American dance student Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) arrives in Germany to attend “the celebrated Academy of Freiburg.” Moving through a pair of menacing magnetic doors at the airport, she finds herself alone in the wind and rain. As her brusque cabbie drives her through the Black Forest, he comments that the downpour only started half an hour before she arrived.

Suzy is introduced to the freak show that constitutes the academy: a patronizing administrator (Alida Valli), an ugly Romanian servant who had his teeth replaced after contacting gingivitis, and a blind piano player with a seeing eye dog. The students resemble wicked stepsisters, except for Sara (Stefania Casini), a friend of a girl who was brutally – and memorably – murdered earlier in the film. Sara has some suspicions about their academy.

Experiencing more weirdness – maggots fall from the ceiling, another student disappears – Suzy contacts a psychiatrist friend. He notifies her that her school was founded in the 19^th century as an academy for the occult. The shrink believes witchcraft to be a symptom of mental illness, but when Suzy returns to the school, the goings on get even creepier.

Directed by Dario Argento, from a script Argento and his girlfriend Daria Nicolodi referenced Thomas De Quincey’s mythology essay “Suspiria de Profundis” to write, Suspiria is considered by many to be the Italian filmmaker’s best film, and perhaps one of the best horror films of all time. Entertainment Weekly recently enthused that it was “the scariest movie ever made.”

To watch Suspiria is like being drunk in reverse. My mind and body totally rejected it initially. There is no story here, no characters either. Argento – who was inspired by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – had wanted to cast twelve year old girls as the students. His producers rejected that idea, but no one bothered to rewrite the script. What passes for dialogue is then incredibly lame. If that wasn’t bad enough, many of the actresses have their Italian dubbed into English.

Argento doesn’t bother with logic or pretend to. Instead, the loosely connected weirdness serves as a canvas for one of the more spellbinding visual spectacles ever put on a movie screen. Without access to a script, or actors that were worth their bus fare back to Italy, Argento uses color and sound to evoke a creeping sense of unease.

With director of photography Luciano Tovoli, Argento employs saturated, almost animation-like primary colors – reds, blues, greens and lacquered blacks – throughout. Even the rain is lit green or red. The art design is ornate and disorienting, creating the feeling of being trapped in a spookhouse. Italian rock band Goblin (yeah, yeah, Goblin!) composed a repetitive, but thundering score that gets into your head after a while.

This flick is creepy. There’s a scene where the students are asleep on cots in a gym due to the maggot outbreak. Casini wakes Harper to ask her if she hears the same creepy, wheezing snore that she does; it’s coming from a silhouette on the other side of a sheet right behind them. The heralded finale – where Harper meets the owner of the wheeze, and is told “Hell is behind that door! You’re going to meet death now, the living dead!” – is also pretty wicked.

Any fan of the horror genre should at least say they’ve seen this. My advice, watch it once to build up your tolerance, then watch it again with an open mind, where you can appreciate the audacious visual canvas for how unique it is. Or just get wasted and hit play. Either works.