50 Fantastical Film Interiors

For their second feature, directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have followed their mesmerizing and seductive debut, Amer, with another glowing tribute to the gialli — the stylish Italian thrillers of the ‘60s and ‘70s. A film festival favorite, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears makes its theatrical debut at the IFC Center August 29. Set inside a labyrinthine Art Nouveau apartment building, the film follows a businessman as he searches for his missing wife. “Soon traditional narrative dissolves into mise en abyme in this kaleidoscopic and vertiginous adventure in sound and image, sadism and eroticism, and the real and the imagined,” writes New Directors/New Films. The movie’s surreal landscape inspired an exploration of other films that use interior space in strange, fantastical ways.

Suspiria

Cinematographer Luciano Tovoli and production designer Giuseppe Bassan brought Dario Argento’s stunning gothic fairy tale, Suspiria, to life. Set inside an ominous dance academy, the film’s lurid color scheme and surreal set design was inspired in part by Disney’s 1937 animated classic Snow White — particularly the film’s “Technicolor grandeur.” Tovoli discussed his approach to Argento’s masterpiece in a 2010 interview with American Cinematographer magazine:

I decided to intensively utilize primary colors — blue, green and red — to identify the normal flow of life and then apply a complementary color, mainly yellow, to contaminate them. A (horror) film brings to the surface some of the ancestral fears we hide deep inside us, and Suspiria would not have had the same cathartic function if I had used the fullness and consolatory sweetness of the full color spectrum. To immediately make Suspiria a total abstraction from what we call “everyday reality” I used the usually reassuring primary colors only in their purest essence, making them immediately, surprisingly violent and provocative. This brings the audience into the world of Suspiria.