‘Why are there always three?’: The Gothic Occult in Dario Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy

Thomas De Quincey’s essay ‘Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow’ provided Dario Argento with the spark of an idea, which was further ignited by tales from his then wife, Daria Nicolodi, who told him of her grandmother’s stay at a music school which was run by a coven of witches. From these sources Argento came up with the mythology of The Three Mothers, which were to feature in three of his films: Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980) and La terza madre/The Mother of Tears (2007). This article will examine the occult and esoteric sources of The Three Mothers trilogy, and explore how these references work to create a series of films that may superficially appear to use the supernatural and occult to create scares, but actually incorporate elements of Western Esotericism rather than traditional Christian images of evil. By doing this, these films transcend their apparent flaws (in terms of shallow plot and character development, a common complaint directed toward many Italian horror films) and instead imbue the mise-enscene itself with meaning, character and narrative. Although the films are situated within the Gothic genre, and in many respects follow traditional Gothic lines with witchcraft and the occult becoming synonymous with evil, I will argue that the films actually belong to the long tradition of art forms that have attempted to investigate the allure and the danger of occult exploration.

The PREDICTS database: a global database of how local terrestrial biodiversity responds to human impacts

Biodiversity continues to decline in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as habitat destruction, exploitation, pollution and introduction of alien species. Existing global databases of species’ threat status or population time series are dominated by charismatic species. The collation of datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents, and that support computation of a range of biodiversity indicators, is necessary to enable better understanding of historical declines and to project – and avert – future declines. We describe and assess a new database of more than 1.6 million samples from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world. The database contains measurements taken in 208 (of 814) ecoregions, 13 (of 14) biomes, 25 (of 35) biodiversity hotspots and 16 (of 17) megadiverse countries. The database contains more than 1% of the total number of all species described, and more than 1% of the described species within many taxonomic groups – including flowering plants, gymnosperms, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, beetles, lepidopterans and hymenopterans. The dataset, which is still being added to, is therefore already considerably larger and more representative than those used by previous quantitative models of biodiversity trends and responses. The database is being assembled as part of the PREDICTS project (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems – www.predicts.org.uk). We make site-level summary data available alongside this article. The full database will be publicly available in 2015.