Luca Guadagnino is following up Call Me By Your Name
with a project that’s deeply personal to him,
and one that made Quentin Tarantino cry,
a remake of one of the most legendary horror films of all time -
Dario Argento’s Suspiria.
“Bad luck isn’t brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds.”
Released in 1977,
the stylized fairy tale-nightmare follows Suzy Bannion,
an American ballet student who attends a dance academy in Germany,
only to discover it’s a front for a coven of witches.
[whispers] “Suzy, do you know anything about witches?”
So in honor of the new Suspiria’s release,
we’re going to look at what made Dario Argento’s 1977 film so mesmerizing,
and how Guadagnino’s non-traditional remake
is an homage to the feeling the original Suspiria gave him—
a feeling that would profoundly impact his directorial style.
“The illicitness of it, and the incredible freedom of Dario,
were really empowering me, very much.”
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“Skepticism is the natural reaction of evil nowadays.
And magic is ever present.
Which means that magic is everywhere, and all over the world, it’s a recognized
fact.”
By the way,
if you notice that dialogue from the original seems out of sync,
that’s because during filming, everyone spoke their own native languages,
and it was all dubbed into English later.
Argento began his filmmaking career working in the tradition of Giallo:
A horror-film sub-genre that peaked in popularity in 1970s Italy.
The term Giallo, which translates to “Yellow” in English,
stems from a line of pulp mystery novels with yellow covers
that were published in Italy starting in 1929.
The archetypal giallo film combines elements from detective fiction with:
bloody, drawn out murder sequences,
opulent visuals, jarring soundscapes, and, typically, a female lead.
Suspiria was very much born out of giallo —
everything is over the top —
but instead of being strictly fiction, it has supernatural subject matter,
so it builds on and transcends the genre.
Suspiria is the first film in Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy,
about a trio of malevolent witches
with the power to manipulate events around the world.
This concept came from Thomas de Quincey’s Suspiria de profundis,
an 1845 collection of psychological fantasy essays
influenced by the author’s visions on opium.
Argento and his screenwriter and partner at the time, Daria Nicolodi,
wanted a tone of perverted innocence,
so they studied stories of the European occult
and watched Disney fairy tales like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
and Alice in Wonderland.
“It all seems so absurd, so fantastic.”
Suspiria isn’t to be watched but experienced:
it’s an acid trip in a haunted mansion,
a beautiful nightmare that you don’t want to wake up from.
plot and character development are of little importance.
“Do not be concerned - it’s nothing.”
What makes the film so captivating is the feeling it gives viewers—
“I know.
But I have a strange feeling that somebody already told me about it.
Or something similar.
I can’t—“
Guadagnino spoke of the corporeal fear it gave him.
Suspiria showed Guadagnino how movies could
“Upset somebody in a beautiful way.”
As a director, this inspired him to follow Argento’s lead
to make films that viewers experience through the body
instead of just through the mind or emotions.
The language of Suspiria is primarily visual.
We might not learn much about Suzy from what she has to say,
“a lot of strange things are happening.”
but we feel how she feels when she’s scared,
when she knows something’s not right.
The visuals—
from the movement of the camera, to the lighting and color palette,
to the mise-en-scene—
work in tandem to overwhelm the viewers and transport us to another world.
Argento and cinematographer, Luciano Tovoli, took a dramatic, experimental approach
to give the film the look of a dark fairy tale.
They opted for a palette of bold, primary colors:
the artificiality of the light representing the presence of the supernatural.
Tovoli achieved this by shining strong lights
through makeshift screens made of colored velvets and tissue paper,
which he placed uncomfortably close to the actors’ faces.
To produce a color scheme reminiscent of Snow White,
the film was processed in three-strip Technicolor, an old-fashioned technique
that gave The Wizard of Oz its vibrant, cartoonish colors.
The production design was heavily influenced by expressionist paintings and films.
So we see geometric shapes, textured backgrounds,
and architecture of odd proportions.
The ceilings in the academy, for instance,
are so high that they nearly swallow the dancers wandering below,
suggesting the girls’ vulnerability in this environment.
And the camera is constantly in motion—
it’s as if the viewer is floating through someone else’s dream.
Murder sequences are shot from “impossible” angles,
making us feel like helpless onlookers to the victims’ fates.
Like the film’s visuals,
the score by Goblin plays both atmospheric and symbolic roles,
even from the opening scene.
As Suzy walks toward the airport exit,
eerie music stops and starts as the door opens and closes—
building a tension that makes it feel like Suzy,
and by extension, the viewer,
are being pulled into an alluring nightmare.
