by the nurse who, spoiler alert, turns out to be the motherfucker of darkness.
She introduces him as Professor Arnold, but he turns out to be Varelli. He was also later in the church as the bishop.
Oh, yeah. Thank you for remembering that. This is a Fyodor Chali. Oh, my God. Fyodor Chaliapin, Jr.
Yeah, he's some very interesting credits, all stuff from like those to like Moonstruck to the name of the rose. So, yeah, he was.
How appropriate that he's in the name of the road. Yeah. That's hilarious. Absolutely. I made the connection. No, it's all good. You want some monks? I'll give you some monks.
Damn. All right, folks. So we're not going to do the entire plot because we'd be here all freaking week. But we're going to do some nice talking here. The movie opens up. It's New York in April. And our pal.
Rose, she'd be researching. She'd be reading that third motherfucker book. And when they show the building that she discovers the location of the third mother, I call it the House of Synth.
oh yeah love it the blast of music so good i love um out from like the first shot as well was sort of you know
Drop some clues or whatever, some nice foreshadowing next to her set of keys. Is it like a letter opener that Mark will end up using to pry open the floorboards later on? Oh, yeah. Nice, nice, nice.
She lives next door to Kazanian Antiques. And I wrote in my notes, our deals make you Kazanian.
She talks to Mr. Kruzanian about this third mother bullshit. He's not helpful? No, his tone is very, especially towards the end, is kind of like...
A bit standoffish or even just like, you know, getting the fuck out almost is sort of the subtext. So he's a New Yorker is what you're saying. Yes. Sorry, folks. I live in Florida.
We got enough of you New Yorkers over here. Jeffrey, get your snowbird ass out of Florida. He would never come. He would never knowingly come here. Oh, dear.
Good evening. I'd like to talk to you about that book. Which one? The one that you sold me. The Three Mothers. Have you read it?
Some of it Is that story just made up or is there some truth to it? Did it upset you? It's nothing more than a book written by some alchemist
But yeah, he indulges her briefly, at least, and a little chat until he sort of cuts her off. And I just, again, from the office film with the subtle atmosphere and...
Before he sort of closes the door, there's so many shots in this where you, it's literally, if ever a film, you know, like Suspiria's ever, every frame a painting, this is one. Oh, yeah.
and um we'll get into but you know like the differences of the color palette and the aesthetics or whatever in the look i'll just say right now in some ways i may sort of aesthetically prefer this uh this it's kind of like a slightly more controlled palette especially like the sort of blues and
and reds and specifically we'll talk about that and it gets complicated especially because with the home video history of this film and like the various versions in different sort of color timings but um
Well, actually, I'll just read this now, if you don't mind, if I can find it wherever the fuck it's gone. About the look of this from now, this is on a page.
from a website called originaltrilogy.com, and it was to do with, because now there's like a 35mm, full case kind of a 35mm Italian print, which is out there, if you know where to look.
Well, I'll just say it because this is like, I'm not going to encourage piracy or anything here. If you have an actual copy of the film and...
you can't find this and you want to watch it, just try and find me on Facebook or whatever. Send me a message and I'll try and help you find it. But again, only if you own it already. So there's a quote from a guy who's a Danish Argento expert called Thomas Rostock.
I believe he's on a commentary for Deep Red. There's like two paragraphs here, I'll just try and read it quickly. So he says,
seeing it's on the big screen by way of an ex of the excellent uk print in circulation around 1995 was a truly an astonishing experience for me totally blew me away in a way suspirio couldn't even begin to match i must say the anchor bay dvd of 2000 actually
much closer to Romano Albani's intended look than the new MGM Fox. Romano Albani, along with Argento, worked hard to achieve a fuller more lush look than Suspiria.
Using in particular the two new lighting colour gels named Rose, happily enough, and Deep Blue, introduced into the market in 1979. In short, Rose and Deep Blue are the governing colours of Inferno.
However, the MGM Fox transfer suppresses exactly these two colours to the point of oblivion rose, a dull, faded hue deep blue. If one is aware of literally the hours it can take to light different colour gels in a film set,
It is especially disheartening to witness MGM Fox's negligent attitude towards the intended colour-specific look of Inferno.
But perhaps even worse is the fact that this is the only transfer making the rounds to all colours of the world, commercially through MGM's cost-efficient licensing.
We'll stand as a meta representation of the real beautiful and haunting colour scheme that is at the very heart and soul of Inferno.
One can voice many a fault about William Lustig's academic Blue Underground releases, but on the visual colour correctional side of things, yes, yet to make a mistake. So that's it, and there are some caveats to the Blue Underground because there's some odd bits in that, and really...
the point is it doesn't seem to be a definitive home video release of this conspicuous bias absence of every i think i said this on the suspiro episode every film
including the five days now, which I actually watched finally, uh, between recording, uh, episode and this every major form of is between.
read with the crystal plumage sorry just every film even and opera is now on 4k apart from inferno it's just it's criminal because uh he said in a review of uh one of the blu-rays of this there's an argument to be made this might be the most beautifully shot
horror film in colour ever made, and that even includes Suspiria. Damn. Nice. Very nice.
coming back to and this is like a case in point like i said every frame of painting one of my favorite shots is when rose she's like stood in the doorway before kazanian closes and even when it's closed as well um how her hair it is literally more like a rose sort of ready
it's not it's red but it isn't maybe it is that rose color and there's a sort of blue behind it it's just so fucking gorgeous yeah nice hey time to go urban spelunking so so she you know
Gets a clue that the keys that she needs are below her feet. She decides to go and look underneath the building.
Now, to that, sorry, just backing up in the beginning, but where she's reading from the three mothers, she sat on the floor. And I think at the end...
Maybe the repeat the line, the keys under the sole of your shoes. I think she even looks at her shoes at that moment, just as Dario's director's credits coming up. Maybe she stepped on something. That's New York.
Yeah, exactly. But yeah, so she goes underneath the building to look for these keys, or to look for clues or whatever, and the whole thing is flooded. Someone needs to call Joe the plumber.
I'm glad you mentioned the beyond because I was going to say, do you think she found Arthur under there looking for keys too? Of course, this actress was a synchronized swimmer.
It alarmed the crew how long she could hold her breath. That's a little trivia for you there. They were like, is she dead? But no, she could just freaking hold her breath for a thousand years.
Oh, people wondering if she was dead or dying. That comes to part of the trivia I'll mention later. Oh boy. So if she drops her, her, she dropped her apartment keys down there.
I guess that's what they are, yeah, and with this very interesting key ring on it. I'm not quite sure what it's meant to be. It looks like an eye made of snakes or something like that. That would make sense because she's got an evil eye necklace on as well.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. She's protected. So she goes swimming down in this frickin' insanity underneath the place, the murky waters of this delightful building.
She runs into some bodies. Is it one body or is it two bodies? I'm confused. There's one body, but how it's cut, all the various different angles, you could be forgiven for thinking it's more than one. It's so almost comically persistent in it.
It strikes this great balance. It's kind of almost comic and the look on the corpse, but it's also bloody terrifying at the same time. And it's a call ahead to Phenomena.
Yes, absolutely. That waterlogged bod. Now, who the fuck is this bod he's supposed to be? Do we have any clue?
No, I mean, is it just like a previous tenant who also has been diving into the same books and has looked up there? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I guess. I was always wondering if this was a thing, because, you know, this movie is very weird.
Oh, there is some, I mean, there is some stuff that was cut out of this because, well, actually I'll just mention the trivia bit now. So apparently Ari Miracle, she was losing some hair because of like a bad fever she had. Now this led Argento to think that she had some kind of terminal illness.
and that she was not...
going to be able to finish the film so apparently cut down her scenes because initially when she was cast she said oh you'll be the lead in this and obviously we saw how that panned out now some talk i think in there's a great video q a from a screening i think it's the new beverly
cinema with tim lucas introduces it and uh desiring miracle and keith emerson who is fucking hilarious um nice they talk about that she had they filmed a scene where she finds a body in the park
But that was, I think, apparently cut. What? Yeah. Bless. Yeah, there's a lot that was cut. We'll get into some of the insanity of this.
Because when I found out how long the original screenplay was, my jaw dropped, but I'll save that for later. Interesting. We see some witchy black gloves making their first cameo. We'll see some more of that. After she gets away from the body...
And gets away from, gets her keys back. And she's just soaking wet going back to her place. We hear some whispering voices plodding against her. But we must go to Rome. We cut to Rome at the same time.
And my favorite thing about opera class when I was in Italy is it was cat friendly.
So I got to bring my cat. And this guy was distracting me with his mustache. And I was staring at him and staring at him. And then he looked like he was going to throw up. That's right, folks. I'm Anya Peroni.
Was it just me, or do you think Lee McCluskey aged while he was making this film? Because in the first shot, I've got a note where I'm like, I'm sorry, bro, but you're not fooling anybody with that mustache. He looks about 12 in this scene. I know.
Working with an Italian crew will age an American. Well, that bit at the end, again, we'll come to, you know, where I think he had an injury. So, yes, Lee McCloskey's got his big, chonky headphones on.
And he's sitting next to his pal, Sarah. And what ends up happening is he's got a letter from his sister. Can I just say, Will, with his mustache fashion accessories? He's also got some very nice ties.
Oh, yeah, dude. Very nice ties. Folks, doomedmoviethon at gmail.com. I'll explain that joke to you. Yeah. So I think you're listening to Verity. I think Verity is a big.
The big music in this, right? Yeah, a piece I've got to write down from Nabucco. Yeah, yeah. Gets played a couple times in this.
I don't want to get ahead, but Verdi will kind of come back in a Keith Emerson soundtrack cue soon as well. Thank you. He reads a letter from his sister, but he's feeling sickly because the girl...
with the cat is staring at him. Now, of course, for years, I thought she was the third mother just hanging out in Rome, going to music class, but no, Daria Nicolotti says that is not the third mother.
