Inferno (1980) is the horror film that treats plot as an obstacle. Dario Argento's follow-up to Suspiria (1977) takes the mythology of the Three Mothers, three witches who anchor their power in three buildings across the world, and instead of explaining it, simply drowns you in it. The result is one of the most visually intoxicating and narratively maddening films in the genre. It doesn't try to scare you the way a conventional thriller does. It wants to disorient you until fear seeps in through the gaps.
A building that breathes wrong
The film opens in New York. Rose Elliot (Irene Miracle) lives in a vast, crumbling apartment building and has been reading a book called The Three Mothers, a text by a fictional architect named Varelli who claims to have built homes for three ancient witches. She finds a flooded basement beneath the building. She swims into it. That's the sequence that announces what kind of film this is: water, candlelight, a floating ballroom beneath the foundations, and a corpse rising slow from the black.
Argento shot Inferno on a soundstage at Rome's Cinecittà studios, and that claustrophobic artificiality is precisely the point. The New York of Inferno doesn't look like New York. It looks like a fever dream of New York, all crimson corridors and impossible staircases and rooms that contain other rooms. The building breathes wrong. Its proportions shift. A stairwell leads somewhere it shouldn't. This is architecture as menace, long before the language of "cosmic dread embedded in physical space" became a genre cliché.
What the film owes to Bava
Argento drafted in Mario Bava to direct the New York basement sequence, and Bava's fingerprints are all over the colour palette. Blues that are almost violet. Greens that suggest putrefaction without being literal about it. The elder Bava brought the same approach he had applied to his own giallo and supernatural work in the 1960s and 1970s, which is to say: light as meaning, not illumination. Inferno is one of the last films to carry Bava's visual influence so directly, and that gives it a peculiar double quality. It feels both contemporary to its 1980 release and much older, like something preserved in amber.
Keith Emerson's score compounds this displacement. Where Goblin gave Suspiria its pulse of raw electronic aggression, Emerson provides something more baroque. Church organ mingles with synthesiser. It's music that sounds like a cathedral dreaming. The effect is that even quiet scenes carry a kind of harmonic unease. Nothing in Inferno is allowed to feel safe.
Character as sacrifice
The film doesn't much care about its characters as people. Mark Elliot (Leigh McCloskey) travels from Rome to New York to find his sister, and he's a largely passive presence. Rose herself barely survives the first act. Characters arrive, briefly catch the attention of the building, and die in elaborately staged set pieces. A woman is devoured by rats in a Central Park lake. A man is stabbed by a cook whose face we never clearly see. Each death is staged less for shock than for ritual: the deaths feel ceremonial, as if the building requires them.
This is where Inferno divides audiences. If you approach it expecting the tight cause-and-effect of a giallo, you'll find it broken. Characters make decisions without motivation. Scenes end without resolving. The film pivots between locations, New York and Rome and fragments of somewhere else, without conventional establishing logic. But if you accept it on its own terms, as a structure built from sensation and dread rather than story, it works on a level most horror films don't reach.
The Three Mothers as a system
Inferno functions as the middle chapter of what Argento conceived as a loose trilogy, following Suspiria's Mater Suspiriorum (the Mother of Sighs) and preceding the much later The Mother of Tears (2007), which covers Mater Lachrymarum. Here the witch is Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, and her home is the New York building that Rose cannot stop investigating.
Argento's genius is that he never fully shows us what these witches are. They are suggested by smell, by architecture, by the way cats behave, by the sound of footsteps in empty rooms. Tenebrarum is mostly felt through the building's malevolence rather than her physical presence. When she finally appears, it's in a form so brief and so surrounded by fire and collapsing set dressing that she remains more impression than image. Horror built on what's withheld rather than shown. It's a discipline Argento didn't always maintain, but in Inferno it's near-perfect.
Why Inferno keeps growing
The film was not well received on release. Argento had suffered a heart attack during production, and Inferno arrived in a market that wanted slashers in 1980, not colour-drenched witchcraft poetry. It took decades of home video circulation and repertory screenings for the film to find its correct audience. That audience is now substantial. Inferno's reputation has risen steadily since the mid-1990s, partly because the films it influenced, those that placed atmosphere over plot and treated architecture as an antagonist, became a recognisable strand of elevated horror.
The basement flood sequence alone justifies the film's existence. Seven minutes of underwater candelabra and slowly rising bodies, with no dialogue and no monster, just the building showing you what it contains. It's the kind of filmmaking that has nothing to do with craft in the conventional sense and everything to do with nerve. Argento committed to the image and trusted it to communicate. It does. The way Argento fuses colour, geometry, and dread here connects directly to the sensory assault of his earlier Phenomena (1985), a film that similarly runs on dream logic rather than plot logic.
Inferno isn't a film you watch once and fully possess. It gives you different things depending on what you bring to it, and it withholds something every time. That's not a flaw. That's its method.