When it was announced that Luca Guadagnino was remaking Suspiria,
he was met with skepticism from die hard fans of the original.
How could someone attempt to recreate such a singular film—
the realization of Argento’s directorial vision?
Luckily, this wasn’t Guadagnino’s goal.
He’s called the new Suspiria a “cover version”:
He’s paying homage to the experience he had
watching Suspiria as a 14-year-old.
“I always wanted to make horror films, I am a big, big scholar of horror films.
That’s what I really, really want.
I want to be a horror movie director.
Yeah!”
The 2018 Suspiria is an entirely different film
that conjures a different type of feeling,
but like its predecessor, it gets under your skin and leaves a mark.
“A piece about rebirths.
The inevitable pull that they exert,
and our efforts to escape them.”
The new Suspiria has the same basic premise:
a young and seemingly naive Suzy travels to Germany to study at a dance academy—
but this time, it’s located in a divided Berlin
instead of Freiburg.
The year is 1977, when the original film was released.
Outside of the academy’s walls, the militant group The Red Army Faction
is engaged in bombings and shootouts with the local government
in a period of violent activity that would become known as “The German Autumn.”
This historical context informs the movie’s themes, visuals, and plot.
“Mirroring the story of Suzy Bannion and Madame Blanc,
and these couple witches,
with the hatred, and the violence, and the division
that was in the reality of the times and in the place.”
Argento and Nicolodi’s screenplay had a thin, gory plot,
classic of gothic horrors,
but David Kajganich’s screenplay has much more narrative depth.
The story barely resembles its source material, only nods to it.
Structured in six acts and an epilogue, layered with symbolism and side plots,
the new Suspiria is an hour longer than the original.
And it explores the medium of dance much more.
“When you dance the dance of another, you make yourself in the image of its creator.”
The movement of the dancers plays a key role in the process of witchcraft;
the dancers even perform along the points of a pentagram
duct-taped to the floor.
The choreography was influenced by Pina Bausch and Martha Graham,
resulting in a style of dance that, as Madame Blanc says,
is about breaking the prettiness in things.
And -- fittingly for a remake -- there’s a thematic tension
between the old way and the new way of doing things.
The feelings of trauma, shame and oppression that permeated the German Autumn
served as the influence for the film’s visuals.
The end result is a depressive blend of earth tones:
muted grays, greens, and browns.
The production and costume designers took a naturalistic approach,
working with props and intricately-patterned fabrics
to make the film feel like an artifact from 1977 Germany
as opposed to a period piece.
Needless to say,
the aesthetic mottos of these two Suspirias differ dramatically:
Argento’s was a “more is more” attitude—
an assault on the senses.
“You wanted to kill Helena Marcos.
[chuckles deviously]
Hell is behind that door.”
Guadagnino’s is a quiet and restrained approach,
conjuring a feeling that slowly burns under the viewers’ skin.
The only moments in Suspiria that visually recall Argento’s
over-the-top giallo sensibilities, occur in Suzy’s nightmare sequences—
rendered with fractured camerawork and disturbing imagery.
Watching one of these dreams unravel is like dealing with a repressed memory
that surfaces with a vengeance.
And as quickly as the memory began, it ends,
and we return to the muffled imagery of mundanity.
But we don’t forget what we’ve seen.
Radiohead’s Thom Yorke produced songs for the score,
and he took a fittingly understated approach, creating haunting, introspective melodies.
Yorke was a fan of the original soundtrack by Goblin,
and he borrowed their technique of repeating motifs to build dread.
“There’s a way of repeating in music, which can hypnotize,
and I kept thinking it was a form of making spells.”
The old and new versions of Suspiria exist in different worlds,
but their makers share a common directorial philosophy.
The original Suspiria opened Guadagnino’s eyes
to what cinema could do,
and inspired him to take an Argento-esque approach as a director:
valuing boldness and collaboration, creating films to be experienced from within,
and deliberately using style and technical knowledge
to put viewers in a particular mind-body state.
In Argento’s case, this was a deep, bodily fear
provoked by horrifying sequences that are too beautiful to look away from.
In Guadagnino’s,
it’s a burden to carry and memories to repress,
wrapped in a realistic historical moment.
By remaking Suspiria,
Guadagnino was essentially saying thank you to a film
that continues to impact his work as a director.
His Suspiria offers a fruitful model for filmmakers who want to pay tribute
to the directors and films that made them:
it tells us -- don’t try to remake the past,
but offer your own perspective for the future.
“We’ve gotta get rid of that bitch of the American girl!
Vanish!
Make her disappear!
Understand?”
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