She says that is just a witch that is obviously in on the whole thing. And she's trying to keep Mark from getting involved, probably. That's what I think. Interesting. I mean...
yeah i see it either way to be honest in my head canon it's a bit different because she just i just think if you were going to get anybody to play that well i don't know like really thinking
let's think about this like if you were to visualize between the um you know mother of size and suspiria to mother of darkness and this how the mother of tears would really come and we know it panned out in mother of tears sure uh without i'll let you and um jeffrey
yes when but you know basically what she was like some kind of supermodel or something yeah gorgeous but yeah oh my god any of peroni is stunning like well stop what you're doing yeah yeah
No slouch yourself to say the very flippant least. So I wrote in my notes, hey, Mark, she is definitely not cursing you right now. So he leaves, and of course...
Sarah gets the letter and this cuts to the progressive rock taxi. Love it. And I'd ask you a question about this scene. Is it just me? And I may have mentioned this before to you.
This, when I first saw it on Blu-ray, and it startles me every time, because I've never seen this in any other film, where there's something about, and I was trying to read up on this, just...
see how it would work i think there's some phenomena of like chromatic aberration or something i think was called where to me it looks 3d almost in like 2d film it looks like this image is um luciano tavoli said he was trying to do this in susperia and
i i don't know to me they didn't quite achieve it in quite striking the ways they did here it literally styles me every time it looks like 3d on a 2d image uh the combination of like i don't know is it the blue and red with like the flashes of light behind
her and how she's maybe sat in the taxi cab or whatever it's just it's incredible nice nice i wrote in my notes she says take me to the library and step on it
Which is actually a quote from David Foster Wallace. Classic. She gets to the library and it's one of my favorite libraries in a movie. Oh my God, this library.
Oh, this came up on Twitter recently, actually, this library. You may have, did you see where this was? No, I did not. Let me, oh, I've got to log back into, sorry, I refuse to call it X, but let's not go there. It's called Twitter.
Yeah, exactly. It'll always be Twitter. I don't care what Lone Mollusk says. Exactly. So a guy called... adam scovel on twitter who has written a few books on like folk horror and the like and self-professed uh film location nerd a few days yeah yeah he was um
I'll just read his tweet. He says, I was admittedly there for a different job, but it was amazing to see the Bibliotheca Angelica today, the sheer wealth of volume for this breathtaking architecture. Though I did snap some angles from when it was used by Dario Argento for Inferno 1918, naturally.
And he's Adam Scoville on Twitter if you want to have a look at his photos. Oh, another note about this library. I would be remiss if I didn't mention this. I think I told you I found a 420 reference in this film.
Oh, firstly, when she gets out of the taxi, she like pricks a finger on something that has been placed there as the taxi driver in League. Scary. There's a quote from somebody else. Sorry, I just want to put it about Sleeping Beauty.
on this which you may have got this um in your um i know i'm glad you said i didn't write it down there's a quote from this is some great uh another great twitter accounts me called sarah makes people watch things oh yes Follow.
Oh, God, yeah. Capsule reviews are just incredible. So she's got a quote here from Argento's Sphere book. It says,
parallel world, enchanted and evil, from which she will never be able to return. Which, of course, reminds me of the perfume of the lady in black. Oh, yeah, of course, with the tennis racket. Yep, yep, yep.
Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant. So there's this, what would you call like a, what do they call them? You know, we have like the, like a stone outside the building with something written on it. What's the fucking name for that? Phallus.
Thank you. We'll go with that. I'm going to mix that really loud in case people are listening to it out on speakers and be like, whoa, Jesus.
Oh, please do. So written on this phallus, as I say, he says, and I neglected to translate it all. It says, Bibliotheca Photosophica Fonda. Sorry, it's not Fonda. Fondazione. Ooh.
The last word. This is the key bit. I did translate. It means hours. This has the weirdest opening times I have ever seen for anything. This is 8.13 to 4.20. Blaze it.
I shit you not. What? Did they close then to go and, you know, burn baby burn disco and fern in the basement? 813 is the area code if you're calling my number, y'all.
Really? Yep. Dude, and I'm always 420 blazing. Synchronicity. I call it the mother of freaking dank chronic. Oh, the mother of darkness, yes.
Oh my god, folks, of course, as always, we recommend our Idle Hands episode. I think it's practically a primer at this point for every episode we record. You can listen to us talking about marijuana for like a half hour.
Get a contact tie off it, hopefully. It's so dumb. Anyway. It's Cuckoo. Anyway.
She's walking through the library, and oh my god, my favorite patron of the library ever is the girl with the frizzy hair smiling in her. Holy shit. Goosebumps.
We get people like that in my library all the time. Oh, brilliant. I wish.
i wish to for you you just see like the whites of her eyes or something in a grin it's just such a great image i think it is currently my profile picture on facebook and has been a few times i think it's always been my one on instagram i don't think i've ever changed it
So she wants to check out a copy of the third mother, the three mothers book. And the librarian's like, oh yeah, it's right behind you, dude.
oh i think i so and i love how he's just like nodding off and then wakes her when she appears and this moment always gets me because i i i basically had this happen to me once uh not with there was no snoozing librarian or anything but i was in so it was
quite into the books of Carlos Castaneda at the time. And I was up to, I think it was Tales of Power was the next book I was looking for. And I was in the charity bookstore that I used to.
volunteering and it was just at the back of my mind i guess and i turned around and it was literally fucking there weird yeah yeah exactly so that this i think this is one reason i like buzz off this film so much because it really
gives that sense of this sort of magical kind of universe sort of thing. Oh, yeah, totally. Totally. Looking for something? No. Yes. I'm looking for an old book.
Well, what book would you like? Its title is The Three Mothers. Yes, The Three Mothers. Why, it should be there, right behind you. But now it's time to go library spelunking. She goes down.
into the depths of the library and typical to all libraries. There's a laboratory underneath. Of course. For Al. Do you know Al? Alchemist? Alchemist.
Hey, come on. He's got his pots of stew going. So he's got rabbit. He's got rabbit stew, turkey stew, beef stew, rat stew, cat stew, what have you.
If this was Suspiria, he'd have some bat stew. It would all be ended up going down the toilet anyway eventually, wouldn't it?
So the thing about alchemists is they're fucking stupid. No, I just want to say something weird there. No. So this alchemist, he, he, okay. He is stupid. Like he lives forever, but he doesn't like brew up some moisturizer for his hands.
Dumbass. But yeah, so of course she shows up where she's not supposed to be and it would have been fine, but she had a copy of that third mother and he starts chasing her. Why do you have that book, asshole?
And I wrote in my notes that she's chased by Christopher Lee from whipping the body. Yes. We'll be talking about Mario Bava later, folks. Absolutely. She escapes, and she goes...
back home and we meet elevator sports coat guy and this is gabrielle labia as carlo um he totally thinks he's gonna get laid oh my god it's so cute because who could resist him he's
Just like a male slut, I guess, hanging around elevators. I don't know. He agrees to accompany her back to her apartment. She's scared. Doesn't want to be alone. Then we cut to paper dolls being cut by the witchy black-gloved hand.
I love it. And it made me think, because I just recently, when I re-watched this to take notice, I just watched The Monkey. And it's kind of almost like sort of anticipates that, you know, cutting the heads off what it sets in motion.
Nice. Nice. What I really like about this is we get a lot of trippy stuff here. In particular, the hanging woman. Yes. So this was supposed to be more elaborate.
There's a scene I'll talk about in the trivia that was very elaborate. They had to cut because they could not figure out how to do it with the budget they had. But we see this woman hanging and she's supposed to be part of a series of...
events that are triggered by this doll cutting thing and it's just one of my favorite moments in the movie because it's it's a really important thing we're never going to learn about like we'll never know what that was about
Ever. But we see a lizard getting his moth on, chewing on a moth, which the moth is the real victim of this movie. Absolutely.
So there's a very strange moment that blew my freaking mind. Folks, when you watch this next time.
Look at Carlo's frickin' face when the power goes out. Yes. He makes the weirdest face, because I think they're trying to make it seem like he's in on it.
Yeah. They're throwing some stuff around, but the way they chose to have him.
do that little red herring is very funny. Yeah, and it's just like slow head turn. I think it's just something about Gabriel Levia's expression, and I got this re-watching Zeta last week, how he just almost permanently looks pissed off.
it's kind of there's kind of a bit of that energy going on it's like you know fucking electricity board or fucking students not paying the rent again now i'm gonna have to go and like put a uh another coin in the meter for them or something cheap bastards well when you're
When you're being dragged down the street by a freaking construction vehicle and your head's hitting the curb, you're not going to be happy. No. Then we have the...
Definitely not at all giallo pair of murders in this, this giallo. Now folks, we joked, we joke, we love the joke about, you know, Suspiria being a giallo because it's, we love.
We know it's not, but it's funny to drive people insane by acting like it is just to see. I just love like people get so incensed by saying giallo with the context of these films at all. But come on, dude. These are these.
murders that happen to carlo and sarah are just so giallo it hurts they really are i mean and um it's a bit like although maybe we've got the um
supernatural stuff sort of going against them already um in the spirit episode you quote somebody saying uh like suspicions are yellow until it's not it's kind of a similar thing going on here i suppose the death of
carlo is very funny he has the knife through his throat you think he's up to some shenanigans and you think he's dead but then he's not and then he shows up with the knife in his throat and it's so comedic like him him asking for help is like basically
pinning her to the ground and bleeding on her it's very funny oh my god but then we find out that man sarah knows how to make an entrance boy when she falls through the thing
She's the one that falls through the fabric, like the fabric tear. Yeah, you see maybe a bit of a hand creeping through, maybe the blood first, and then she falls around, and there's another gray.
Like, either synth or, like, organ swell or, like, stinger. Yeah. In your soundtrack. Falls through the curtain and says, oh my god, it's gorgeous.
