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| “ | Even if I have the name of a snake? | „ |
| ~ Suzy Banyon |
Susanna "Suzy" Bannion is the main protagonist of the 70s Italian horror classic, Suspiria. She is an american ballet student who transfers to a prestigious dance academy in Germany but realizes, amidst a series of brutal murders, that the academy is a front for a supernatural conspiracy.
She was portrayed by Jessica Harper, who also portrayed Janet Weiss in Shock Treatment.
History[]
During a night of rain and thunder, a young American ballet student, Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper), lands in Munich to attend a prestigious dance academy in Freiburg. When she reaches the school, she witnesses another student, Pat Hingle (Eva Axén), fleeing the building in a panic. Unable to gain access herself, Suzy stays in town for the night.
Pat arrives at a friend's apartment where she is attacked and murdered. She is stabbed several times. The killer then winds a cord around her neck that finally hangs her when she crashes through a stained-glass ceiling. On the floor directly below, Pat's friend is also killed when she is hit by falling glass and metal.
On her arrival at the academy the next morning, Suzy is introduced to Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett) and Miss Tanner (Alida Valli). In a recurring Argento plot device also used prominently in Profondo Rosso and Tenebrae, Suzy realizes she recalls overhearing something Pat said the night before, but is unable to remember it. Suzy meets Olga (Barbara Magnolfi) and Sarah (Stefania Casini) and learns that she is to board off-campus with Olga. The following morning, Blanc informs her that a dormitory room is now free but Suzy says she would prefer to stay where she is. After a strange encounter with the cook (Franca Scagnetti), Suzy passes out during a lesson and awakens to discover the staff have moved her into a dormitory room against her wishes. Sarah's room is next door, and the two become friends.
As the school prepares for dinner, maggots begin to fall from the ceiling. Tanner discovers crates of spoiled food on the floor above, and the students and staff are forced to sleep in the practice hall overnight. During the evening, Sarah identifies a distinctive whistling snore as that of the school's director, who is not due to return for several weeks. The next morning class is interrupted when Tanner accosts the blind pianist Daniel (Flavio Bucci), telling him that his guide dog has bitten Blanc's young nephew Albert (Jacopo Mariani). Outraged, Daniel proudly resigns immediately. That night, Suzy hears the staff as they leave for the night, but realizes they seem to be heading somewhere inside the building. While discussing this with Sarah, she becomes suddenly drowsy and goes to sleep, leaving Sarah to count the footsteps she hears as they pass. Meanwhile, Daniel the pianist is killed on his way home when his dog becomes spooked and tears his throat out.
Next day, Suzy upsets Sarah by telling Blanc that she heard Pat saying the words "iris" and "secret" the night she died. As the two girls swim, Sarah reveals that she was close to Pat and that Pat had been taking notes and talking strangely for some time. Later, she discovers the notes are gone. Once again, Suzy comes over drowsy and Sarah flees her friend's room just before an unseen person enters. Escaping to the attic, Sarah is attacked and finally murdered after becoming trapped in a room full of razor wire.
Finding Sarah's room empty the following day, Suzy goes to meet her friend's psychologist Dr. Mandel (Udo Kier). Mandel explains that the school was founded by Helena Markos, a Greek émigré, who was believed to be a witch. Markos is also known as Mater Suspiriorum, or the Mother of Sighs. Mandel's colleague Professor Millus tells Suzy that a coven can only survive with their queen.
Back at school, Suzy discovers all the students have gone to the theater. Finally suspicious of her prescribed glass of wine, she dumps it and listens for the footsteps of the staff. After her count, Suzy finds herself in Blanc's office. Noticing irises painted on the wall she finally recalls what Pat was saying the night she was killed, and finds a door hidden in the wall. Beyond, she discovers a ritual chamber where the coven is gathered, apparently directed by Blanc and comprising most of the rest of the staff. Unseen, Suzy learns she is to be killed, and finds Sarah's corpse. In another room she finds the directress and accidentally wakes her. The directress reveals herself as Helena Markos (also known as Mater Suspiriorum - The Mother of Sighs) and taunts Suzy, calling Sarah's reanimated corpse into the room to attack her. Suzy lunges at the outline of Markos, fatally stabbing her through the neck with the tailfeather from a glass peacock. Suzy then flees out of the school and into the night as the school bursts into flame, destroying the entire coven.
2018 reboot[]
In the 2018 Italian-American remake film, she is portrayed by Dakota Johnson.
In 1977, Patricia, an undergraduate from the Markos Dance Academy departed the school claiming the mistresses of the establishment were witches, she tells everything to her psychiatrist, Dr. Jozef Klemperer before disappearing. Short time after, Susie Bannion an American postulant for the dance academy comes to ensure to learn dancing from her idol Madame Veva Blanc, she hear for Miss Tanner (Blanc's assistant) and other two disciplinarians. Meantime, Blanc is learning a class when she senses Susie's movements and goes see her audition. Susie is accepted in the Academy immediately.
On her first repetition, Blanc introduces Susie to the rest of the students before repeating Blanc's masterpiece "Volk". Olga, the student replacing Patricia as the protagonist has a breakdown as she loses Patricia. Blanc tries to soothe her, but Olga blames the matrons of being responsible for Patricia's dissappearence as well of being witches. Blanc then gives the main role to Susie. Just as Olga is quitting, she is bewitched by Miss Griffith, a shameful matron, to the audition room, there it is discovered that Susie's movements inflict fatally on Olga's body crushing and twisting her body breaking her bones like a rag doll until she's left half dead. the matrons then bring her with hooks through a secret door that takes them to their inner sanctum.
