Argento came to the rehearsals this time. He stood in the room and explained to four musicians what he actually wanted, and what he wanted was not a soundtrack. The music was to be as much the protagonist as the images, if not more so — it had to take hold of the audience and not let go. Then he had the sound mixed to a volume in the cinema that was close to deafening. Nobody had asked a rock band to do this before, and the record they made is the most experimental thing Goblin ever put their name to.

The short version

Suspiria is the third Goblin studio album, released on Cinevox in 1977 and, in the same year, in Japan on King. Maurizio Guarini had left, so this is a quartet: Claudio Simonetti on Mellotron, Elka organ, Logan strings, celesta, Fender Rhodes, piano, Minimoog and System 55 — and voice; Massimo Morante on guitar and bouzouki; Fabio Pignatelli on bass; Agostino Marangolo on drums. Unlike Profondo Rosso, every piece here is entirely the band’s own work. There is no orchestra, no jazz composer, and no side B belonging to somebody else.

What Argento wanted

The director is described by one Italian critic as the group’s official adviser and one of the main architects of their musical evolution, which is a striking thing to say about a man who does not play. His theory was that film music should not settle for commenting on the picture and hinting at atmosphere, but should function as a sound agent in its own right — the exact equivalent, in hearing, of the visual style he had chosen. He was there for the sessions, pushing. That is the difference between this and Profondo Rosso, where the band were hired to rescue somebody else’s score and ended up writing half of it by accident.

The sound

They went looking for instruments a rock band had no business owning. The bouzouki, a Greek relative of the mandolin with a very deep tone, carries the main theme in intricate dissonant arpeggios and was something Argento wanted badly. There is Indian tabla, and sitar; the percussion running under much of the film is African. Simonetti is the one whispering the wordless syllables. And then the effects, which were built out of whatever was lying around: plastic cups, jerrycans of water, bottle tops, and sighs and cries performed by Simonetti and Morante. The point of connecting rock instruments to ethnic instrumentation was to reproduce the mystical weather the film moves through.

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The songs

The title theme is immortal and the reason people who have never seen the film know this record: tabla, bouzouki and celesta converging on a cyclical, rotating motif that goes round and will not stop. Witch, Opening to the Sighs and Sighs follow. Markos is the one with the storming riffs, precise and out of control at once. Black Forest starts cacophonous and collapses into an oozing, lurching funk groove — and, like Blind Concert, never made it into the finished film at all. Death Valzer closes. Reissues have added a celesta-and-bells version of the theme, an intro, a narration and an alternate Markos.

Reception and legacy

After the disappointment of Roller’s sales, this took Goblin to their first international success — a gold disc, and a following in Japan that has never gone away. They invented a new way of scoring frightening cinema, and the influence went somewhere nobody predicted: every Scandinavian metal and progressive band since has drawn on this sound, and Suspiria is the record prog-metal musicians love most, the one that introduced most of them to the band. The claim Italians make, and it is hard to argue, is that plenty have taken from it and nobody has managed to imitate it.

The verdict

Essential, and the one to hear if you only hear one. The title theme first, obviously, and then keep going, because the album is stranger than its famous four minutes. Markos next. Then Black Forest, which the film did not want and which is one of the best things here. Then Profondo Rosso for the comparison: two years apart, one made by a band doing a job, the other made by a band who had been told to frighten people and worked out how. Listening to Suspiria is like a nightmare with your eyes open, and that was the brief.

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