In the lexicon of horror cinema, few images are as seared into the retina as the burning reds, icy blues, and neon greens of Suspiria (1977), Dario Argento’s baroque ballet of terror. The film doesn’t simply depict a nightmare; it looks like one. But the bleeding, hyper-saturated colours weren’t a product of post-production trickery ora happy accident. They were the result of obsessive craftsmanship, arcane technical decisions, and a willingness to chase a dying medium to its grave.
The Obsession with Colour
By the mid-1970s, Argento was already a master of giallo, the Italian horror-thriller genre, but Suspiria marked a break from even his own surreal standards. His vision was to create a film that felt like a “fairy tale set in hell”, and for that, realism had to be thrown out the stained-glass window.
Central to this vision was his use of colour: rich, lurid, unrelenting. Red wasn’t just red; it was the blood in a fever dream. Blue wasn’t cool; it was suffocating. These were colours that didn’t behave like colours. They screamed.
The Secret Weapon: Technicolour, and Its Obsolescence
The first secret to Suspiria’s signature look lay in the camera and film stock. By 1977, the Technicolour dye-transfer process, known for its impossibly saturated hues, was almost extinct. Most filmmakers had moved on to cheaper, faster processes. Argento, stubbornly, did the opposite.
Suspiria was one of the last films to be printed using the original Technicolour imbibition process in Europe. Argento, working with cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, sourced one of the few remaining three-strip Technicolour cameras and matched it with Kodak’s Eastman Colour 5247 film stock. The trick was in pushing that stock to its absolute limits in contrast and exposure.
Tovoli later described the technique as painting with light, literally. Instead of just lighting scenes for visibility or mood, he lit them with colour. Gels were placed directly over lights, sometimes stacked in multiple layers. to produce unnatural hues that flooded the frame without bleeding into the actors’ skin tones.
Lighting as a Character
Unlike traditional film sets where lighting is designed to mimic reality, Tovoli and Argento used lighting symbolically and expressionistically. Hallways bathed in red weren't just red, they meant something: danger, transformation, corruption.
In fact, lighting continuity was often ignored. A hallway might glow blue in one shot and green in another, simply because Argento felt it better served the mood. This wasn’t a flaw; it was the philosophy.
Some scenes were so saturated that actors reportedly couldn’t see their marks. Jessica Harper, who played the lead role of Suzy Bannion, recalled feeling disoriented during many takes, not just from the surreal story, but from the relentless, unearthly lighting.
The Struggles on Set
The use of old and cumbersome Technicolour equipment presented massive challenges. The three-strip camera was loud, bulky, and inflexible. Lighting had to be carefully pre-rigged, and the film stock was sensitive to inconsistencies. Argento demanded painstaking precision from the crew, often reshooting entire scenes because the light levels weren’t “pure” enough.
To achieve one of the film’s most famous set pieces, the stained-glass murder in the opening, dozens of custom-colored glass panes were constructed, only to be shattered in a perfectly choreographed death scene. The lighting setup for that scene alone took over a day.
Budget constraints also meant that Argento had to fight to retain his color vision in the editing room. Producers urged him to tone down the saturation to make the film more palatable for broader audiences, but Argento refused. He supervised the color timing himself, insisting on maximum density and hue.
Inspired by Animation and Fairy Tales
Argento has repeatedly cited Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as a key inspiration. He wanted Suspiria to feel like a Technicolor cartoon, not in tone, but in visual intensity. He even instructed Tovoli to study Walt Disney’s use of contrasting primary colors and artificial lighting.
The sets were painted in deep reds and seafoam greens, not for realism, but to act as light reflectors. Everything was a surface for color to bounce from and distort. The result was a feeling of being trapped in a living, breathing nightmare painting.
The Legacy of the Look
Suspiria’s colour palette has since become iconic, influencing generations of filmmakers from Nicolas Winding Refn (Only God Forgives) to Panos Cosmatos (Mandy) and even the Wachowskis. Its status as one of the last films to use the original Technicolour process lends it a ghostly aura, a final breath of cinematic artifice before the modern age of digital grading.
The film endures because of this commitment. In an era increasingly dominated by muted tones and “gritty realism,” Suspiria is a defiant scream in living colour. Argento didn’t just use film as a medium; he treated it as pigment, canvas, and flame.
Conclusion: A Nightmare, Hand-Painted Frame by Frame
What Argento and Tovoli achieved in Suspiria was not simply beautiful cinematography; it was an act of rebellion against realism. By resurrecting dead technologies, manipulating film stocks, and sculpting light as if it were clay, they created a cinematic hallucination that remains unmatched.
In doing so, Argento didn’t just make a horror film. He built a dream machine, one where colour bleeds, and the nightmare never quite ends.
References:
https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/hues-out-hell-how-dario-argento-uses-colour
https://www.slashfilm.com/809979/how-dario-argento-masterfully-used-lighting-in-suspiria/
https://theasc.com/articles/suspiria-terror-in-technicolor
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2015/feature-articles/luciano-tovoli-suspiria/
