I’ll admit that historically I’ve been a bit of a baby when it comes to horror, but I couldn’t resist the temptation of dipping my toes further into the genre when the Norsk Filmklubbforbund (Norwegian Federation of Film Societies - NFK) announced its annual film seminar theme would indeed be that.

Anya Taylor-Joy in The Witch, Jessica Harper in Suspiria, and the iconic Black Phillip in The Witch. Background photo: Hanna C. Nes / PRESSET.

All quotes have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Held over two days - Saturday, October 28 and Sunday, October 29 - I was lucky enough to attend the first day of the conference to catch a couple lectures and screenings at Cinemateket. As is tradition with the annual seminar, several academics are invited to give talks and pair their presentation with a film of their choice. After a quick introduction by Atle Hunnes Isaksen, we began a day of spooks on a sufficiently gray and blustery day (who said you can’t watch horror in the morning and mid-afternoon?). Rikke Schubart, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark, and Russ Hunter, professor at Northumbria University, were both in attendance to give vastly different lectures for two witchy movies.

Rikke Schubart presents her findings regarding the use of awe in horror cinema. Photo: Hanna C. Nes / PRESSET.

Schubart started the appropriately caffeinated audience off with a fascinating discussion on the use of awe in horror, which she partnered with Robert Eggers’ 2015 critical darling The Witch. I was intrigued by the choice to focus on awe, an emotion that holds a lot of potential in the horror genre. As a cold emotion, it provokes us to think and doesn’t necessarily prompt a physical expression. “Awe will often give us this epiphany, this wow which is beyond words,” Schubart said in her talk. “Awe and wonder makes us want to move closer, while awe and fear leaves you all frozen. It can be both negative in the sense that we feel dread or positive. Largely speaking, awe is an adaptive thing as it allows us to accept that someone is more powerful than I am and then I submit. In a reality check, you encounter a new thing and it is complex. You have to find out what it is but you’re not sure what it is. You might think this is not possible, this can’t be, but it is.” The Witch was the perfect choice to accompany Schubart’s lecture. Following a New England Puritan family in the 17th century after they’re banished from their community, we watch them slowly unravel once they suspect malevolent forces in the woods nearby are stealing and possessing their children. Schubart notes that the wild is regarded as “uncivilized and unconquered” and “a place where the supernatural can be.” Her discussion of awe is especially potent within the film as we watch the characters struggle to comprehend what is happening to them and subsequently lash out at each other. There’s a quiet contemplative energy in the first half of the film that illustrates the idea of awe and fear, before the paralysis is shattered and all hell breaks loose.

I managed to sit down briefly with Rikke to ask her a bit more about awe in modern horror.

Has there been a development over the past few decades with how awe is used in horror? This could be either within the film or as a response the filmmaker wants to elicit.

- The Shining is an example of a horror film that builds up with awe, for example the nature scenes with the camera flying around in the air. You have this sense that you are going someplace in the mountains that is far away, big, unknown and remote. You also have the awe that the boy can see things, but that awe later becomes fear. Possession films don’t use awe in the same way as it’s clearly a possession so you’re not questioning what is going on. So awe needs this sense that you don’t know what’s going on. I think that you might be right that awe is a sort of new trend. In fantasy, you have awe like in The Abyss by James Cameron from 1989. In horror, awe will end in dread and usually go towards death. Horror ends with going where you don’t want to go and fantasy is where you want to go. Awe is a feeling of being overwhelmed, the opening up where you are not certain, so you are surprised and you do “a reality check” which is matching what you encounter against what you know so you can categorize and understand the unknown thing.

I wonder if this has anything to do with horror becoming more accepted in prestige film discourse? Maybe that’s another reason why awe is a tool - because it allows for an emotional journey that reads as more complicated, complex and challenging.

- But I think the reason that you couldn’t make those kinds of films before is not that directors didn’t want to make them, but that producers thought they couldn’t sell them. It’s not a matter of creativity, but how to sell it. Nowadays when you can stream, people are finding out that the audience actually wants to see things that you thought they didn’t want to pay to see, which means that the films you can make are also different kinds of films. So with accessibility, there is a change in production. I think that production has often had an idea over who wants to see to see what and who buys and then they didn’t want to produce the things that didn’t fit their concept or their idea.