Klemperer's investigation[]
The next day, the witches poll for who shall head the coven, Helena Markos (the Academy's founder who claims to be one of the Three Mothers) or Madame Blanc, the witches poll and Markos wins one more time. Following this, Blanc argues with Tanner their plan to possess Susie for Markos, as she is old and ill. When Susie remains on the Academy, Blanc makes her have dreams concerning her, "Mother Markos" and the coven. Susie's dreams also revealed her rural upbringing, a strange glowing wisp haunting Susie as a child and her religious, abusive mother who resented her daughter's bizarre behavior and would die later of an unknown illness believing Susie to be her "sin" she "smeared on the world".
During a repetition of Blanc's new choreography "Open Again", Susie achieve for Blanc, unaware that Markos is on the ground beneath feeling Susie's movements. Blanc senses her as well as Susie, but she ignores what it was. Susie then tells about this to Sara, but she calms her down. Blanc talks to Tanner who tells her Markos just wanted to feel her.
Dr. Klemperer demands the police to verify the Academy for witchcraft, to detectives examine the school, but are cursed by the matrons via magic, and their memories are erased. When Klemperer perceives the police will take to action against the Academy, he chooses to talk to Sara Simms, another student of the Academy and Patricia and Susie's friend. Klemperer reports the situation to her, but she is unconvinced, so he proves Patricia's journals to her, where she wrote everything about The Three Mothers cult. She convinces and investigates the Academy for herself, she finds the secret entry to the inner sanctum. During this time, Miss Griffith kill herself and the matrons take her to Mother Markos. Sara hears them and steals one of their hooks as evidence. The witched this out and track the call to the police to Klemperer.
Furthermore, Blanc organizes a plan for reunions for the matrons at a local restaurant, so that Susie "inadvertently" sees them having fun and she doesn't suspects.
Volk[]
Klemperer helps of presentating Volk in the Academy. Meanwhile, Sara examines increasingly inside the building. At last, she finds Patricia, decaying alive. Not only her, but also another legless girl crawling towards her, and before she escapes in terror, she confronts Helena Markos on her bed calling her name. As Volk is being carried out, Blanc manifests holes on Sara's way breaking her leg. The other matrons find her and heal and hypnotize her, then they take her to the performance so she can do her part. She dances with robotic presition when Klemperer remarks Sara's eyes and Susie's eyes have changed colors. When Volk is almost finished, Sara collapses to the floor with her leg again broken. That night, Blanc speaks telepatically to Susie criticizing her for the event. This is where Blanc beg to feel something off with Susie.
Final act[]
Blanc invites Susie to one of their reunions at the restaurant. However, while the others amuses, Blanc and Susie look at each other. Klemperer aranges of Patricia's journals and when he go back home, he finds Anke, her wife who went missing during the war. Glad to see her again, they crosses all night, engulfed by his love for her, he isn't aware they were walking towards the Academy. Klemperer is then aware Anke was just a hallucination created by the witches who then attack him.
That same night, Susie is led to the inner sanctum where she discovers the other students brainwashed and executing a dance as Sara is behind disemboweled as part of a sabbath before Patricia. She also finds Dr. Klemperer watching everything in horror naked on the ground, Miss Tanner with Helena Markos and Madame Blanc, Susie tells Blanc, and she proves she looks scared. Markos scorns Blanc, saying she's scared of Susie, while Markos wants to go on with the ritual, Blanc attempts to avoid it as she is having a bad forerunner, Markos argues with Blanc, and Blanc tries to stop the sabbath, only to be nearly beheaded by Markos.
Markos tries to finish the ritual, but the matrons sees as an incarnation of Death appear and step towards Markos. Susie then demands Markos which of the Three Mothers she claims to be which she answers in panic "Mater Suspiriorum". However, Susie replies back she is Mater Suspiriorum, proving herself. Then Death kills Markos and makes all the heads of the witches who supported Markos explode while Tanner scream over Markos dead body. Then Susie "unleashes" the girls being part of the ritual by taking their lives. Once Susie takes over the coven, they release Dr. Klemperer.
The next day, it is revealed that Blanc barely survived, and Susie visits Dr. Klemperer on his house and forgives for what her "daughters" did to him. She tells him the truth about his wife and what happened to her during the war to comfort him, then she erases his memory of all the awful things he witnessed.
Gallery[]
Suspiria (1977)[]
.jpg "Suspiria (1).jpg (85 KB)")
.jpg "Suspiria (2).jpg (330 KB)")
Suspiria (2018)[]
Trivia[]
- Director Dario Argento cast Jessica Harper as the lead after seeing Harper's debut performance in Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise (1974). At the Texas Frightmare Weekend in Dallas, Texas in May 2017, Argento said he cast Harper because she had "big eyes."
- The woman playing Helena Markos was not credited. According to Harper, she was a 90-year-old ex-hooker who Argento found on the streets of Rome.
- According to Harper, since the film was going to be dubbed after principal photography, sound was rarely recorded during shooting. Harper remarked that it was strange to her to be in the middle of shooting a scene and hearing the background sound of a stagehand hammering away on another set in the studio.
- Rudolf Schündler, the West German actor who played Professor Milius, spoke neither English nor Italian, so during the scene in which Milius he talks with Suzy about witches, Harper could not understand him, as he was speaking in German. Harper later said that she tried to keep a straight face as not to flub her lines. Harper said that many of the actors spoke different languages during shooting, mostly Italian and German, and it often communication difficult.
- Harper said in interviews that the most frightening scene in the film for her was the climax, in which everything explodes and shatters around her as she flees the academy. Harper said that the rigged explosions were quite unnerving as they went off close to her.