When Colour Becomes the First Shock
Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) is remembered not for its plot, but for its colour. The film’s stained-glass reds, electric blues, and theatrical greens create an atmosphere where emotion is felt before it is understood. This approach to colour—using it as psychological force rather than decoration—resonates deeply with my own surreal portraiture. In my artworks, colour carries the emotional truth of the image long before the viewer interprets its symbols. The palette shapes instinct, mood, and unspoken tension in a way that aligns closely with Argento’s cinematic world.
Red as Emotional Violence and Vulnerability
Argento’s reds are unforgettable: unapologetic, saturated, and overwhelming. They do not exist to mimic reality; they exist to expose its emotional underside. In my surreal portraits, red holds a similar duality. It represents intensity without aggression, desire without clarity, and vulnerability without fragility. When red appears on a face, within a petal, or behind a mirrored silhouette, it becomes a pulse. It suggests that something internal—fear, longing, instinct—has risen to the surface. This redness does not imitate Argento’s horror; it transforms his chromatic violence into emotional symbolism.
Blue as the Dream State of Fear
The nocturnal blues in Suspiria create a space where the viewer feels suspended between lucidity and dream. Blue becomes the colour of disorientation, the quiet void where intuition replaces logic. In my surreal art, deep blue backgrounds serve the same purpose. They host the portrait like a dusk-lit stage, offering emotional distance that heightens the impact of brighter tones. Blue becomes a container—calm yet unnerving—where the figure appears both present and unreachable. It is the dream-state where symbolic tension takes root.
Green as the Colour of the Uncanny
Argento’s use of green is one of the most haunting elements in Suspiria. It flickers across hallways, hits faces at unsettling angles, and transforms familiar spaces into places of quiet threat. In my surreal compositions, green often behaves in the same psychologically unstable way. It outlines flowers, illuminates contours, or glows inside botanical shapes. The effect is subtly uncanny: something natural becomes slightly too vivid, too alive. Green becomes the colour of emotional disruption, echoing the intuitive wrongness that defines Argento’s cinematography.
Female Presence as Charged Atmosphere
Suspiria is built around female presence, myth, and transformation. Women in the film are observed, haunted, tested, and ultimately revealed as forces of their own. In my portraits, this feminine tension becomes an emotional language rather than a narrative one. The faces—sometimes multiplied, sometimes stylised, sometimes half-hidden by petals—hold their own power. They do not exist as objects within a story but as symbols of internal worlds. This shift transforms Suspiria’s atmosphere of danger into a contemporary exploration of identity, embodiment, and emotional truth.
Botanical Symbolism and Occult Energy
Argento’s film is filled with symbolic textures: stained glass, patterned walls, ritualistic spaces. These details expand the emotional environment without directly stating their meaning. In my artwork, botanicals serve that same symbolic function. Vines wrap around faces like emotional memory, petals glow as though lit from within, and floral shapes echo patterns of intuition. While Suspiria uses architecture to create ritual energy, my portraits use flora. They become the visual carriers of tension, softness, ritual, and transformation.
Multiplicity as a Response to Colour Violence
One of the themes that links Suspiria to my portraits is fragmentation of identity. The film plays with mirrors, reflections, and disorienting perspectives. My multi-faced portraits extend this logic into emotional space. The multiple faces do not reflect confusion; they reveal the layered nature of inner life. Against a bold, Argento-like palette, this multiplicity becomes even more expressive. Colour becomes a spotlight that reveals different emotional truths within a single figure.
Soft Horror Within Surrealism
The horror in my work is quiet. It lives in the stillness of a face, the too-bright glow of a petal, the uneasy harmony of colours that should not belong together. This softness echoes Suspiria’s style of horror—strange rather than literal, symbolic rather than explicit. Both rely on atmosphere over narrative, intuition over logic. The palette becomes the medium through which tension is felt. The viewer experiences emotion before they understand its shape.
Why Suspiria Still Resonates in Contemporary Art
Argento’s film continues to influence visual culture because it treats colour as emotion, space as psychology, and beauty as tension. These same principles shape my surreal portraits. Through saturated reds, electric greens, velvet blues, and symbolic botanicals, the artwork becomes a contemporary echo of Suspiria’s aesthetic intensity. The film’s emotional violence transforms into a visual language of growth, vulnerability, and surreal introspection—honouring Argento’s legacy while evolving into something deeply personal and unmistakably modern.
