Inferno or Underworld is a 1980 Italian horror film directed by Dario Argento. This film is a sequel to the 1977 film Suspiria as part of a trilogy of the story of three mothers. Argento pushes the boundaries of his witchy universe and clearly outlines it. In this film, his clear handwriting is manifested: a particular bold visual style of the horror of the time. In the European horror tradition of that time, the principal strain, thriller techniques, began to emerge. Argento, in his surrealism, has always woven a detective interest into stories. Combining classical approaches to horror with the deliberately theatrical style of murders, often filled with erotic overtones, he superimposed suspense on top of a thirst for the denouement.
Inferno is the most revealing in this regard: the film does not have a very bright atmosphere, unlike Suspiria, recognized as a world classic. However, from the point of view of the plot, Inferno does much more: the story is overgrown with additional details that refer both to the first part and give room for the third – the Mother of Tears. The murder scenes in his films follow certain Italian horror traditions, but the accompanying atmosphere of suspense is filled with sometimes extremely unusual decisions. First, Argento experiments with the soundtrack, making it more meditative in Inferno than the more classically disturbing music in Suspiria. Secondly, Argento’s Giallo films do not rely on the number of violent scenes but on the quality of the environment of the plot. Although Argento is often praised for the aesthetic content of each scene, as an artist, integrity often suffers from this. Nevertheless, the deliberately theatrical game, sometimes turning into the grotesque, the illogicality of the scripts were alien and at the same time fresh for such a genre as Giallo or horror. Thanks to these tools, the director implemented surrealistic features in his films before Inferno (Blood Red, Bird with Crystal Plumage) and after (Mother of Tears), which influenced the further work of other directors in this genre.