MS. 45

My second time reading Alexandra Heller-Nicholas' work (the above mentioned SUSPIRIA being my first) and I wasn't as impressed the second time around. I do enjoy how she sets her books up: chapter 1 deals with the groundwork for how the film got made: script, casting, locations, etc., chapter 2 deals with a scene-by-scene analysis and chapter 3 deals with the films release and legacy. With this book being so steeped in gender roles/feminism, I felt she would sometimes go off on tangents that would last a few pages before getting back on topic. Furthermore, she reference the 2014 Alamo Drafthouse Bluray/DVD release that housed a few special features. The special features were enjoyable, albeit a little thin in my opinion. Already having seen these, she referenced them a lot and as such, don't know if that's due to laziness on her part, difficulty in finding quoteable material for her book, or because the information was just that valuable. But having seen and heard these recently, I was disappointed in how much she relied on them for this book. I will give her credit however that she was able to pull material for Zoe Tamerlis Lund, which was a nice balance to the disagreements over who wrote what between her and director Abel Ferrara. For those who don't know, star Zoe Tamerlis Lund died in 1999 due to heart failure caused by drug abuse so finding interviews conducted before her death with which to pull quotes from could present a problem. Overall, not a bad book, just not as enjoyable as her first that I read but I would definitely read more of her work.