Triple Threat: Dario Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy Ended an Era of Giallo Movies

A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Maybe that’s why the trilogy is such a satisfying structure for so many epic series or curious corners of cinema history. This year in Triple Threat, Ken Lowe revisits another of cinema’s best trilogies each month, including some unofficial trilogies that have come to define a director, actor, or time in film history. You can follow the series here.

Everything in Dario Argento’s films, so once said Guillermo del Toro, is trying to kill you. The absolute chaos and unpredictability of films like Tenebrae or Opera are an Argento signature, and part of his indelible mark on the giallo subgenre of horror. Like a lot of auteurs, Argento makes movies that are not concerned with convention (narrative or otherwise): Episodic scenes of gruesome violence sometimes come completely out of nowhere, principal perspective characters may either die or turn out to be villains. As if to compound the dissonance, his films’ scores are liable to go anywhere. You never know what’s coming.

Argento has had a prolific career, and as recently as last year has still been writing scripts. He’s about as diametrically opposed to a franchise filmmaker as can be found, so it’s interesting that he’s got his own explicit trilogy, and that it isn’t even an unofficial one like, say, John Carpenter’s.

Argento created his own creepy mythos with his Three Mothers trilogy, creating a loose but continuous narrative around three witches who are so powerful that they inspire madness and violence in everyone around them, and the imperiled young women who find themselves faced with the task of defeating them and their insane followers. The subject matter may be particular compared to his other works, but the trademark vile, transgressive, shocking violence is pure Argento.

The Movies

Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) is a young American ingénue joining a dance academy on a rainy night in Freiburg, Germany—a city, Argento has noted in his interviews, that lies close to the borders with other countries that provide the continental European fairy tale influences that informed his and Daria Nicolodi’s script. On the night Suzy arrives, she witnesses a woman fleeing into the night, right before she’s denied entry by some panicky person inside. We witness the murders that Suzy does not—two women brutally slain. The movie follows Suzy as she tries to uncover the truth of the murders, and what’s happening at the academy of dance after hours. Her harrowing journey ends with a confrontation with one of the witches, cloaked in invisibility, as the reanimated corpse of one of her friends menaces her.

Suspiria’s plot and performances aren’t what sets it apart, though they don’t hold the movie back at all. Dario Argento’s team crafted an unforgettable atmosphere, though, with their visually arresting sets built specifically for the movie and the earnestly weird music of prog rock band Goblin, who collaborated with Argento on the soundtrack. (The band was reportedly given one day to write and one day to record this soundtrack. Make of that what you will if you, like me, find the score to be a bit repetitive.)

Although critics looked askance at it at the time, Suspiria has endured as a cult film with a completely unique look and feel. Argento, reputedly the kind of director who signs off on every decision big and small, crafted something that stuck in the minds of horror fans right around the time the slasher subgenre was coming into bloom.

Rose (Irene Miracle) runs across something disturbing in the book of poetry she purchases from the shop on the ground floor of the foreboding apartment building where she lives in New York. She suspects that she may live in the building told of as one of the lairs of one of the powerful witches called the Three Mothers. Drawn to uncover the truth, Rose writes to her brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey) in Rome to ask his help, and then immediately proceeds to delve into the absolute scariest and ickiest parts of the building.

Mark, meanwhile, receives the letter but ignores it because a hot (and creepy) woman in his university class distracts him. When his girlfriend goes to investigate Rose’s cry for help, it ends with her and another bystander gruesomely murdered. By the time Mark figures any of this out, there are only scraps of Rose’s letter left, and a phone call between the siblings is interrupted by shadowy home invaders. In escaping them, Rose also gets killed, leaving clueless Mark the sudden protagonist and perspective character walking into a situation he can’t possibly understand or be prepared for.

Inferno, like Suspiria, benefits from comprehensive set design that builds an alarmingly tactile world to menace its victims, and a wild soundtrack that at times just starts shouting Latin at you in a soprano. More so than either of its mates in this trilogy, Inferno is liable to do anything at any moment. Sadly, although it’s enjoyed a similar cult status in the decades following its 1980 release, it didn’t do as well as Suspiria due, in part, to a more limited release. And though Dario Argento remained as prolific as ever in the years following, he wouldn’t return to conclude his loosely connected trilogy until nearly 30 years later.

Mother of Tears starts with a familiar premise: Some evil is unearthed and quickly comes to dominate the lives and the nightmares of those involved with it. In this case, it’s a buried box of artifacts found in an unmarked grave in a cemetery in Rome. When archaeologist Sarah (Asia Argento) examines the artifacts while working after hours at a museum, things immediately get violent—she’s hunted by a psychotic monkey and ghoulish cultists murder her coworker. The police don’t believe her story, and neither does the boyfriend who the church originally reached out to about the strange box (Adam James).

As Sarah is pursued by both the police and a ranting pack of psychos who are either prog rock witches or just normally behaving Anglophone tourists, she also hears a voice guiding her and counseling her in the use of a strange magical power she did not know she possessed. As random acts of violence break out in the streets, the spirit of Sarah’s dead mother (Asia Argento’s actual mother and co-writer of Suspiria, Nicolodi) appears through the use of really dated visual effects to come to her aid in a final battle against the witch responsible for all the mayhem: The Mother of Tears.

Mother of Tears is the odd man out in the trilogy—there’s none of the grandiose bespoke set design and a lot less of the atmosphere on offer in the installments that hit theaters 30 years prior. It also features, it must be said, an egregiously violent lesbian-burying scene (but that, too, is a part of Dario Argento’s normal purview).

Best Entry

Sadly, Mother of Tears doesn’t do much to justify Argento’s return to the subject matter, and although Suspiria is at times visually unforgettable, it’s also a bit slow for its fleet runtime. Inferno, on the other hand, comes right out of the gate with alarming and unnerving scenes, then continues with completely wild, gonzo unpredictability. That earns this trilogy’s middle entry the crown.

Trilogy Trivia

It’s impossible to bring up Dario Argento’s convoluted lore without mentioning its inspiration, which was apparently the works of Thomas de Quincy. In his Suspiria de Profundis, de Quincy posited that, as the Greeks named three Fates and three Graces, there were also three Sorrows, whose names Argento adopted for his three antagonists in the films. It’s obviously a motif that was on his mind outside of this trilogy: His film Tenebrae adopts the Latin word for “darkness,” even as the Mother of Darkness appears in this trilogy in Inferno.

Marathon Potential

At under two hours each, Dario Argento’s The Three Mothers makes for a great scary evening if you’ve got friends who are real gorehounds (and if nobody has a problem watching a movie starring Asia Argento). Depending on what sort of substances are lubricating the evening, you either want to watch the movies in release order, thus ensuring that Mother of Tears hits when the good stuff does, or get it out of the way immediately and then do Suspiria and Inferno.

Join us next month for another installment of Triple Threat, as we examine the Dad Action franchise that ushered in the post-9/11 era and cemented Matt Damon as an action star, The Jason Bourne Trilogy.

Kenneth Lowe has broken the law of silentium. You can follow him on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.