Oh, and it's funny, when I re-watched this, I've watched this twice for this episode. One was to take notes off the Blue Underground Blu-ray, and I re-watched it last night with that aforementioned 4K scale of the 35mm print. Unlike the one for Suspiria where... the dropped
transitions or drop frames somebody's gone in and they've they've filled in those bits i guess because they were quite bigger than missing chunks they filled them in with bits from the blu-ray this is just the raw the raw print so there are bits which have not been uh
re-stitched in from the sources which makes some of the transitions kind of comical at times
like um you know talking on the phone of although like you miss the end of their phone conversation i think of like oh what's going on and then you know abrupt cuts but the important thing about this scene anyway is we've seen a few
title cards or whatever you know announcing where we are in april or whether we're in new york
or Rome or whatever but this has to be the most important one in the film where it says you know to clear up any mystery or head scratching we might have been doing lets us know that it is indeed in New York the same night in April
Gotcha. There isn't a time like over the phone of like, what, eight hours or a day? Nope, nope, nope. It's exactly the same time. Yes. Time zones be damned. Sis is in trouble. Rose is in trouble.
She's being chased around. She cuts her hand. What did she cut her hand on? I can't remember.
It's the glass door knocker at the top half of it comes off and it leaves a really nasty cash in her hand. And it's another one of those moments where you'll get it with the locking doors where the supernatural force or whatever seems to be almost influencing an animal.
objects that's cool we get more like whispering and the silhouetted people yes and i said somebody call the freaking landlord and fix these windows god yeah
So, yeah, so she's running around and being pursued. And then she gets.
is this one is she the one who gets the you think i've watched this in my lifetime i swear she's the one who gets i'm gonna cut this part the the she gets killed by the window the witch yeah it's almost like guillotine sort of window and the uh
I knew she did, but I just couldn't think of it. I mean, this film, even when you've seen it a lot, it is a bit of a labyrinth you can almost get lost in. Well, yeah, exactly.
and yeah it's easily done so don't worry um the whole lead up to this so there's so many great sustained set pieces uh light suspense sets pieces and this and this
might be the sort of apex of it possibly certainly for like how long it goes on but not in a way that overstays its welcome now there's some weirdness of there's like an exterior shot of like a shop over kazanian shop where it's like how the fuck has she ended up here
You know, the bizarre, almost maybe house of leaves sort of architecture. Sure, sure. She's been, I mean, yeah, maybe that's it. She's been, I don't know, teleported over there.
This bit before she enters another laboratory, my favourite bit of this, where she walks down the stairway, sees some almost feline yellow eyes staring at her, which I found out this was a Mario Barber painting.
like drawn on like black velvet or something. That's just an incredible image. And then when she starts walking down the corridor and there's this great like 180 sort of whip pan or something to, again, more creepy shadows.
veiled under all these layers of, I don't know, like plastic and just shit that's like, because this building's completely decrepit. Oh, man.
The city and the county inspectors have not taken a look at this fucking place in a long time. They'd be getting bribed not to come by. They probably have, yeah. So after she dies, horribly, by the way, Mark arrives.
To the building. And he meets the ex-ballet teacher. Oh, yes. Who's now like, you know, you know, like running this freaking building. And I don't know why I wrote this in my notes. Musicology.
Never heard of her. Because Mark studies musicology. I don't know why I wrote that. I'm glad you mentioned that, though, because it brings me to the introduction of the nurse stroke of Mother of Darkness.
who uh she's wheeling professor arnold stroke varelli around and they have this conversation in the uh the elevator which by the way i just wanted to mention we talked about the color in this film now there's the red and blue also and especially if you watch this
35 millibre print scan that's knocking about the amount of gold and yellow in this film oh my god that if this is meant to be how it's meant to be seen and that thinking about it with all the alchemical stuff i can't help but think it really is meant to be and we've been missing that in a lot of home videos
stuff but more on that later so they have this brilliant exchange which actually so i re-watched for the 50th anniversary of deep red i re-watched that very close to this and i'd never noticed the similarity between the bizarre sort of comic conversation and confusion
or winding up whatever that's going on about, and Deep Red is, oh, a piano playing engineer and all of that. And she just, poor Demings, he can't get it through the lady's head that he's a pianist or she's a bit senile.
what have you and there's a similar thing here of um
Oh, she thinks he's a professor of toxicology or something, not musicology, and just doesn't get it, and then just completely patronizes and insults him on his sister. Is it in Cemetery Man where they keep calling him an engineer? Yes, the lovely lady.
Yeah, another connection. Love it. Love it. And you, what do you do? Oh, I'm a student. Musicology. Oh, wonderful.
A professor, toxicology. We know two other young men who... No, no, no, it's not toxicology, musicology. It's got nothing to do with medicine. What is it then? The study of music.
Oh, yes. Your sister's involved in rather strange work too. Strange? No, she writes poetry. Oh, yes. A pastime especially suited for women. Goodbye.
In the apartment, Mark starts hearing things. Someone's saying, hello, hello. And it's Daria Nicolotti.
You know, as Elise whispering, trying to get his attention. Man, the sound design. So cool. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The way this movie plays with sound. And I liked your.
trivia about them trying to do the quad sound or yeah it would make because I think that was a big thing in Suspiria wasn't it which now finally on home video you can get the um
like 4.0 track or whatever which is obviously not a very common configuration at all but um yeah you do have um re-listened to these on headphones last night the stereo track and they play with that kind of nicely a bit quite effectively
Nice. We get to see how Kazanian lives. And I wrote, in my lonely room, day after day. He's being annoyed by cats, but we'll get back to that in a second.
We get more sound waves. Someone's threatening to kill Mark. Wow, my nose fall apart completely. Let's have a look.
So, yeah, just when he arrives, firstly, there's another little occult-y reference on the outside of this. This is G.I. Gurdjieff. He stayed here in 1924, apparently. Now, speaking of the cats, are they...
I think feeding the cats Rose, is that what's sort of implied where you go in and there's this whole thing with the, you know, trying to stealthily wrap the meat up and this, you know, this goes to the youthful place where Mark appears.
Interesting. I could see that. I could see that. I hadn't thought of that. Maybe they're training them to give them a taste for human flesh for later. Something. Yeah.
If anybody's confused, I think we've gone a scene all over 420 blazed in here. It's not quite 420 here. It's 4.11 p.m. We did take a little break, people. That's right. We've not gone completely mad. One thing that I do love little... production design detail here i love how if you're a book lover
then this film you know somebody just keeps messes of books all over your your apartment or your house or whatever you will love this film because just like rose's desk you can tell she's definitely a poet and then mark comes in and he has some piles
his own to it including i thought i spied a little he had a little cliff's note thing in there or something that could be wrong he's cheating yeah yeah that's cheating me
the butler i neglected to i forgot i know we didn't go through the entire cast because it's quite an epic cast this john the butler leopoldo mastelloni
i don't know him for anything else um let me see is anything jumping out here not a lot of credits about 22 but he has a great presence in this and i love his sort of especially when you will leave a scene he's sort of like creepy looks where he'll just sort of stay from open before
exiting stay left or right or whatever. Another one of these complicit characters. Or is he, you know? Ah, yes, yes, exactly. Elise's death scene is insane. We have all kinds of...
Cat throwing. Just before that, sorry. No, no, it's fine. I can't believe my notes are completely fucked for this. Until we get to the rest of the movie, I have no idea what's happening.
don't worry i'll i'll pick it up a little bit then if um before a death scene uh like she's not in the film for long so it's in my great deal here but i'd be remiss if i didn't mention this scene and gives us a chance to talk about the music a bit more
um one of my favorite little scenes in it is after she has met mark and she's been called away to the phone and i think uh john the butlery's run a bath or whatever and then she
realizes no i did stand on blood and she goes back to speak to mark and yeah both sat there like with the lights off and she's talking about was it rose's ravings and about the myth of the three mothers and i love how when she starts talking about the three mothers like suddenly
this blue light is like covering her all of a sudden. Yeah. Now I wonder if, and this ties to, there's a lot of stuff with, you know, like Rose swimming earlier on Sarah, when she's absolutely drenched in rain.
This is, again, maybe some alchemical significance to the water and the color blue and all of that. I haven't, you know, I don't know a great deal about it, but I believe these are sort of potent symbols within there. So whether this has some...
Meaning for like, you know, the diving into this forbidden knowledge or something, maybe. Literally, literally diving. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I just pun myself. She's talking about this and Mark, I think he gets distracted or whatever.
while she's talking by the door handle. And while this is happening, there's this great sort of bobbing sort of camera up and down, like tracking to the air vents, which we'd seen earlier that allow you to, you know, from the outside of...
somewhere speak into another apartment presumably anything you the walls literally have ears in this place anything you say can be heard by anybody and this
It tracks right into that sort of grill, and then we hear this laugh and this great sort of focus pull out to see Elise sort of stand up into frame, sort of startled. It was like, oh, what was that? Do you hear that laugh? And yeah, like I say, Mark is totally distracted by the door knocker at this point.
knock as men what are we like no i i love i love the paranoia the thing with magic and done well in a movie is you're already fucked
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, so the pricking of the finger on a sharp object or the walls have ears and that laughed blood curdling. Absolutely, yeah. And I love the music cue over this as well.
Maybe the sort of one of the prettiest in the film is, I think it's called like Elise's story or something. Just again, just bringing the atmosphere and the vibes and all that just brilliantly.
When it crunches. That's why I love Nestle Crunch. Chocolate is scrunchest when it crunches.
That's why I love Nestle Crunch. The blend of Nestle's Creamy Milk Chocolate with Crunchies tastes just as good as it sounds. Chocolate is crunches when it crunches. That's why I love Nestle Crunch.
So they find the bloodstains outside of Rose's room and Mark gets ill.
and totally just passes out from the dodgy event where somebody maybe uh he's been i don't know 420 blazing it down there quite i mean he's just or just he's not used to it or just ripping some farts
It's just a fart joke. But yeah, so he passes out and then Elise is on her own, which reminds me, of course, of Suspiria when our pal Sarah is alone.
While Susie's passed out. I'm sorry, Susie is passed out. So she gets separated and she ends up in the room with the cats. And she's swarmed by cats.
There was a little thing I didn't write down, but there was supposed to be a shot of a rabid cat earlier in the movie to kind of foreshadow this moment. But I think they just decided either not to film it or they couldn't.
