Only now does it occur to me... BUSINESS IS BUSINESS (1971)

Only now does it occur to me... that Paul Verhoeven invented a "SUSPIRIA fetish" six years before SUSPIRIA came out!  

Allow me to explain that barely coherent idea in further detail: BUSINESS IS BUSINESS is Verhoeven's 1971 feature-length debut, a film about the life and times of an Amsterdam prostitute.  Like most of his Dutch output, it's well made, thematically daring, and features crisp cinematography by Jan de Bont (who went on to direct SPEED, SPEED 2, and TWISTER).  It's very "slice of life" in its construction, and we follow our heroine as she encounters a number of bizarre fetishists, from "cluck like a chicken man" to "loves to do housework in a baby bonnet guy," and so on.  However, the fetishist who is the subject of this post prefers to cower beneath the bedcovers while bathed in green and red light 

 

as our heroine, dressed in a rubber witch mask, menaces him accordingly.

Between the lighting and content, the whole thing easily looks like it could be an outtake from SUSPIRIA (or its sequel, INFERNO, which actually uses rubber masks of this caliber).  Therefore, I think I'm within my rights to call it "a preemptive SUSPIRIA fetish."

Being as SUSPIRIA had not yet been released, however, it's more likely Verhoeven's inspirations were either the films of Mario Bava or the color sequences from Eisenstein's IVAN THE TERRIBLE.