Editorials
Revisiting Dario Argento’s ‘The Three Mothers’ Trilogy
The teaser for Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria that dropped recently revealed a distinct departure from the vivid colored world of Dario Argento’s beloved supernatural classic. Color scheme aside, the teaser seems to be boldly declaring that this won’t be closely following the same beats of the 1977 film. While there are foundational plot elements in common, like the dance academy or that the narrative centers around dancer Susie Bannion (this time played by Dakota Johnson, and with different character spelling), the teaser gave a glimpse of a notebook with a particularly curious set of notes that gives an indication to the larger mythology that may be at play; the Three Mothers.
While waiting to see what kind of madness Guadagnino’s film has in store come November and the potential for a new trilogy based on the Three Mothers, I revisited Argento’s original trilogy to reexamine the lore behind his trio of fearsome witches.
The Three Mothers are a triad of evil, powerful witches stationed across the world to manipulate humanity on a global scale. Argento drew inspiration and the concept from Thomas De Quincey’s collection of psychological fantasy essays Suspiria de Profundis, or more specifically a section titled “Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow,” where De Quincey envisions three companions for the Roman goddess of childbirth; Mater Lachrymarum (Our Lady of Tears), Mater Suspiriorum (Our Lady of Sighs), and Mater Tenebrarum (Our Lady of Darkness). Argento took the idea and spun it into a supernatural horror trilogy, each Mother a powerful witch receiving her own film. He also drew inspiration from his grandmother, who claimed to have fled a German music academy due to actual practicing witches that were there.
Suspiria – Mater Suspiriorum
Easily Argento’s most recognized and most beloved film, Suspiria stars Jessica Harper as Suzy Bannion, an American ballet student who transfers to a prestigious dance academy in Freiburg, Germany, and soon discovers a supernatural conspiracy amidst a string of brutal murders. Aside from the stunning vibrant colors and a progressive rock score by Goblin, Argento cleverly borrows from giallo tropes before ripping the rug out from viewers with the reveal of witchcraft.
The witch responsible for the brutal, extravagantly staged deaths in the film is the Mother of Sighs, or Mater Suspiriorum. The oldest and wisest of the Three Mothers, she remains unseen for most of the film, hidden behind a secret passage underneath the dance academy and further concealed by her coven. The final showdown between Suzy and the Mother of Sighs, given name Helena Markos, was a terrifying battle as the witch reanimated Suzy’s dead friend Sara to attack. Suzy successfully kills the Mother of Sighs, causing the dance academy to burn to the ground and her coven dying with it.
Inferno – Mater Tenebrarum
An underrated, thematic sequel to Suspiria sees its protagonist square off against the youngest and cruelest of the Three Mothers. While the colors are still present (but not nearly as intense) and the score more delicate than that of Suspiria, Argento enlisted his mentor Mario Bava for some of the effects, matte paintings, and trick shots for the film. Bava, and his son Lamberto, worked as second unit director and assistant director, respectively, picking up the reins when Argento was too ill, suffering from a severe case of hepatitis at the time. The exquisite underwater sequence near the beginning of the film can be attributed, at least in part, to Bava; this remarkable scene alone makes the film worth watching. The intense pain and suffering that Argento endured during production dampened his memories of the film; he’s cited Inferno among his least favorite works.
While the main antagonist of the film is Mater Tenebrarum, or Mother of Darkness, she’s not the only Mother in Inferno. When Rose Elliot stumbles upon an ancient book by E. Varelli that tells of his building the three homes of the Three Mothers, she realizes she’s living in the New York building belonging to one of them. She writes to her brother Mark, back in Rome, begging him to visit. Before he can read her letter, he’s distracted in class by a beautiful student, which turns out to be Mater Lachrymarum, the most beautiful and powerful of the Three Mothers. But this is Mater Tenebrarum’s movie, and Mark does eventually make his way to New York to find his sister. Of the three witches, Mater Tenebrarum’s death proves to be the most anticlimactic; after her identity is finally revealed and she turns into death personified, she passively perishes in the flames of her burning building.
The Mother of Tears – Mater Lachrymarum
Nearly 30 years after Inferno saw limited release, the conclusion of the Three Mothers trilogy finally arrived in 2007. Its modern style and aesthetic bears little resemblance to its thematic siblings, only the mythology serving as connective tissue. It’s also by far the more violent and gruesome, especially when watching the unrated cut. Visceral deaths of babies and children illustrate that this mother may be far crueler than her youngest sister.
The Mother of Tears closes the loop, reconnecting to the first film by introducing the protagonist as the daughter of a powerful white witch that fought and weakened Mater Suspiriorum prior to the events of Suspiria. That daughter, Sarah (Asia Argento) is guided by the ghost of her mother while Mater Lachrymarum grows exponentially more powerful with the unearthing of her magic cloak thanks to the Catholic Church. With widespread violence erupting across Rome, where this Mother is based, and the ever-increasing number of coven members closing in on Sarah, Argento does succeed in demonstrating that this Mother is the most powerful. As such, it builds to one of the more thrilling climaxes, with Sarah underground in the thick of the cannibalistic coven surrounding Mater Lachrymarum for one hellish showdown.
As the furthest removed from Suspiria both in look and in date, The Mother of Tears is the worst received of the trilogy. It’s also the most daring in violence, gore, and nudity. From a mythology standpoint, the final entry is faithful to the story of the Three Mothers.
Each of the witches were powerful and varied in their skills, yet all three were tethered to their specific architecture. Save for Suzy Bannion killing Mater Suspiriorum directly, the subsequent Mothers were destroyed by proxy of destroying their enchanted homes, or their objects of power. Argento created interesting supernatural lore and saw it through its completion, even if it took him three decades to finish.
That said, there’s a lot that could potentially be improved with the new reboot. After Suzy, the subsequent protagonists weren’t as developed, and the witches themselves were often built up to be horrific and fierce only to defeated fairly easily. Even still, it’s a trilogy worth revisiting.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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