So these cats are supposed to have rabies. And they swarm her. Daria Nicolotti says, oh, that's me in the movie. That's me doing that cat shot. Except for when the cats are on my face. That's my stunt double.
Jeez. Oh boy. And then she gets stabbed by an unseen killer like we do in these movies. I love it. Mark.
starts to come to and everyone finds him and he says it's his heart and uh somebody goes oh his heart give him some heart medicine
But of course. Yeah, dude, that's what I want people to be like, oh man, you okay?
Have some of my nitroglycerin tablets, dude. No, stop it. Get this away from me. I'm going to blow up. Mark dreams of ocean waves, which quite a bit of, speaking of water. Yeah. Quite a bit of.
theorizing and in different reviews about that shot right okay i think he just has sand fleas speaking of insects well um in the next scene sort of daytime and maybe one of the the shots i believe the aside from a bit in the central park the only shots of actual new york and some of the shots
away from the apartment, and he's sort of looking out, and he touches the side of the window frame or whatever, gets ants on his hand, which is a bit of a, I guess, well, like, un-shannon-de-loo moment or something. Oh, boy, yeah, you know. Now that's...
why you go to college. So you can be seated in a room with a bunch of people watching that movie. Good times. Good times. It's like the most like typical, like what's college.
It really is, isn't it? Here it is. Oh my God. I wasn't even in a film class. It was, it was a world, it was a world literature class and the teacher was showing us a bunch of movies one day. It was fucking hilarious. No, that made, yeah.
In fact, I think when I did my film degree, it wasn't under the media department. In fact, they probably looked down the noses at the media department. It was run by the English department. Oh, boy. So, yeah, he sees these freaking ants. And then we get Mr. Kazanian.
He's pissed off about the ants too. No, he's complaining about the cats and they say a mean thing about him after he complains about these cats getting into the apartment.
But you know what? You can call this guy whatever you want because he's a fucking asshole. Since they won't call the cat exterminator, good old Kazanian takes it upon himself.
In his defense, and I put that in lowercase d, he is...
infested with cats he's got so many cats everywhere it's ridiculous he should have found a way to make friends with him though because then he could you know he wouldn't be lonely and he could become you know we have a lot of cat ladies i guess he could be the elderly cat man
Oh man, he could have been hooking up. But yes, he puts the cats in a bag. And this is why I do not watch this movie very often. Cat scares in horror movies is classic. They throw a cat at somebody. I'm not...
over the moon about it but i'm like whatever it's it's just a cat they land on their feet according to legend but this these cats in this bag are fucking pissed and even though i don't believe they drown the cats i don't
they didn't go there but it's just so creepy this guy carrying his bag of cats it's it's not it's not good because you definitely see that one shot of the cat being that he picks up
i mean it's quite compliant for a while until yeah it's not obviously and yeah obviously throws that in the bag which is a bit not great uh yes i don't know whether that hopefully i presume the shot
the cutaway of the banging the head hopefully is fake here from things that william lustig from blue underground he was like a production coordinator or something with some
kind of mechanical device they put in a bag that would move around to basically simulate this oh thank god yeah uh so so he takes the cats down to the river uh in central park and
He really wants to get deep in this water. He really, really, really wants to get deep because he can't drown these cats properly. And we get the beautiful New York skyline, which apparently was...
A bunch of milk cartons that Mario Bava made. Yeah, with like photos stuck on them. Yeah. Bless his heart. I love it. So he loses his footing. I wrote in my notes, argh, my crotch.
Oops, I mean crotch. As he's flailing around, fun trivia here. He was supposed to have wooden legs.
that were going to float away. That's why he needed the crutches, because he had wooden legs. Oh, wow, that would have been amazing. Yeah, that would have been great. There's also another moment that I'll talk about later that was like...
What? They cut a lot of stuff from here. Anyway, so the eclipse be happening. The eclipse is Clipson.
And he starts screaming for help because sure enough, the other animals I worry about in this movie are the rats. They start pumping rats in to this soundstage here. Now, I...
I don't love rats, everybody, but I think, you know, leave them alone. Yeah. And this isn't, this isn't, um, Paul Nashy explaining why he set the rats on fire so gleefully in, uh,
In The Hunchback of the Morgue. Paul Nash is like, those rats were mean. They were jumping up and biting me. I'm like, dude, you set them on fire. Go fuck yourself. I love...
Love that movie so much. I never watch it. I cannot watch it. It's too much. Yeah, it's always a bit of a... occupational hazard as it were with watching these films unfortunately yeah Spain and Italy man they got a lot to answer for I'm not saying American movies didn't do it but damn
Yeah, there's a scene in the Blue Eyes of the Broken Dawn. I think you know which one I'm talking about. That's one of the main reasons I keep putting off rewatching that. Yeah, I got to fast forward to that. We do know where bacon comes from. Yeah.
Is it a bacon baddie? Is that what you guys have? Oh, God, you're going to be careful. You're going to start a civil war over here over this. I've done this before. We've had this exact conversation before because I love British stuff.
Let's just, right, I found it on, oh, this is on Reddit, on a subreddit called Map.
porn now it's i call it a bomb over here if you're in the south it's a roll more in the middle it's a cob somewhere right in the middle it's a muffin
which you'll appreciate. A bit further north of there is a tea cake. Sort of northeast, it's a bun. Then in Scotland, it's a roll again. And in Northern Ireland, it's a bap.
So that's it. Okay. Yeah. I probably made up batty. I don't know. It comes from watching Keeping Up Appearances as Simon. I think you've heard of that show before. Oh, yeah. I think so. Just about.
Rats start eating him alive. And then he starts screaming for help. And there's a very helpful guy at the hot dog stand because New York is nothing but hot dog stands. He's dressed like Mel from Mel's Diner.
He comes running to help with his big meat cleaver, and he doesn't help so much as kills him. And I wrote in my notes, hey, don't worry, I'm coming to save you, mister. Forget about it.
That's my New York. I sound like an authentic New Yorker there. Sorry, my notes just made me laugh. I'm so stupid. No, it's all good.
Do you think people talk about how he runs across the water? Speaking of water again, which he kind of does. I kind of see it, but maybe not as explicitly as intended. I'm not sure whether it's... Yeah, I'm not sure if that's like a...
it'll be easier for the shot if you do this even though it kind of ruins the illusion of how deep the water is yeah versus is he jesus yeah exactly after he gets murderated by by this guy uh we cut to
The whole plot to rip off Elise from Carol and John the butler. They've been trying to rip her off and steal her jewels and stuff. John disappears.
And she's like, where are you? Where are you? Where are you? And the lights go out and she goes and finds him. And I wrote in my notes, eyes a popping. So this was a cut scene. Supposedly.
Argento, who does all the killings in his movies because he's a psycho.
He was going to be the hands that strangled John the butler. And as he was strangled, he was strangled so intensely that his fucking eyes popped out. Oh, wow.
hilarious would pay to see that obviously and then freaking carol um she does not get an a plus for fire safety
I think she gets an F for a fire fail. It's almost as bad, in fact, probably equally as what is in the next year with Dagmar Lissandra and the Black Cat, where she's trying to put out, probably again, similar to this.
It's going up the curtains quite quickly and she grabs a fucking pillow and starts like, I'm trying to put it out. Folks, Fulci and Argento, you know, working concurrently. There's a lot of talk.
about you know fulci ripping off and you know ripping off argento in certain ways
But a lot of times it's just coincidence. It's just something really stupid happens in both this and the black cat involving fire. And it's amazing. You know, I believe the eyes glowing.
in House by the Cemetery is fully... If it's not a rip-off, it's him making fun of Argento. Yeah, that's probably quite a lot. I don't know. There's no way he just...
Oh, I want that too, dude. So Mark, following the ants in the floor, I wrote in my notes that he's an ant murderer. And if you pick at ants, they'll only get worse.
He like sprays them with like bug spray or some like, it almost looks like they get frozen. It's very weird what he sprays them with. It's not nice. Leave the ants alone. I'm defending the ants. Come on, people.
I love animals. What can I do? So he's back in the apartment. There was some great transitional shots in this. One of the best just before this. I think after...
Alita Valley falls out the window and crashes through a fucking skylight or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a shot of, like, a window blows open and some curtain billowing in the wind. You see the full moon, which, oh, did we mention? Yeah, there was, like, an eclipse.
which peaks just before Kazanian gets killed, I think. So it's all a very magically sort of potent time when this is still happening. Exactly.
Back in his apartment and he's sort of looking at the picture, the painting or the drawing or whatever of the building and sort of puzzling it out. You know, what was that line about under the soles of your shoes, grabs a pencil and looks at the...
I don't even know what's going on there. There's like a snake fighting something else, maybe all tangled together, you know, on the detail of the side of the building. Yeah, I'm not sure what it's fighting.
Yeah, maybe like a dragon or some kind of reptile or something like that. Because the ants, he sees a little crack in the floor leading to grab a little... Oh, this is a moment that's actually...
I wonder if this is a reference which is repeated exactly in Zeta. Gabriel Levy is looking in the grave and finds out that grave's empty. Yeah. And with a bit of wire and similar thing in this, he realizes, yeah, I could totally...
getting the full space under the floorboards and starts, gets that letter opener we saw at the beginning in the first shot and starts sort of prizing under there and then gets a fucking crowbar or something, starts breaking right through the floor. Nah, that's not good.
that deposit back. No, definitely not. And the cat appears and sort of beats him to starting to explore under there. And I love how the exact point he puts his hand down, he finds that scroll.
which i neglected to uh sorry to translate what the latin was here and i'm sure my um because i went to a weird school where like old grammar school where we did latin and classical studies for a few years until we could
choose our options as we call it where we could basically elect and not have to do that anymore
There was maybe about three people who actually chose to study the Latin. But anyway, needless to say, I did not learn very much. Not one of them. No, I was definitely not. But yeah, I just love how that scroll is exactly where he puts his arm.
um and yeah he lands under there and then we uh commence the sort of last act and one of the greatest if not the greatest fucking music cues uh cue i've ever heard oh my god dude for those of you who have dozed off in the
watching the movie you're fucking awake now because emerson goes bonkers oh wow yeah yeah oh speaking of bonkers emerson moments i forgot to say i was going to mention it the taxi ride thing
he's talking about this in the q a uh that i mentioned on um it's on the arrow disc and it's available on youtube or elsewhere really worth a watch he's such a character i know it's such a sad loss what happened to him he is so funny and is he's got like irene miracle just practically
piss in piss in his eyes um and talking about how um argento played in verde and said he wanted him to use it
And then Argento was a bit mystified of like, where is it? And he said, oh, it's in the taxi ride thing. But basically what he'd done, he'd thrown it into 5-4.
