Suspiria is a no-surprises murder mystery that dabbles in feminist ideas, tracks the occult, and exists as an adjacent precursor to the slashers of the ’80s. The cult classic is beloved for its terrible overdubbed dialogue and iconic for its use of color. The reds, yellows, and blues of this film are so paramount, so specific and intriguing, that viewers can easily bypass the rest of the movie altogether; this is important because, in a lot of ways, it’s not a great film. This is the second of a three-part series on the colors of Suspiria.

Directed by Dario Argento and released in 1977, Suspiria follows protagonist Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper), a young American ballerina who moves to Germany to study at a prestigious school of dance. The film takes a lot of risks in the strange camera angles that shift perspective jarringly in a scene, as well as in the childlike script that is both blunt and sometimes boring. But it is precisely in this unpolished strangeness that we find a truly remarkable film. What Argento lacks in typical movie necessity, he thrives in the subversive means behind storytelling. Suspiria is a courageous film that forces the viewer to engage with color and atmosphere, suspending us in a delirious state that perfectly encapsulates both the plot and the characters. Viewers are immersed, wherein light and color bleed into our peripheral vision, encompassing our entire experience of the film.

You might enjoy this series more if you have watched the film first. Spoilers ahead!

The color yellow is threaded carefully throughout Suspiria; it is one of the three main colors of the film, but the least prominent and is arguably the most important because of the way that Argento uses the color to signify transitions and transformations. Yellow signifies sickness, disorientation, and is often found in poisonous plants and venomous animals but as it’s often pleasing to look at, it also represents joy, creativity, and youth. For these reasons yellow is an uncanny color, one that is a dichotomy in and of itself, and one that is hard to completely define, as it is constantly fluctuating between two opposing definitions.

In Suspiria, yellow is not just a color: It highlights pivotal moments. Like The Chorus in Shakespearean theater, it functions as a character that shows up when we need to pay attention, when there will be a significant shift. It is not immediately noticeable, except for a few main instances that drive the story forward: the first being the bright yellow skylight at the beginning of the film, the second being the rehearsal room where the protagonist falls ill, the third being the cast of yellow light during an escape scene, and the last being another cast of bright yellow light that shines on Suzy at the end reveal, as well as several other small instances sprinkled throughout the movie.

Our first introduction to yellow in Suspiria signifies imminent death. Near the beginning of the film, there is an intentional shot of the bright yellow skylight in the apartment building where an unnamed young woman is seeking refuge from a killer. Argento draws our eye to the window twice, as we’re meant to consider it not just as an aesthetic choice but also as an important object in the narrative. There are hints of yellow sprinkled throughout these opening scenes: the gold trim of the dance school architecture, a yellow bathrobe, the yellow window that frames the woman’s face in the bathroom before she is attacked, and the yellow skylight. The sequence ends when the young woman breaks through the skylight and is hanged by a rope after being stabbed multiple times. In this death scene, the broken pieces of the yellow window glass impale her friend, leaving them both lying in pools of blood surrounded by yellow shards. In directing our attention to the yellow skylight that is ultimately the cause of the character’s death, Argento is giving us a warning. In doing so, he sets up the remainder of the film to use yellow as a signifier for major themes: death, sickness, escape from captivity, and the loss of innocence or youth.

For protagonist Suzy, the color yellow transforms her body. During her first day at school, she is told to report to “the yellow room” for rehearsal. It is here where she gets sick and collapses, and we are meant to believe that she has fallen under a curse placed on her by the teachers who run the school. Yellow is commonly associated with sickness, so it is no surprise that Argento chose this room over a red or blue one to depict Suzy’s illness. As a result, she is bedridden in a dormitory with a yellow bathroom and put on a strict diet that makes her fall into a deep sleep every night.

While not identical images in subject matter or hue, the similarities between this scene in Suspiria and van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers (1889) are striking. The background is a similar dreary shade of yellow, and the gesture of Suzy’s arms is not unlike the bend of the flower stalks. Both of these images are on the verge of collapsing. In the yellow rehearsal room, Suzy faints upon falling suddenly ill. In the vase, the sunflowers are approaching the end of their flowering season. Both seem to suggest that youth or innocence is nearing the end. And yet, each is frozen in time. Suzy’s sleeping spell keeps her locked in a state of unknowing. She is unable to explore the school and question the teachers’ practices because she is constantly asleep. Frozen in a painting, the sunflowers are trapped in a beautiful youthful state, not quite dead but on the verge of losing life—a state of perpetual sleep.

