Italian director Dario Argento followed up Suspiria(1976) with this slightly demented but compulsive shocker.
American student Mark Elliot (Leigh McCloskey) receives a letter from his poet sister Rose (Irene Miracle), who thinks her old gothic New York apartment has links to an ancient coven and has a malevolent occupant in the form of one of the “Three Mothers” – a trio of evil witches who are supposed to rule the Earth.
When Mark arrives in the Big Apple from Rome (following the untimely demise of his girlfriend), Rose has disappeared, and a series of occult killings is gripping the city.
He talks to the various weirdos who live in the apartment building, almost all of whom die in grizzly, colourful ways soon afterwards: a woman is pelted to death by cats, a crippled bookshop owner (who tries to get rid of the cats) is devoured by rats, eyes are gouged out, heads are guillotined by window panes, and Mark stumbles around with a blank expression on his face throughout.
He’s more in the dark than the viewing audience!
Argento’s house of horrors is a towering apartment block, an elegantly dilapidated labyrinth full of secret rooms and forgotten staircases.
The witch’s influence seems to have spread beyond its walls, infecting the cluttered antique shop across the alley. In fact, even Central Park – where one of the characters meets his grisly end – assumes a strange aura of garish unreality.
Dario Argento’s technical skill, though, creates enough striking moments to offset any inconsistencies in the plot and excuse several thoroughly incomprehensible scenes (it’s unlikely even Argento had any clue what was going on).
That said, an underwater sequence with a hideous streaky-bacon corpse is the most frightening set piece in the Argento canon, and unfathomable mystery is part of the charm of his movies.
American student Mark Elliot (Leigh McCloskey) receives a letter from his poet sister Rose (Irene Miracle), who thinks her old gothic New York apartment has links to an ancient coven and has a malevolent occupant in the form of one of the “Three Mothers” – a trio of evil witches who are supposed to rule the Earth.
Argento’s house of horrors is a towering apartment block, an elegantly dilapidated labyrinth full of secret rooms and forgotten staircases.