And he does in front of this audience, I won't try to replicate it. He just basically, you know, this dun-da-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. He said he was trying to replicate the feeling of being bumped around an Italian taxi.
Yes, yes. Which it really just nails. Awesome, awesome dude. I'm a little ambivalent about...
Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, the band. I haven't heard very much at all. I listened to a few tracks the other day. My dad mentioned one to me years ago. I listened to it like Fanfare of the Common Man. He'd sing the praises of. But yeah, I need to give him a bit of a shot, but I get you. It's a bit of a...
It can be a bit of a, depending on your face, hit and miss area sort of. Yeah, it's, well, you know, I'm a big yes fan. Yes, I got to yes first. I suspect if I'd gotten to Emerson, Lake and Palmer first, I might be.
singing a different tune so to speak but like I'm a big King Crimson guy so out of the big three I love those two and I think one of my issues with ELP is not
the music at all. The music is insane. Like it's so dynamic and fucking bonkers. And there's times when I like them musically and like nerding out on the rhythms and the, the, the more like,
aggressive stuff versus king crimson's pastoral and medieval kind of like kind of stuff not and of course there's genesis and if you go down the genesis train next thing you know you're
got flowers in your hair and you're you haven't showered in three weeks but like emerson lincoln palmer has some of the most irritating lyrics yeah lyrically they are so lame sometimes
look up the cover for love beach and that's all you need to know about emerson i did listen to one the other day and yeah i get exactly what you're saying with the lyrics it was nice and everything it's just not my taste and i
It doesn't help. I am more of a music person than a song person anyway, to be honest, if that makes sense. Yeah, same, same. I'm going to look this up just while we're, again, that you said to look up. Love Beach. Love Beach.
I'm pretty sure it's called Love Beach. Oh, oh, wow. Casey needed some open collars down to your navel. Good grief. Yeah. And they were the biggest artists. They are what...
They caused punk rock without the excesses of Emerson, Lincoln Palmer on tour.
we would not have the Sex Pistols and every other frickin' British punk band. Seeing this cover was probably the moment that did it. Johnny Rotten said, I have an idea.
But anyway, yes, this music. Oh, my God. So Mark goes down. Mark goes all the way down to the frickin' bottom of this wonderful building here. He meets the architect, a.k.a. the phantom of the apartment.
as i call him and of course it's our guy professor arnold slash uh varelli was it yeah varelli uh the guy from moonstruck snap out of it
He tells them all the shit. He admits, you know, like yada, yada, yada. This is all my doing. I built this shit for them. Kind of regret it now because I'm trapped with them.
You almost for a split second get a little sympathetic for a split second. Like he's not also fucking evil as fuck. Yeah.
And then he stabs Mark with the frickin' syringe full of God knows what. But I love his line, to them we are nothing but dust. Oh yeah, brilliant. Boy, oh boy.
So he's hooked up to a machine to help him speak. And it's like Phantom of the Paradise. I love that. I think maybe Argento really liked Phantom of the Paradise a lot. He had to have Jessica Harper, you know.
But yeah, absolutely. Is it probably like the most high-tech thing, apart from some of the locks and all that in this?
Yeah, this movie. And you get this in Suspiria as well. I love how, especially now that we're nearly 50 years away from this, this kind of like all-world feel of it. You don't see a single television or obviously a fucking smartphone or anything, God forbid, in this.
oldest um that's probably the most high-tech thing the speakers and the reel-to-reel stuff in there and then the sure sure the music class it's just more like old musty books everywhere so i say it's just uh if you're
There is the deleted scene where Mark, he's trying to use his phone, but the screen's cracked. Sorry to stop you where you're saying that. Killing my buzzman. I can never kill your buzz. Oh, no.
The dude gets knocked over and he's choking on his own apparatus to help him speak and he's dying. The whole place is on fire, by the way. He must be very flexible if he can choke on his own apparatus. Sorry.
Oh, matron. Yep. Thank you. I'm here all week. I'm fucking done.
We're done. That's it. Between that and the freaking VHS trailer for the stupid shit.
Oh my god. So anyway, we finally get to see Veronica Lazar's big nude scene. You get to see all the way down to her fucking bones. No. So there's this amazing bit where the place is burning down.
she's talking to him, but she's in the mirror. She's disappeared and she's in the mirror. And there's lots of just like, Oh, all of her. What's the word? I mean, she's just brassy. Like she's.
She's taking it to the 10th level in honor of our recent passing of Wingshauser.
She's fucking housering this moment. I just blast and out and just, it's so, I wish that the reveal had come earlier somehow. And just, just her being evil base. Cause she's so like,
innocuous but suspicious yes because you have to suspect everybody in this movie but oh my god i love this turn so much she's such a great performance you kind of wish there was more i totally get that i suppose
Not to say you would dilute the impact of it, but because we're given so little, you know what I mean? Maybe that sort of thing is it. I don't know. It's beautiful. And then she smashes the freaking glass and she's like...
Yo, our name is Death, bro. I was going to save this for the end, but I'll talk about this now. First time I watched Inferno. First viewing. Way back early 2000s. Probably like...
2003, 2005. I forget. This was a deal breaker. I thought this was the stupidest thing I'd ever seen. The rubbery looking death costume. It is not great.
It gets better. It's better to me now. I get it now. It's a weird thing. A bit like the, although it's different, like the scene in the skeleton, the sort of Jason and the Argonaut skeleton in Nightmare on the Street Through the Memories. I've seen that in high def.
I think it actually looked better rather than worse, and re-watching it in this 4K 35mm scan last week, and maybe it looked better rather than worse again. But, yeah, I suppose...
it's still there's this kind of artifice about it which you kind of need to sort of make peace with to uh speak to um not let it bother you and that aside just kind of the symbol of it more the more and more i watch it just makes sense to me again with this sort of medieval
sort of worldview of I guess the whole movie in a way it's like kind of a big memento mori or something and it's a spirit where it's kind of like you can vanquish evil this one more is like no ultimately at the end of the day we're all fucked
This is the boss battle. We can't win. Yeah, basically. Yeah. But now that I, you know, after years of talking myself into it, it's a woodblock print. Yeah.
a carving of death it's it's you know the simplest freaking thing in the world and apparently there was a different design in mind but they were rushing things but
I don't care. I'm fine with it now. I just wanted to mention that. No, no. And then the whole place comes crumbling down like how much agency Mark had.
was uh zero yeah you know uh so yeah the evil's defeated because it kind of like is destroyed by its own hubris but it's just a building it's not like death dies you know
Yeah, yeah. It'll just, like, it'll relocate somewhere else, presumably. Mark has to run out of there. Place is exploding. Lee McCloskey said this was the scariest moment in his life. Yeah.
Because all the crew is behind plexiglass. His stuntman broke his leg or something like that. Or that's what they told him. And they made him run through the explosions. And he said...
The shrapnel was fucking terrifying. The look of terror on his face is very real. Yeah, I'm describing it's like the sound of a fucking Harrier jet or something when it explodes. Shit.
And that's Inferno. He's outside. You have been watching a giallo called Inferno. Yes.
Your journey has come to an end. Everything around you will become dark, and someone will take your hand. You'll be pleased, not unhappy. You'll enjoy moments of incredible brightness.
Oh, boy. So before we get into the trivia, per se, we've been dropping some little gems. And before we get to how we feel about this movie, I just wanted to talk about... the crew briefly producers of course claudio argento and salvator argento could be related to dario i'm not sure was it um
Salvatore, that's his father, isn't it? Was this the last one that he worked on? Oh, no. No. Canterbury, I say, right. Yeah, yeah. Hmm.
That was the last one that his dad helped out with. And then one of the other producers is a cinematographer named Guglielmo Groni.
Did not produce a whole lot of stuff. It's just one of the people who contributed to the production. I'm not sure how. All that jazz. Camera and electrical department. Speaking of gorgeous movies, oh my god. That's another I still need to see.
It's depressing. But it's very charming. It's a very charming film. I have a big crush on Roy Scheider. I have no...
Absolutely no problems admitting I have a man crush on Roy Scheider. He's a beautiful guy. Cinematographer, good old Romano Albani, the guy you mentioned, he was one of those guys who shot some...
cool american horror movies i love in the 80s speaking of when i just went to his page now the first thing that comes up is terror vision
Yes, yes. Terror Vision, 1986. Absolute classic, folks, if you haven't seen that yet. He also shot Troll, the OG Troll. I love Troll. I'm probably alone in this. I actually think I love it more than Troll 2. Well, that's the thing.
Here's the thing. As a child, I was completely mesmerized by Troll, the original one.
It's a wonderfully made movie. Yeah. And it was just popular enough over in Italy, but also it has some Italian crew working on it that they, that the abomination, the perfectly amazing abomination troll too.
There's no reason to like Troll 2 better. Sorry, folks. But also, he shot Phenomena, and then he shot Bloodlink, which where is the Blu-ray for Bloodlink?
Oh, my God, dude. The Michael Moriarty twin giallo with sweaty, sweaty Cameron Mitchell. I was going to say because I've not seen it, but that's weird because Troll obviously has Michael Moriarty in it as well.
Oh my god, I didn't even think of that! Yeah, I always remember that because he plays Harry Potter in it and it's a meme I'm cycling every few years, him dancing to a blue chair summertime blues and I think I put the title as Harry Potter.
