Dario Argento believes murder should be beautiful, and INFERNO is him proving it.
The middle film of the Three Mothers trilogy — between Suspiria and Mother of Tears — starts with a letter. Rose, a young poet in New York, writes to her brother Mark: she thinks her apartment building was designed by an alchemist as a home for one of the Three Mothers, ancient witches who rule the world through suffering. By the time Mark arrives, Rose is gone. The building is still there. The building is the problem.
Because in INFERNO the architecture is the monster. Corridors that shouldn't exist. A flooded ballroom with something floating in it. Rooms that breathe. Argento shoots it all like a painting that's bleeding — every frame drenched in color, every death staged like opera. A woman goes under black water in a sunken room and it's the most gorgeous drowning ever filmed. Cats do something unspeakable. The Mother of Darkness waits at the center of it all, and the building burns down around her like it's relieved.
There's barely a plot. There's atmosphere so thick you could cut it. That's the deal with Argento: you don't watch INFERNO for the story, you watch it to be drowned in.
What we're burning: the Aphrodite Oil Candle ($22). Aphrodite is beauty — and this is the most beautiful horror film ever made, beauty with blood under its nails. Let it burn while the colors do their work.
Burn it for the ones who know the prettiest thing in the room is usually the most dangerous.
Some houses don't haunt people. Some houses are the haunting.
Get the Aphrodite Oil Candle at Whisperedechos.store — beauty bites.
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