Behind the Couch

...The Dead Will Deafen You! Last night Belfast’s Waterfront Hall played host to a special screening of George A. Romero’s satirical zombie classic, Dawn of the Dead . The screening was part of the Belfast Film Festival and featured a live score performed by none other than Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin. Dawn of the Dead tells of a group of people caught up in an ever-increasing pandemic of the dead returning to life and devouring the living. Seeking refuge in a shopping mall, they attempt to fortify the place while they await rescue. Events take a turn for the worse however, when their sanctuary is pillaged by malevolent humans and the group soon realise they have more to worry about then the marauding zombies outside… Describing the experience of seeing Claudio Simonetti and his band perform the score for Dario Argento’s Suspiria live last year as 'sensory overload', doesn’t do it justice. Nothing can prepare you for the experience of hearing the band perform live, an...

Last night Belfast’s Waterfront Hall played host to a very special screening of Dario Argento’s nightmarish, witch-infested classic, Suspiria . The screening, courtesy of the lovely folks at the Belfast Film Festival, was accompanied by a live score performed by none other than original Goblin member and long time Argento collaborator, Claudio Simonetti, and his band, the Simonetti Horror project. My ears are still ringing… Suspiria , for the uninitiated, is the terrifying tale of American ballet student Suzy Banyon, who enrols at an exclusive dance academy in Germany. Her arrival coincides with a raging storm and the savage murder of another student. Increasingly odd occurrences and other grisly deaths suggest that there is something evil lurking within the school, and Suzy eventually discovers that it is actually a front for a witches' coven. Often hailed as Argento’s masterpiece, Suspiria is a visceral onslaught of vision, sound and colour. The viewer is bombarded by graph...

What usually comes to mind when one thinks of the films of Dario Argento? Is it the ravishing, ceaselessly prowling camera work? The lurid, stylised colouring of his cinematic canvas? Perhaps it is the rhapsodic and fiendishly elaborate violence that perforates his morbid tales? Chances are that no matter what the director’s name conjures up, the music that accompanies his striking images will surely rank highly in terms of what we associate with his brand of lavishly sadistic cinema. Whilst Argento has worked with some of the most original and unusual composers throughout his career, from the great Ennio Morricone and prog-rocker Keith Emerson, to jazz musician Giorgio Gaslini and most recently, Marco Werba, his most distinct musical collaborations have without a doubt been with prog-rockers, Goblin. Argento’s long-lasting and highly distinctive relationship with Goblin began when Giorgio Gaslini, who had worked with Argento on Door Into Darkness and The Five Days of Milan p...

1977 Dir. Dario Argento The arrival of American ballerina, Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper), at a prestigious dance academy in Freiburg, coincides with a series of savagely brutal murders. Suzy slowly begins to realise that the academy is actually a front for a coven of witches led by the diabolical Mater Suspiriorum – The Mother of Sighs – who plans to unleash untold suffering and pain upon the world. With her friends falling prey to evil supernatural powers and no one to believe her seemingly outrageous story, Suzy must face her deadly foe alone… The first film in a trilogy, Suspiria precedes Inferno (1980) and the only recently completed final chapter, Mother of Tears (2007). With Suspiria , Dario Argento and his co-writer Daria Nicolodi created one of the most vivid, nightmarish and hallucinogenic horror films of all time. Deeply influenced by the drug-induced and vivid writing of Thomas De Quincey, Argento also borrows from Lewis Carroll, the Brothers Grimm and Snow White a...