Harry Potter and the summertime blues, I think is what I called it.
My brain is collapsing in on itself. Thank you. It's fucking perfect. Thank you. But yes, blood link, dude, if you can't find a copy of it, I'll send you one. It's so fun. Of course it's ripped off an old VHS, which is sad because man, it's just beautiful. It's, um,
I think it's Alberto DiMartino is the director. Oh, really? Super good. Yeah, I believe so.
Of course, we talked about Keith Emerson. He would go on to make the greatest soundtrack to a giallo ever called Murder Rock Dancing Death in 1984. Absolutely essential.
Oh, that's a point. We spoke about the church a bit. He's one of the people who did the soundtrack for that, of course. Yeah, and that was a big falling out with Argento. Really? Argento, again, not crediting people.
Not on the poster for the church, apparently. That sucks. And when Emerson wrote to Argento asking about it, Argento never spoke to him again. Oh, fuck's sake. Bless you.
He's such a dick. Argento's such a dick. But anyway, next up we got editor Franco Fraticelli, who did all the greats. That was Argento's go-to guy for editing. Oh my god. Unreal. Unreal.
Just the amount of films he cut is so cool. Love it.
Art director is Giuseppe Bassan, who I think we talked about last time. Yeah, he was another Argento go-to guy. I think he did. I'm just going to double check. Yeah, neglected to mention, yeah, the production design, art direction.
in this film and the just all the stuff littered around the sets and stuff like one i noticed last night i'd never seen before which might have a tie to sleeping beauty in the laboratory where rose gets it
I think that's even the name of the Emerson music cue of that scene. Yeah, there's all these, like, lizards and stuff, again, like, in...
cobwebs and stuff, but there was, I think, some sewing machines in there, which made me think of the spinning wheel in Sleeping Beauty. Nice. Nice. I like that. That's cool. Of course, we have assistant director Lambava, our boy, Lamberto.
You know, collabing with Argento for forever. Just forever. But this was when Mario Bava, his dad, worked with Argento. Yeah. Mario Bava's...
According to some of the trivia, he was way more involved than he gets credit for. Yes.
On that Q&A with Irene Miracle, she says that she never really actually worked with Argento because he was laid up with hepatitis for quite a bit of this.
So it sounds like I think I've heard a say elsewhere, possibly that Mario Barber is who directed her, maybe exclusively. Now, there's a bit of.
ambiguity varying things about a lot of people had said for years that bava directed that um legendary underwater flooded ballroom scene but that seems now to have been discredited and it was a guy called
Gian Lorenzo Battaglia sorry if I got that slightly wrong who did the underwater stuff on Unferno was kind of a go-to guy for underwater photography he directed some films himself that I'm now forgetting what the hell they are
look this up uh yeah the credit zone to water photography and what did he direct popeye we didn't direct popeye 1980 but he was in the department for that
He progressed to be cinematographer on Demons and Demons 2, Miami Gold, You'll Die at Midnight, Delirium, La Casa 4, Witchcraft. Oh, my God.
photoshopped this once I think I sent it to you a film called and we threatened to cover it didn't we from 1990 called Lombarda which I photoshopped Lombarda into that dancing with a lovely lady if I remember it's yours
Not Photoshop. I can't use Photoshop. I used MS Paint. What am I talking about? If a freaking Blu-ray of this ever comes out, because the only thing keeping me...
for us from covering the the italian lombata film that was cashing in on the lombata craze is the copy i found looks like dog shit i think it even has some untranslated italian parts because it was one of those uh italian american
productions dude it is it looks so fucking awful i can't wait i can't wait for vinegar syndrome to rescue it from obscurity
But I just, I love the way, I love this movie's bridge between the old school Baba, you know, from Black Sunday, passing the torch on to Argento and passing the torch on to his son.
i absolutely you know we adore good old lamberto our boy we love him that's the point actually and credit to brad here for i was rereading some of the research he helped with
On a blog post I did for Inferno's 35th anniversary, so 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah. Let me just find this.
He consulted his copy of the Tim Lucas Mario Barber term, All the Colors of the Dark, and basically cleared up a bit more about Barber's contribution, which was including glass mat paintings, maquettes, miniature sculptures, and in-camera tricks, such as the mirror.
shot in the finale apparently his grandson Roy also helped with the maquettes so this basically means obviously that three generations of barbers worked on the film that's right I forgot about that yeah wild
So I have lots of trivia, folks. I had to tap out. There was not sure how many pages I filled for Suspiria, but I couldn't go on.
Just before you get into that, and on that note, I will say, my sort of reach extended my grasp for this.
my attention span energy levels etc because there's other stuff like you know the um i suppose the occult references of uh you know falconnelli and all that i did listen to i'd love to get a physical copy of it to see all the plates and stuff and it but i don't know the first thing about
So I felt out of my depth looking into the mystery of the cathedral, which we talked about for more on that. Listen to the episode on the church. We talk a bit more about that.
and related to that uh richard stanley and in being on the trail of the three mothers which if you want to find that um let me see um best way to search for it i think it started on his myspace a series of things called on the trail of the three mothers where he really went off the deep end
with after first being introduced I think there was a movie-thon of Argento's films at the Scarlet Cinema where they were like six in one night and he was just he was basically staying there to sleep at the time because he crash landed from South Africa you know fleeing from
military conscription and uh just you know basically saw one of this for the first time in some kind of like drugged out pays or whatever in and out of sleep and it leads him down this rabbit hole to say the very least
um that spans years and includes some weird characters like in Argento himself there's one point where he's talking to John Voight I think as your Argento and I've it's years since I've read the whole thing so I can't remember a lot of it now but if you want to send yourself slightly
insane thinking about this film go and read that honestly you may have to um you may have to put it through the internet archive way back machine again if you struggle with that you want to read it let me know and i'll um send you the link but uh is with this i kind of want to reread a lot of that but
I just, in the end, I thought I'm going to get too bogged down here and I'll focus more on the film itself. And as with Suspiria, we could spend a year talking about this. There's so much to do. Yes, it would be even longer for this one because it seems to me there's even more information about this film.
Than the others. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I, you know, I did Alan Jones, went back to Alan Jones, Profundo Argento's, his book. So yes, Argento was completely miserable during the writing of this film. He was...
hot on the heels of the success of Suspiria and he was, you know, in America and met good old George Romero and they developed a relationship and he would...
co-produce dawn of the dead and while he was in america working with romero and helping him with with with dawn of the dead he was just i'm making my next movie in america i have to make my next movie in america and new york in new york
And he ended up, or this was Dario Nicolodi's idea to film in New York. I don't know.
They both claim it. He went to New York in winter and holed up in a hotel while suffering from hepatitis and wrote this freaking movie.
And it was totally miserable. His letters to his family weren't getting through, so he thought he was going to die there and nobody would know. But yes, he wrote under these conditions.
This makes so much sense for how morbid this film is in a lot of ways and how death-obsessed it is. Yep, yep, yep. So production started on May 21st, 1979. They shot for 14 weeks.
in Rome and New York at a budget of $3 million, which is some big money for back then, especially for an Italian production. So the first problems he had were with Fox Studios, the American distributors.
to fund this thing uh they gave him so much grief over casting he never wanted to deal with
Because he got burned enough by Paramount over the Four Flies and Grey Velvet distribution bullshit, which is ridiculous. We're lucky to even get to see that movie nowadays. But yes, Fox started to give him a lot of shit about casting.
and they kept parading all kinds of freaking young actors for the parts and it was driving them freaking nuts and finally they made
Their decision with Irene Miracle and Leigh McCloskey. Leigh McCloskey was supposed to be James Woods. Yes. James Woods was going to be in Inferno, which I did not know until...
researching this time i'd never heard that before i mean it would be an interesting alternate universe to visit to see that but the energy of it will be so so different and i can't imagine him no maybe he could have played like kind of a more passive
protagonist i've seen somebody or name on twitter they kind of annoyed me where they said oh it's a shame lee mccluskey's such a pansy and i thought stop that's terrible yeah yeah it's and related to that so i'll just mention
Argento's direction to him in the interview on the Blue Underground thing, he told him to play him like he's not really connected, like he's in a daze or a strange haze or something, which does fit and, again, speaks to the sort of dreamlike.
passive nature of the uh the the feel of it and him to quote protagonist yeah or whatever um oh and uh another
Another person was Nancy Allen in the role of Rose. That would have also been fucking crazy. Irene Miracle tells a weird story about how she was in Kenya.
And she was forced to leave because of some political situation over there. She had the clothes on her back and a toothbrush when she fled to Rome.
And that's when she auditioned for the part. As you mentioned, William Lustig of Maniac fame.
He was so excited to get to work with Argento. He was a fixer in New York. He was arranging camera equipment, lighting equipment and stuff. And he could not help.
interrogating Argento about his movies. Oh, but of course, yeah. And he was so knowledgeable about Argento's films that of course Argento was flattered by this. He was going to make a movie called Movie Maniac.
And it was going to be what Maniac became, but he wanted – there was talk of Goblin doing the soundtrack and Daria Nicolodi starring. Oh, yeah. I remember that. Yeah, because –
She ended up doing something else. But what was the... Who did the music for Maniac? I have no clue.
I haven't watched that in years. I have only seen it once, and it was relatively recently. Now, apologies if this is in your notes, but I'll just mention it in case I forget. The helicopter shots in Maniac feels like...
i don't know whether it's meant to be this omniscient sort of evil hovering around looking for prey like the maniac in it apparently was some footage he shot for argento that was never used in the film
if memory serves wow the music for maniac uh so i tell you before i actually ever watch maniac i'd heard that you know go into a showdown
song i'd heard that about 10 weeks before i ever watched the film i love it so much it's a guy called jay chatterway who yeah done a lot of stuff with star trek on tv apparently nice yep and he would do the music for maniac cop
Yeah, he did the music for Maniac Cop and Silver Bullet. Yeah, good stuff. The rat story is wonderful. While they're terrorizing Kazanian with the rats.