Dario Argento and the giallo: A cinema of beauty and brutality

After a delicious lunch (and a lot more coffee) in the foyer where one could peruse the bounty of film literature and collector posters from Z filmtidsskrift, we went back in for the second half of the day. Russ Hunter, an engaging and funny lecturer, introduced us to the world of Dario Argento and the giallo, before a neon-soaked screening of 1977’s Suspiria. I was a bit familiar with giallo, having read up on many genre classics such as Blood and Black Lace, intrigued by the lurid and vibrant aesthetic. Deriving from mystery novels in yellow paperback covering, the term giallo has “been adopted internationally to refer to a very specific set of films, started off formally by The Girl Who Knew Too Much by Mario Bava and later enshrined in terms of iconography by Blood and Black Lace a couple years later.” Hunter describes the genre as usually centering an innocent passerby who witnesses a murder and takes it upon themselves to solve it. What sets the genre apart is that it is “characterized by graphic violence (usually against women), and lots of inventive murders filmed in an interesting and creative way.” Hunter expanded on this, saying that “the focus is usually on the set pieces of the murder, rather than the narrative logic of how we get to the conclusion to work out who the murder is.” Think of a masked killer wearing an overcoat, black hat and gloves, plenty of POV shots and electric red blood.

As a result, Argento didn’t have the best critical response as a director. “Italian critics typically found themselves very disappointed in Argento because he’s not interested in making films that are politically connected, he’s much more interested in the visual image.” In a country defined by filmmakers such as Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni, Visconti and De Sica (to name but a few!), Argento's work doesn’t fit into the expectations set for prestige Italian cinema. “In the post-war period in Italy, socially engaged realist films are de rigueur. He had that capacity but no interest,” Hunter said. This isn’t to say Argento’s work wasn’t popular. He was a massive hit with audiences, despite the dismal moral reviews his work garnered from the Catholic Church.

Suspiria tells the story of a young woman attending a dance school in Berlin who, after a series of mysterious killings, begins to suspect that the institution is being run by witches. Suspiria, as Hunter says, is “in many ways, you can see this film as a giallo, but at this point Argento said he was bored of making them. He moves into the realm of making a witchcraft film and is very anti-realist.” I had seen Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake (truly one of the worst movie watching experiences of my life), so I was looking forward to seeing the source material. Hunter describes the remake as “completely different” from the original. “The interesting thing there is whether that makes it the perfect adaptation as it’s not at all like the original or whether we get frustrated because it’s got nothing really of the original in it. I think what’s interesting with the new one is that it sets it against a very particular political context. Argento’s Suspiria doesn’t really have a political context.”

Russ Hunter chats about Dario Argento’s filmography. Photo: Hanna C. Nes / PRESSET.

A problematic fave?

So why has Argento’s reputation changed over the decades? Hunter says that “the growth of DVD has allowed people to reassess his work” as critics would review DVD releases of older films. As for Argento and the giallo’s legacy? Hunter situates Argento’s work as existing “between the low and the high brow,” adamantly stating that the “legacy is amongst fans.” He continued, saying “I think that brand of slightly illogical but very creative cinema based around spectacular deaths has tailed off, certainly in Italian cinema, as budgets and taste have changed. Audiences are constantly discovering or re-discovering Argento’s work. I think within the industry itself, I’m not sure if there’s a legacy.” For a director who once said “I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or a man,” it isn’t hard to see why Argento’s work has been embraced with a little bit of a hesitancy. As a young woman watching his films, I find joy in the camp luridness of the murders. The blood is a garish red, the screaming offset by heavy synthesizers and there are frequent dialogue delays due to dubbing. There’s a stage-y effect that makes you so utterly aware of its performance, which lends me to being slightly more forgiving of the director’s problematic comments (also, gosh the 1970s were wild!). The combination of visual decadence and an attempt to be serious that routinely reads as camp to the modern audience makes it a feast for contemporary viewing.

After logging both films on my Letterboxd, I left at the end of the day feeling both mildly terrified and sufficiently inspired by two different entries in a genre that has been shafted in the past. After last year’s seminar on South Korean cinema and this year’s focus on horror, I look forward to seeing what theme the NFK has up its sleeve for next year’s installment!

Russ Hunter is currently writing a book on Argento, but in the meantime you can read Italian Horror Cinema (which he co-edited with Stefano Baschiera). The Horror Studies Research Group at Northumbria University (Twitter/X address @HorrorStudies) has a team of academics who all research (you guessed it) horror!

"Malefic, negative and destructive": A Day of Spooks at the NFK's Annual Conference