SUSPIRIA Day 12: in the mutterhaus

As Volk is about to begin, Sara descends into the Mutterhaus once more in search of Patricia, surely, but possibly also for a way to help Susie, who she now realizes is lost to her. She does find Patricia and what seems to be the still living remains of some other girls. It's a horrifying sequence. Sara is terrified and pulls away from Patricia's grasping hands. A woman with no hands or feet unravels herself and begins to crawl. We hear the raspy voice of Markos yelling "Saraaaaaa!"

But gotdangit, I know it adds to the mysterious feel of Helena's dungeon, but it's so dark down there! It's a seriously dim scene in a movie that is not exactly bright and sparkling at the best of times. So just to see everything there is to see in the blackness of the Mutterhaus, I brightened up some screencaps and...oh my.

I've always loved the crazy wireworks that are a nice echo back to the razor wire room in the original film, but in the darkness you can't tell how much is actually there. And those beds, those small beds, are they typically filled with the poor women whose life force Markos is siphoning? There are many of them, a potential full of dread.

I suppose it's possible, even, that some of the coven sleeps down there, but somehow I can't really imagine someone as cool as Vendegast settling for sleeping in a box in a basement.

But we know who does sleep down there: Helena Markos. You can just barely make her out in her weird four-poster bed (another nice callback to Argento's Suspiria)–heck, the first few times I saw this, I didn't realize you could see her at all. But there she is.

She's got her Silent Hill corpse art to look at, I suppose, while she sits in her sunglasses and waits and waits for Susie to be ready. I hope someone brings her a magazine once in a while!