It was Mario, Lambaba, and Argento throwing rats on this poor actor. They imported 1,500.
some super rat from China and these were pretty aggressive rats and they were trying not to get bit while they were doing this scene there was a moment where They weren't getting a scared enough reaction from the guy who plays Mr. Pityov.
So Lambaba's like, leave me alone with him. I'll get him to get scared. And so they laughed and all of a sudden they could hear these blood curdling screams coming from the actor. And they're like, what did you do? And he wouldn't tell them what he did. Oh my God. Ridiculous.
I love it. But yes, that studio was infested with rats for years. Like many, many, many years later, those rats bred with the rats that were there, creating some super rat they couldn't get rid of and Argento.
I was always scared that people would find out that he was the guy who did the D the D palace studios. That was him. That rat infestation was his.
Of course, Fox got cold feet about distribution after some managerial changes, which is, you know, as bad as a writer's strike when it comes to fucking up movies. Yeah. I am pro writer. I'm pro writer. I'm saying.
Didn't want to come off as like Mr. Union Buster over here. Oh, yeah. You have to be careful. You don't end up getting the hashtag canceled or anything. That's right. That's right. Yeah.
You mentioned, I forget where she was in the company at the time, somebody called Sherry Lansing, who Argento was watching a preview with, and he said she kept grabbing his arm and he thought, oh, this is a good sign, but he said she disliked her and it was basically too strong for the American market.
Whatever. We can take it. Yeah. So, yes, Alan Jones talked to good old Keith Emerson. And this was some fun stuff from Keith. Because Argento...
his relationship with goblin had soured a little bit or he wanted to just go in a different direction than goblin for this movie either way he's a massive prog rock fan and chose emerson because of emerson lincoln palmer
Of course, Emerson had never heard of Argento before. He had no idea about his cult following. And so a jet lagged Keith Emerson flying from the Bahamas to Rome.
Oh, my God. So he told Argento told him.
to do something completely different. And of course he gave him complete creative freedom on the project. Or Emerson says the instructions were lost in translation. Either way, I felt like I could do what I wanted. Yeah. He...
composed on piano. He did get instructions on using the piece from Verdi's Nabucco, and he, of course, said he's going to do his own arrangement of it, hence the 5-4 time.
Emerson thinks the music is romantic and pretty. I disagree. It's fucking terrifying.
I mean, yeah, romantic and pretty until it isn't, I guess. But yes, absolutely. Lietta, or no, Lietta got me...
the Deep Red soundtrack on vinyl. I found a very cheap copy of Inferno on record. I don't know if people...
That old print, that old version is still cheap, but if you can find Inferno on LP, go for it. Yeah. I found doing chores to it is horrible. Don't.
I had to turn it off. I was cleaning and I had the music playing and I got mad as fuck. It was making me really freaked out.
I said to you who were running behind a little bit, I was listening back, well, just through it. And I tend to skip around when I listen to it a bit for that, the reasons you're sort of saying. Yeah. But it was quite funny when I was getting ready.
this delight I think it's called Q where you said quite rightly it sort of anticipates some of the Evangelion soundtracks um and I think I said to you didn't I it's like because it's very like well it was out because it made me think I wasn't
trying to sort my um you know recording space out it was more like i'm trying to flee from a killer right right it lit a fire fire under my ass to sort of get moving killer was coming for you exactly
At the premiere, Argento was completely freaking out. And Emerson was like, hey, man, take a sip of my flask of cognac.
And, of course, Argento downed the entire thing and then ran out to make his speech, which Emerson was confused how he could even talk after that much cognac. And then...
The audience went nuts at the premiere. The audience went completely batshit crazy and...
Emerson said that he couldn't believe the reaction and he was so happy that people were like reacting to his music and like really like whooping it up.
And because he'd always wanted to get into film composing, he was very happy to get to do more film composing and Inferno and Argento opened those doors for him.
And just a little bit from a good old Daria Nicolotti. Oh man, she's great in an interview. She was still angry with Argento about Suspiria and how he just refused to acknowledge her and also the whole...
bullshit with the um the casting which of course she wanted to play susie um and when she saw what a hopeless mess that argento was while writing inferno she caved and helped him out
And instead of a writing credit, he bought her a trip to the Caribbean. She says that in the interview with...
Good old Alan Jones. She'll get the last laugh because the third film will never happen without her. And she says, and I quote, maybe I'll give the story to Tim Burton. Yeah.
What? Was that a sticking point? Did Argento hate Tim Burton or something? I guess so, yeah.
I have more from Daria here. This is from Spaghetti Nightmares, the Bible of Hello, This is the Doomed Show by Luca M. Palmarini and Gaetano Mastretta.
Would love a new edition of that fricking book someday, an expanded edition. That'd be wonderful. Uh, but yeah, um, in that one, Daria Nicolodi in her, in her interview says, Lee McCloskey is a real fool.
Oh, dear. She takes credit for the alchemy, occultism, and romanticism of the movie. She had a funny thing where she said that Suspiria is the best-selling VHS of all time in America, which I... That's not...
even remotely true but i love that she said that i think your friend who collects a titanic vhs will probably have some words to say about that i think that was a mistranslation but it was very funny yeah um So, yes, she wanted Inferno set in New York and Rome because...
And she says New York is the capital of the world and Rome is the most Gothic city of all. She says that Carl Jung felt the seething movement of Rome's corpses underground. Nice.
The interviewer says to her that the effects in the movie in Inferno are weak. That's one of the problems with the film. She agrees.
And says that she wishes that all the effects had been done by Mario Bava instead of, you know, Lois Bitter, whatever. And that's all from Daria Nicolodi.
I have one quote from her. I didn't get Janice to watch the whole thing, but the last thing that I watched last night from the Arrow Blu-ray interviewer there. I've got a quote from her. It says, I pushed Darryl. This is echoing what you said.
I pushed Dario toward the fantastic, the occult, alchemy, and fantasy in general, an area he had never covered before. I think this was after he'd found doing Jali a bit.
stale or yeah what have you and i like this at the end though and it's on a positive note the last thing i wrote down she may have said she may have you know shit told him after this anyway it made me happy
as he totally realized my dreams within the genre. Nice. That's beautiful. I love it. To bring us back down to Earth.
I have the author's review of Inferno in the back of Spaghetti Nightmares. The worst part about Spaghetti Nightmares are the reviews in the back.
If they're not spoiling the ending of the giallo, then they have some really interesting opinions. But to summarize, they say, Inferno, an inconclusive symphonic poem on evil and death. But the overall result...
Is disappointing. What if they, what?
you wonder how they because this is like you sort of implying this is presumably quite an old book now and you wonder how they saw it whether they saw it in a theater whether they saw it on vhs uh you know i wonder and that's the thing
Alan Jones, this is his favorite Argento. And he was there when it was in theaters. Cool. Like, so he saw it in theaters. So I think that really would have affected you, but yeah, I wonder. Oh yeah. Yeah. Last page of notes.
The new reference point for this Italian stuff going forward on any episode, Italian Gothic horror films, 1980 and 1989 by Roberto Curti.
Roberto Curti is the all-star, dude. He feels like the final word on this shit. He has some wonderful trivia stuff here. While he was in New York, Argento wrote a 267-page screenplay for this film.
Divided into 99 scenes. Wow. Holy shit. Working with Daria Niccolotti during all this. Produced this massive freaking volume. I would love to read that.
But Dardano Sicchetti, very successful writer of Italian screenplays and wonderful, wonderful genre guy. He was called in as a quote unquote sparring partner to hang out with Argento and...
He says he was paid very well to help with one scene. But mainly he was there to boost Argento's confidence. So Argento's like, am I ruining my career? So they paid Suchetti to just bounce ideas off of him. And he's like, no, dude, this is your thing. Do it.
They film the central park scene first. They encounter lots of trouble with those pesky little things called unions. And then they fled back to Rome.
Some of the effects had to be scrapped because they were too ambitious. One in particular I'll talk about later. They were going to try doing video effects. So if you've seen...
That's a good example of this. The Antichrist, 1974. No, I'm not thinking of Alberto DiMartino. And Hausu, Hausu, 1977. They would make the effects on video.
because it was easier to create effects, and then they would film the VHS.
and then splice it into the movie and do other special effects. I'm very technical, folks. Or did they do the whole thing like this on the Zapper 200 Motels as well?
Yes, exactly. Argento and the company were like, this doesn't look good.
But this is part of the reason why the film is so disjointed. That 267 page screenplay got cut to shit, which is why there's so many weird stuff and non sequiturs in the movie.
Veronica Lazar didn't know she was the villain until near the end of the shoot. They were keeping everything, all the spoilers under lock and key. And then they're like, oh, by the way, you're the third mother. And she's like, oh, all right, let's do it.
Let's see. Okay, here's the shot that was insane that they cut because they couldn't get the effects to work. There's going to be a shot where Death, a.k.a. the mother...
And the black gloves would pick up a snow globe of New York and shake it. And this would cause a thunderstorm to take place.
over the city, over the skyline, and a lightning bolt was going to strike the apartment building at the beginning. Oh, man. They kind of set everything in motion. Brilliant. Yeah, I love it.
So yes, as we were talking about the color scheme, Argento and Albani, they didn't want Inferno to be a kaleidoscope of color like Suspiria. So they settled on the palette of pinks and blues.
And then the real red scenes would pop even more if they kept them to a minimum instead of making the whole freaking movie red.
Roberto Curti says that Emerson was hand-chosen by Argento to help make a rock opera on film.
a young person's film. He impressed Argento very much by watching the film, seated at a piano.
And as they ran the film back and forth and got the timing down with the scenes, he just sat there and just wrote sheet music, just composing while writing. And Argento had never seen anyone work that fast musically before. Okay, the weirdest thing.
for me, was as Kazanian is drowning in Central Park in the delicious lake filled with rats, he was going to have a vision of the Charon.