In Suspiria, all of the dancers are trapped by their youth, by their dependence on the school for living quarters, and at the whims of the teachers. Without real agency (as youth often lacks), they cannot escape the predetermined path set by the teachers who are evil witches in disguise. Similarly, we can presume that van Gogh painted a still life of living sunflowers with the dichotomy of painting a once-living plant: Something once alive is now held at the mercy of the viewer.

For Suzy’s friend, Sarah, yellow is salvation from her captivity. In the scenes where she is being chased by the same murderer who killed the woman in the opening of the film, she finds herself locked in a nearly empty room with one very small window. The window is her only escape, and it allows a bright yellow light to shine within an otherwise completely blue scene. Sarah piles a few suitcases to reach the window and climbs through, but to her dismay, the room is not a salvation from her captive state, but instead another trap. She falls into a pit of barbed wire. A yellow-lit door on the other side of the room mocks her as she struggles to break free.

In this scene, yellow is deceptive. Looking again at another van Gogh piece, The Sower (1888), we can see a yellow sun that shines brightly in a green sky. While beautiful and not immediately apparent, this yellow light is also deceptive. Skies are many beautiful colors, especially at sunrise or sunset, but rarely, if ever, are they green. Van Gogh famously chose to paint landscapes in unrealistic colors, rather than display an accurate depiction of the subject matter. Like Argento, van Gogh was more interested in the feelings color can evoke, rather than color’s utilitarian function in a scene. If we look at another piece, Landscape at Twilight (1890), we can see that yellow is painted to draw our eyes up and out of the frame of the picture, towards some other place. As Sarah climbs through the yellow window out of one blue room and into the next, our eyes make the same jump—out of one picture frame and into another—only to be deceived into thinking there would be some respite. While van Gogh’s paintings aren’t as ominous as Suspiria, they are captivating in their unnaturalness. Where one is threatening, the other is beautiful—the inherent dichotomy of yellow.

In Suspiria, yellow shows up when each character either undergoes a transformation or makes a discovery. Eventually, Suzy catches on that something isn’t right with her prescribed diet. After Sarah goes missing and there is no concern from the teachers, Suzy decides to look for her friend. In one quick scene, there is a clever injection of color where Suzy decides to discard her wine in her yellow bathroom. In the following scenes, she enters back into the red hallways to look for her friend. After a long and strenuous journey of counting footsteps through the red labyrinth, Suzy finally finds where the teachers hide all of their secrets. In the underbelly of the school, Suzy creeps along a long blue-and-yellow hallway that shines with yellow light. Here, she learns that the teachers have killed Sarah and that they plan to kill Suzy next. Suddenly and violently, Suzy’s ignorance is stripped away.

Looking at this scene in Suspiria and van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885) one can immediately see the correlation: They are practically the same image. The light source in both shine directly from above to reveal the figures below, which are each in their own right revealing something about the narratives being told. In The Potato Eaters, we’re looking at a family sharing a meal. In Suspiria, we’re looking at Suzy watching the witches share a meal in the form of a sacrilegious Eucharist—a ritual intended to curse the students. Immediately following this scene, Suzy discovers Sarah’s body.

In both Suspiria and The Potato Eaters, the yellow light is the point at which transformation occurs. What is both literally and figuratively illuminating allows both Suzy and van Gogh to move forward in their stories. The images also both deal with consumption—literal or implied—to discuss the figure, or, more acutely, to showcase the body in a state of inevitable decay: the weathered faces and gnarled hands grasping food and drink in the painting, and the implied consumption via the look of horror on Suzy’s face as we know what she is seeing and is about to see. Basked in yellow light, the imagery insinuates some kind of innate bodily rupture—a change that cannot go back, a learned thing that can’t be unlearned.

Suzy, albeit a fictional character, has the chance to accept the painful discovery that her friend has died and use that knowledge to break the curse and save herself (and she does). For van Gogh, the light in The Potato Eaters illuminates the crux of his work: It is not about realistic imagery, but instead realistic feeling. And while this painting originally received negative criticism, it opened the doors for van Gogh to explore new avenues of color and light that have since become the hallmarks of his work.

Argento knew that yellow was a complicated color. Throughout Suspiria, yellow wavers between bright canary shades to dreary brown shades to orange-y shades, all hovering around an idea that you can’t quite pin down. Each yellow shows up when something is about to change, and the narrative jumps awkwardly—from death to sickness to death again to finally a break from captivity. Unlike his use of the color red where viewers are forced to bask in it for long periods of time, yellow comes and leaves quickly, a flash of light that forces a pivot or a jump suggesting that change will come and it will come at a cost.