SUSPIRIA Day 24: WHAT

Despite the sound of alarms ringing out in repeated doomsday-is-nigh articles, physical media is not dead. This is especially true for horror, where numerous boutique distributors regularly save, restore, and release titles from the well-loved to the obscure jam-packed with features, commentaries, and the like. Conversely, however, in this cybertastic day of streaming and platforms and I come from The Internet and I want content for free, plenty of home video releases (for lack of a better all-encompassing term) are all but bare-bones.

Side note: don't get me started on the lame-ass Blu-ray that Carol got or we will be her all day, all night, and into next week.

While there are plenty of folks who don't care a lick nor a whit for supplemental materials, there are also plenty of...well, "cinephiles" sounds too snooty, but let's go with it...who want to hear and see making ofs and criticisms and more. When our favorite movies get subpar releases, we're left hoping for some magical future time when rights are sold or the film in question is miraculously added to the Criterion Collection. Such is the case with me and my life partner Suspiria. Simply put, there is not enough for my tastes on the Blu-ray. There is not enough on the German Ultimate Edition, which mostly comes with physical gewgaws. I desperately want a commentary track. I want a big fat feature-length making of documentary. And today's post highlights a major reason why.

Spoiler alert: I've been working on a piece about the female artists whose work is heavily referenced throughout the film. This brought me back to Suspiria's first teaser trailer, because it contains several shots that were excised from the final product after Amazon Studios was sued by the Ana Mendieta estate, who alleged that the film drew too heavily upon her work. (The case was settled out of court; I'll be talking more about all of this in that future post.)

Well. It had been a hot minute since I'd watched that teaser. I don't think I'd seen it, in fact, since before the film came out. That ~2 minutes was enough to get me dying to see the movie, and I didn't want to be spoiled by anything else. I was instantly...dare I say...hooked. Watching it today, however, I was shocked–SHOCKED!–by this very brief sequence:

Now sure, trailers feature scenes that don't end up in theaters all the time. That's why we need healthy home releases, dangit–we need director's cuts and deleted scenes! And LAWD I want this one.

Is that Susie on the floor? It certainly looks like her leotard.

Sara's costume and robe seem to put this right before she entered the Mutterhaus. In fact, it'd be right around the scene where Susie gets her hair cut–you know, following that brief moment where we see again how far the two dancers have drifted from each other. Sara makes a move toward Susie, likely to warn her one final time about the Matrons...but Balfour purposefully steps between them. Sara leaves, and without a word, Susie watches her go. It's a point of no return for both of them.

Whether it's a newly-coiffed Susie or a less-fortunate dancer, though, I got my eyeballs right up on it because whoa, is that blood on her right hand? And then: what the actual fuck is with her left hand??

I thought maybe it was a weird frame, a blurry artifact from screencapping at the wrong moment, but nope. That horrifying chicken claw is just how her hand looks.

WHAT HAPPENED?

Guess I'll be waiting for the Criterion edition in the hopes that includes answers. Can I sue Amazon Studios for putting out such a skimpy Blu-ray package?

*ETA: check the comments for some answers!