Or Charon, the ferryman who transports souls to the dead. He was going to have a vision of that going by while he was dying. But they were like, we...
don't have time, and also this lake isn't deep enough for a fucking boat. They didn't do it. Which, I mean, I'm very disappointed reading that. I'm like, dude, they could have just filmed something somewhere else and thrown it in. It would have been beautiful.
Okay, last but not least, thank you for your patience from all the books here. After the premiere, lukewarm, lukewarm reception for Inferno. It did not do well.
at all after this initial excitement and you know the distribution problems that we mentioned not really getting out there for a long time people couldn't see the movie
A lot of it is blamed on people wanting Argento to make thrillers again, which I don't know. I feel like after Suspiria, people were ready, but who knows? It's just very interesting.
why the fuck wouldn't people be into this? I mean, I guess because, I mean, obviously there's a ton of overlap with Nisperia, but I think, I was thinking about this yesterday, and I'll get into it more when we talk about how we... feel about the film
Yeah. I mean, I'll just say it now, and I kind of almost hate saying this now because it's a bit of a cliche and it feels almost like a bit of a lame or like borderline pretentious thing to say that maybe Suspiria is a better movie, but maybe this is a better film. Not to say that both are like, you know. Sure.
complete art but um and you're talking about this being a young person's film i don't really think so as much i think this is more more adult and definitely more um
i mean so speaking to this i think i've gone through much of my trivia already because i've still been sprinkling it so throughout but um from that uh our gentle interview on the arrow blu-ray
It says it was designed as a fairy tale for... Wow, here we go. A fairy tale designed for adults. Ah. It evolved from a study I did on demonic alchemy. Bit of light reading there. Influence of cathedrals and their mysteries. I wanted it to be full of puzzles.
Fox didn't like lack of answers. Sorry, my note's breaking down now. I know what you're trying to say. There's a lot of, and I think this works with strength, like there's bits, like some of the...
dropped threads or unexplored avenues and said, great. I forgot what podcast it was.
But there was an interview with Stephen Throw where he's talking about his favorite music from movies. One of the films he talked about was Twin Peaks Fire Walk with me. And one of them was this, you know, truly a man after my own heart. And he talks about in some ways why he prefers Inferno.
or finds it more inexhaustible. I could be paraphrasing, but that was kind of the sentiment. And there's this great bit towards the end where Mark, he opens into some passageway that he looks down.
And he doesn't go that way. He closes the door and he moves on. And he says, I wonder what would have happened if he'd gone that way instead. You know, the film has kind of got a lot of stuff like that in it that just is.
It's just great stuff that your imagination can take hold of and just fill in the blanks, you know? Yeah, totally. That's sort of, I have a similar thought. I have a similar thought about that. But yeah, did you, did you have any other?
Oh. Sick bits from the trivia.
So, I mean, some of it's not even really true, but just the comment Keith Emerson made in that Q&A about, just having really fucking howling, about Iron Dire in Miracle 2, about how he...
You'd have to watch it, but he made a comment about a wet t-shirt contest involving her, which she was not bothered by. She just felt it hysterical. Oh, my God.
He's such a charmer like that. He has the audience in the palm of his hand. It really is such a great watch, especially with – I will watch that. I don't want to dwell on it too much because it's such a sad story what happened to him. Just briefly, I suppose, if you know how I think he was having some problems.
with his hands and playing and he had a lot of mental health problems which what a funny guy he was and just his insane talent
I mean, really, some people have said he was, like, one of the greatest musicians of, you know, piano, keyboard, organ, whatever, since maybe the greatest of his generation. He was just, like, on top of his fucking game, really. So...
The way I feel about this movie, cat annoyance and rat annoyance notwithstanding, is like, I don't watch this enough.
If you hear the outtakes of me ruining the plot earlier, then yeah, you really know I don't watch this enough. It's one of those things I'm so happy every time I fire this up. It's overwhelming, the amount of color.
Even in just the first 10 minutes are so overwhelming, sensory-wise.
The score is an absolute triumph. It's the bombastic synths, the 90-piece orchestra they had for this movie. Then it just drops into this gentle piano moments that are masterful.
you have to watch this with the sect as like strangeness and like, what is, what is going on? Um, I love the dread.
Then they talk about the sickly, sweet smell of the building, but they blame it on a nearby bakery. The little finger cut in the taxi cab where she gets poked with that sharp spot there, a little needle. The classical music. Everything is just...
fucking insane but i have a question okay two questions one what if you only ever saw this movie what if you watched this
but you hadn't seen Suspiria yet. You saw this first follow-up question. Did Suspiria need a sequel or any sequels?
Not to say this movie isn't great or important, but what if we just never got it?
you know well this is a bit in brad when he had a brilliant analogy for talking about the mother of tears and it it sinks year wise with he was talking about star wars and said because you have what is it
New Hope, 77, and Suspiria. Inferno, Empire Strikes Back, 1980. And then it would be like if George Lucas had waited, what is it, 27 years to make Return of the Jedi.
But I mention it because it made me think of like, well, Star Wars could have been a...
It ends on this hopeful ending and all of that. It's one of the reasons I love Suspiria, that evil's defeated and all of that. And it ends on the same way. This is very much like The Empire.
the empire or the strikes back whatever the it could have been completely self-contained what if i'd only ever seen this i would still be um
I'll give another, speaking of fire sort of motifs. I, as I said to you when we talked about Twin Pigs, had seen Twin Pigs Fire Walk with me before I ever saw the series. Wow. I forgot about that. The stuff which would have...
I don't know, just because I was already into David Lynch, any of the stuff that's not explained or whatever, or not fleshed in in terms of exposition. You fill in the blanks. To quote the title of his...
autobiography. He's big into the idea of why he loves ambiguity. It gives you and him room to dream.
and this film really does that so i would have just been enamored of it anyway you know just on the level of atmosphere and of mystery and um yeah so on and so forth i think and just aesthetics as well of course
What cracks me up about this movie is Inferno does more for the lore of the three mothers than Suspiria does. Yes.
this movie creates the trilogy like whereas the first movie doesn't create the trilogy so much you know like um i think that
this movie and people grow, it's growing obsession with it over the years is why Argento could never have not made the third mother, you know? Yeah. That's how I feel.
Yeah, totally. Although you do wonder if like if he could have done it more quickly in quick succession instead of doing it. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad. And it was maybe the breath of fresh air.
everybody needed maybe he pushed that style you know don't get me wrong i've not seen it for a long time but i love mother of tears i'll just say that right now yeah um but what would that have looked like if he'd made um whatever it would have been called
The third one back in 1982 or 1985 or whatever, what would that have looked like? Would it have stuck the landing for a trilogy?
what if he did it instead of trauma you know yeah you know i love trauma but what if he'd done it in 1990 you know it's yeah it's it's very interesting because everyone is so sequel happy forever
You know, especially Italy where, you know, you had shit being retitled all the time. Any other thoughts on this movie? I'm sure you have a few.
i suppose in general to say how i feel about that i'll try not to repeat myself too much from suspiria um you know like that this is like this is an old timer some days of the week it's like a favorite
horror film stroke film of my time it just but I and I'll shout out to Scott by the way and to David who i believe this is both their favorite argentos and they're more i i as you know famously
indecisive and kind of non-committal i've always pushed to pick one it might still be suspirio but i kind of can't do it he's kind of tied really what what i'll say is they they just scratch different itches this
appeals to me more aesthetically and intellectually than Suspiria does, whereas I think Suspiria in other ways is closer to my heart. That's not to say I don't utterly love this film, but they're just, despite the overlap, they're just different.
You know, and that comes down to the music and the choice of the colour palettes and approach. This is kind of a bit of a, it has its bombastic moments, but it's, you know, more, there's more of that quiet horror in this, which appeals to me a lot more as I get older.
It's not to say Suspiria doesn't have moments of that and more relative subtlety too. So, yeah.
But no, I think I've, we could just go on and on really, couldn't we? And I know we're already working about the best part of two and a half hours and we've exceeded the length of the film. But yeah, that's basically the gist of it, I think. Nice.
I love it, man. We'll never see anything like this again. This is incredible.
And hell, I didn't see it because I was just four years old. Stupid. I wasn't even born yet, so I was even stupider.
Oh, you're, you're a Ghostbusters baby. Yeah, I was. Yeah. And that made me think actually of Ghostbusters a bit without you saying this and shaking up the snow globe and the, uh, lining over it. Well, New York again, and all the great, my favorite bits. And, uh,
ghostbusters appeals definitely to my imagination or the sort of occult yeah so i forget his name now the occultist who'd made this insane he could have been the same architect actually as he could he could have almost been a morelli skyscraper i forget his name oh yeah
Ivo Shandler, that's it. Yeah, he probably went to the same architecture school or whatever as we were at, I guess.
He definitely had a foursome with the witches. But at what price? At what price? Yeah, exactly. And on that note, folks.
Thank you for listening, Simon. Thank you once again for running the gauntlet. No, thank you. And again, thank you to Mark as well and to Glenn. Yes, yes. Oh, man.
Don't worry, Mark will get his due when we cover Mark of the Witch, a movie that may have been named after him. Brilliant. Bye, folks. Good night.
Bye.
Folks, thanks so much for listening to this episode. If you'd like to write into the show, send an email to doomedmoviethon at gmail.
Or hit us up at DoomedMovieThon on Instagram or at DoomedMovieThon on Twitter or at DoomedMovieThon at Discord. Or go to HelloThisIsTheDoomedShow on Facebook and message us there.
If you want more Hello, This is the Doomed show, goto doomedmoviethon.com and click the podcast button for the archive. Or go to YouTube and look up Doomed Moviethon and you'll find the content.
classic episodes of Hello, This is the Doomed Show. And if that's still not enough, I have written some books, you know, about my love of movies over on Amazon.com.
Just look up Richard Glenn Schmidt and you'll find Giallo Meltdown, A Movie-Thon Diary, Giallo Meltdown 2, Cinema Somnambulist, or Doomed Movie-Thon, the book.
Hello, this is the Doomed Show. I'm a proud member of the Legion Podcasts Network. Goto LegionPodcasts.com and check out the other great shows over there.