Italian Maestro of horror Dario Argento's 1980 supernatural opus Inferno is unquestionably among the most visually striking horror films ever made. The second installment in Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy following Suspiria, it would be another 27 years after Inferno's release before the Maestro would make the third and final film in the series, Mother of Tears. While Suspiria dealt with Mater Suspirior, the Mother of Size, Inferno revolves around Mater Tenebrarum (The Beyond's Veronica Lazar), the Mother of Shadows, who is reputed by legend to be the cruelest, most vicious of the three deadly sisters. She's also supposedly the only "sister" to reside outside of Europe, and in Inferno she holds diabolical reign over a lavish but nearly empty New York City apartment building, where she maliciously spreads sickness, despair and death over the surrounding area. Twentieth Century Fox helped Argento finance the film after the worldwide acclaim and box office success of Suspiria. Though underappreciated at the time of its original release and not a general success financially like Suspiria, over the years horror fans have come to discover that Inferno is every bit as visually stunning and every bit as fascinating as its predecessor. Some Argento fans have trouble with English composer Keith Emerson's lilting orchestral score, which is a total 180 from the pulsing Goblin soundtrack of Suspiria. I'll admit I had to get used to it myself when I first saw Inferno, simply because it wasn't the kind of score I was used to hearing accompany an Argento film, but now I personally feel that the music fits the film incredibly well and is one of my favorite things about it.

The film begins at Mater Tenebrarum's New York apartment building, where young poetess Rose Elliot (Irene Miracle, fresh from Midnight Express) is one of its few tenants along with wealthy, terminally ill countess Elise Stallone Van Adler (Daria Nicolodi) and mute invalid "Professor Arnold" (Feodor Chaliapin, Jr.), who is cared for by a live-in nurse. After reading a strange book called "The Three Mothers", which describes three buildings supposedly ruled by each destructive mother, Rose becomes convinced that her own apartment building is one of the mythical houses of death described in the book. One night she decides to do some exploring in the basement of the sprawling building and encounters an underwater living room accessible through a large hole in the floor. After dropping her apartment key into the watery hole, she bravely crawls into the hole, holds her breath and dives into the surreal liquid living room. After retrieving the key, she is greeted unexpectedly by a floating, waterlogged cadaver, which understandably scares the piss out of her and sends her on her frightened way up and out of the watery chamber. As she's rushing back to her apartment, she overhears the building caretaker Carol (Suspiria's Alida Valli) talking to the building butler John (Leopoldo Mastelloni) about her activities and runs to her apartment in a paranoid state of fear.

Meanwhile, her brother Mark Elliot (Leigh McCloskey), a music student in Rome who happens to live near the fabled building occupied by the third and most beautiful evil sister, Mater Lacrimarum (Ania Pieroni), receives a bizarre letter from his sister telling him all about her suspicions concerning her odd apartment building and begging him to come to her in New York. But before reading the note he loses it, and it's retrieved by his friend and co-music-student Sara (Eleonora Giorgi), who reads it herself and is shaken by Rose's ramblings. She calls Mark from her apartment and tells him he must come over and read the note, but when he arrives at her flat he finds that she's been brutally murdered, and the letter from his sister has been ripped to shreds and scattered over the living room floor. Upon arriving home after the horrible tragedy, he receives a phone call from a paranoid and fear-stricken Rose, who begs him to come to New York before the line goes dead. Pleading with the disconnected phone, Rose hears someone entering her apartment and hurriedly escapes out of a back entrance and delves surreptitiously deeper into the sinister building, being pursued by a demonic, shadowy being that eventually catches the poor girl and decapitates her with a mirror shard. When Mark arrives in New York the very next day and discovers his sister missing from her apartment, he does some detective work himself, speaking with the frail Countess Elise about Rose who tells him more about his sister's wild story. Soon the Countess is also brutally murdered, and Mark is left alone to discover what's happened to his sister... and the secret of the mysterious building.

Inferno is an enigmatic film and will not appeal to everybody due to its cryptic nature and slow, steady pace. I look at the movie as a kind of marvelously creepy poem, rich in beauty and symbolism, punctuated by vividly brutal murder scenes. Leigh McCloskey is serviceable as the determined Mark, and Irene Miracle has never been more hauntingly beautiful as his doomed sister Rose. Sacha Pitoeff of Last Year at Marienbad fame is excellent as the feline-hating bookstore owner Kazanian -- who lives right next to the evil apartment building -- who tries to drown a sack full of Mater Tenebrarum's vicious watchcats in Central Park but falls into the water himself and, while being chewed on by sewer rats, is brutally slashed to death by a street food vendor who becomes "possessed" by the evil of Mater Tenebrarum during a lunar eclipse. Italian horror legend Mario Bava, who died shortly after the film was shot, assisted with Inferno's special effects and supposedly even directed some of the film for Argento, who was ill with hepatitis during the shoot.

Inferno is tied with Suspiria and Tenebre (which is actually a giallo and not related to the Three Mothers trilogy) as my favorite Dario Argento film. Beautiful, feverish, surreal, violent, and eerie, I rate Inferno a 9 of 10 and recommend it to Argento fans and patient horror viewers.