In February 1977, "Stormy Storm", directed by Dario Agento, was released in Italy, which scared the audience enough.
After the film was released in the United States, it became the director Agento's highest-paid film in the United States, which shows the depth of its horror. In many of today's horror list, "Windy Storm" even ranks ahead of "The Shining".
In 2018, Luca Guadagino, director of "Call Me By Your Name," directed a remake of "Stormy Clouds," which is undoubtedly a nightmare loved by the world.
One
The poster for Stormy Wind reads: "The only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of the film is the first 92 minutes!" ”
The first shot of the film is full of eerie feelings, and in the tenth minute, it even shows you a terrible murder case, which lasts for four minutes. Therefore, some people say that this is a film that most people can't hold the first ten minutes.
"Storm of Shadows" tells the story of a young girl who is mutilated by a witch. New York girl Susie (Jessica Harper) arrives at a ballet school in Germany to study dance, arrives at the school in heavy rain, sees a girl running out of the school gate, and the next day she hears of the girl's death.
Susie, who had come to pursue the true meaning of ballet, soon discovered the evil door of the school: the students here were not very friendly, the school leaders looked strange, and the rumors of witch curses were widely spread in the school.
To tell this eerie story, Argento spent months traveling to Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland and other countries to get inspired. He traveled to the places famous for magic and witchcraft, listened to stories about the Black Forest and black magic, and talked to the locals about the habits, preferences and desires of witches, and then he was inspired by the stories.
Two
Agento was fascinated by the concept of the "magic triangle", which refers to a junction of Germany, France and Switzerland, which is said to have mysterious powers. Using the Magic Triangle as a benchmark, Agento conceived the concept that the cinematic universe he had constructed was inhabited by three mothers.
They represent some kind of primal fear in our hearts, that every mother controls a city, and the story begins with that city.
Thus, there was "The Wind In the Wind" in Freiburg, Germany, the first part of Agento's "Mother Trilogy".
The film's original title, "Suspiria," was directed at "Mater Suspiriorum," along with the last two parts of the trilogy, Hell and The Tears of evil, the "Mother of Darkness" and "Mother of Tears," both from the Essay "Levana and Our Goddesses of Sorrow" by British writer Thomas de Quincy.
The text writes that in addition to the traditional "Three Goddesses of Destiny", "Three Goddesses of Vengeance" and "Three Goddesses of Beauty", there are also three goddesses representing sorrow.
"Stormy Wind" is a horror film with a color supremacy, and the entire film uses large areas, highly saturated geometric color blocks to create a sense of weirdness and dreaminess.
The reason why Agento chose such a color was actually influenced by Disney's first animated feature film "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", you can hardly associate the nightmare, killing and screaming "Storm of Shadows" with that classic fairy tale, but in fact, even the image of the protagonist Susie is derived from Snow White, and the master of the school, the last witch Helena, corresponds to Snow White's stepmother.
Another fairy tale corresponding to "Stormy Wind" is Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. The first scene of the film takes place at an airport in Germany, and it is only in this scene that we can glimpse the real world that we know as it is.
Immediately after that, Susie walked toward the sliding glass door at the exit of the station. This sliding door has a special meaning, like the mouth of the rabbit hole that Alice fell into. Agento gave the sliding door two panoramic shots, and two close-ups of the door as Susie walked through the door. This is not a simple door, it is a door from the real world to the nightmare world.
Three
After Susie walked through the sliding door, a nightmarish journey of horror began in front of her.
She had stopped the taxi for a long time in the torrential rain, and her silk scarf had been blown up by the wind and wrapped around her neck, as if to strangle her to death. After she jumped into the taxi, her situation did not become safer, but more eerie.
This eerieness comes entirely from Agento's elaborate atmosphere of light and shadow: the night outside the car window is deep blue; the red light from nowhere hits Susie's face and turns her into a bloody color; as Susie chats with the driver, the driver's yellow seat and occasionally shining yellow light submerge the picture into another eerie tone that makes people trance.
The film's cinematographer, Luciano Tovoli, said Agento wanted "Windy Gusts" to be like a palette, with a rich main tone and a thick black. Tovolli finally decided to use different colors to distinguish between different meanings in the film: he concentrated on using blue, green, and red in the primary colors to represent the normal, living parts of the film; then used complementary yellow to mix and contaminate these colors, causing a disturbing and sick feeling.
In the film, you will see a lot of unreal, high-saturation red and blue. The exterior walls of the dance school are blood-red; after the school's insect plague, the girls slept in makeshift dormitories surrounded by crimson draperies. The walls of the interior of the college are made of blue velvet, and the corridors on the night of the insect infestation are also covered with unrealistic blue light. As for the green, it is used as an embellishment to appear at the moment when the characters are still alive.
If red represents brutality, blood, and imminent crisis in the film, then blue represents the real death. Such a metaphor is particularly evident in the death scene of Sarah, who has been trying to find out the secrets of the school, and she eventually falls into a blue room, struggling in barbed wire, and is killed by a mysterious hand. The scene ended quickly in a close-up of her eyes, as if illuminated by a blue moonlight, but with a wisp of blood. This is the color of the nightmare.
The reason Agento uses such unrealistic, bold, and intense colors is because, in his view, "Winds of Gloom" is a story that takes place in the subconscious.
The purpose of horror movies is to pull the worst and most primitive fears hidden deep inside us, and if it has too realistic colors, it will run counter to this "deep" meaning, and Agento is to make the film's picture look completely out of touch with everyday reality, and he deliberately uses these strong, surreal colors to create extreme violence, provocation and fear.
On another level, such color techniques are actually a kind of comfort to the audience. In the words of cinematographer Towoli, the color of a film has the effect of being: "You say to yourself, this is not going to happen to me, because I have never seen such intense colors in my life." ”
In the film's colors and sets, we can feel a strong German expressionist style, "Wind Gusts" will also use velvet cloth and paper towels when shooting, so that colored light projected on the face, has a special texture like paint.
Four
In order to enhance the horror atmosphere of the film, Agento also recruited the famous Italian avant-garde rock band Goblin to score the film. The electronic music full of metal feeling, the dense plucking of strings that challenge the limits of people's nerves, and the rhythm full of suffocation all mobilize the mood of the movie like the plot, so that the audience is on the verge of uneasiness and collapse. The soundtrack of the film has also been talked about by horror fans, and has long been regarded as one of the best horror film soundtracks.
At the same time, the various zombie films we are passionate about have more or less borrowed from "Wind Storm". Agento's work profoundly influenced The ancestor of modern zombie films, George Romero. Agento is a co-producer of Dawn of the Living Dead, who co-wrote the screenplay with Romero and worked on the set himself. He also edited a European release of the film and replaced part of the soundtrack with a soundtrack written by the royal band Goblin.
As for why Agento never made his own zombie film, his statement is: "I watched Romero's Night of the Living Dead and loved it very much. Then one day we met in New York and talked like longtime friends. We eventually decided to work together on a zombie film, directed by him, which is why Dawn of the Living Dead was filmed. ”
Five
In 1981's Ghost Drives, directed by Lucci Furch, we see a more obvious direct homage to The Wind: the blind girl Emily's throat and ears are ruthlessly ripped off by her guide dog, as in The Wind Storm' scene where the guide dog kills its owner.
In the 2007 edition of Footprints, an adaptation of Harold Pinter's play, the director also emulated "Stormy Wind", using large areas of color blocks and color light to create a tense atmosphere.
As for veteran film fan Quentin Tarantino, he regards "Stormy Wind" as one of his favorite horror movies, and its impact on future generations of filmmakers is far beyond our imagination.