The ‘Suspiria’ Remake Makes the Original Stronger
Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is a crimson-fueled nightmare. Its stark, beguiling descent into witchcraft, magic, and violent, radical femininity casts a spell all its own. Suspiria reinvents and restructures, it interrogates and dismantles. Horror convention is unwound like innards, coiled around bloody hands, only to be reinserted. No different than Dario Argento’s technicolor masterclass of an original, Guadagnino’s Suspiria is classic occult horror of the highest order.
The Suspiria remake languished in development hell for years. As far back as 2008, David Gordon Green (imagine) was attached with a script already completed. Isabelle Huppert, Janet McTeer, and Isabelle Fuhrman (Orphan: First Kill) were announced to star, and Green described his remake as operatic yet decisively faithful to the original. Rather than rebel against the traditional narrative, Green’s remake would conceivably have been more of the same, just bigger.
Wisely, and to the derision of Suspiria acolytes at the time, Guadagnino capsized the visual prowess of the original. This Suspiria, once bright and lurid and shocking in its hues and grandeur, would be achromatic. Gunmetal streets, oppressive beige interiors; the entirety of Germany, both abused and abuser, stripped of life. It’s a maternal world, one that simultaneously rejects women yet embraces them superficially; one where women themselves bind and hegemonize to violent ends.
Sure, it’s still a man directing a deeply feminine film (an all too common occurrence), though the collective weight of Suspiria’s dense runtime supersedes behind-the-scene ailments and morphs into something truly spectacular. Plus, Argento himself doesn’t have the greatest track record. He’s quoted as saying “If they have a good face or figure I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man”. So at worst, it’s more of the same.
Only, it’s not at worst. Argento’s Suspiria remains the more influential entry in the horror canon, and I’m not here to say otherwise. Instead, Guadagnino and his cast and crew have much stronger, more astute insight into the film’s gnawing themes of feminine violence and feminine subjugation. There’s a lot to discuss about Suspiria—what does it all mean, what really happened? There are incisive Freudian analyses out there, contextualizing the main trio of women—Helena Markos (Tilda Swinton), Madame Blanc (Swinton again), and Susie (Dakota Johnson)—as id, superego, and ego respectively. There’s a wealth of material to explore about its witchcraft aesthetics, the progression of female power and beauty, and how tenuous it can be in a patriarchal, conflict-prone world. Dance is magic, history scars, and so on.
Instead, most interesting to me is Suspiria’s status as a remake, namely how it caresses our expectations while giving us something paradoxically new and canonically compelling. Horror fans especially have had a contentious relationship with remakes in general. Broadly, the argument goes that they’re little more than opportunities to double-bill. See it, love it, see it several years later, just a little glossier.
No matter that some of the earliest examples of horror remakes, namely John Carpenter’s The Thing and Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, not only supersede their originals but are widely considered some of the best scary movies ever made. The derision really started with the Platinum Dunes era of horror remake, whose The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2003 removed both the space between “Chain” and “Saw” and the space between the next high-profile tune-up of some ostensibly broken-down original.
They’re not all stinkers, and in fairness to the creatives and earnest craftsmanship behind them, they were assigned to achieve an impossible task from the start. Audiences loved 2018’s Halloween despite, for the most part, following Carpenter’s own patterns and aesthetics. It was more of the same through a different lens. Conversely, Samuel Bayer’s A Nightmare on Elm Street was narratively and thematically similar to David Gordon Green’s Halloween, only that time, audiences hated it, decrying its attempts at both honoring the original and carving out an identity of its own with its knives for fingers.
Fortunately, Suspiria was once thought canceled in the late aughts. That version might have been operatic, though in terms of visual splendor, matching Argento’s use of color would have innately constrained its own identity. No one was going to do it the way Argento did, so why even bother? Instead, Luca Guadagnino opted to recontextualize and expand, adding thematic resonance to Argento’s original that feels, in its own way, like it belongs within Argento’s canon (and trilogy) of Mothers.
To Argento, the Mothers were simply means to an end. They were preternatural matriarchs capable of obtuse, often confounding (and gorgeous) violence. Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, and Mater Lachrymarum, the Mother of Tears, are fascinating horror figures, adapted from Thomas de Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis. But in Argento’s trilogy, they’re never given much to do. In a way, Suspiria doesn’t just remake Suspiria; it remakes the entire Mother’s Trilogy.
Those are lofty expectations. Writer David Kajganich is quoted as saying “I did a lot of research into actual witchcraft and covens and we did quite a lot of research into the period that it’s set in, what was going on in feminist politics and feminist art then, and how were concerns being exploited from the inside out and how that might look inside of the context of the occult.” Witchcraft, fundamentally, was foregrounded, no longer a background basin of style, little thematic substance.
Guadagnino, too, remarked not remaking the film, but paying homage, saying, “I was so terrified, but as always with something that terrifies you, I was completely pulled in. I think the process of how that movie influenced my psyche probably has yet to stop, which is something that happens often when you bump into a serious work of art like Suspiria.”
His Suspiria is an emotion, no doubt, and a powerful one at that. It is the emotion of a horror remake, of dredging up the dead and bringing them back 41 years later, drawing the ire of old fans and the befuddlement of new ones (three of four audience members during my theatrical screening walked out during Olga’s death). It’s not just Suspiria in name only. It’s the inferno of emotions, the tears, the shattering violence, and the suffocating dread of Argento’s original vision, made monochrome, and thus, new again.
Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is a remake done right. It’s a profound meditation on historical sins and the relegated groups making sense of the disorder. It’s power and frailty, terror and relief. I love it, putting it right up there alongside Argento’s original. Not as the same thing, but something different that nonetheless feels connected by blood. There is no Suspiria without Suspiria, and five years after release, it’s easier than ever to see how one strengthens the other. When was the last time a remake did that? Some might say it’s pure witchcraft.
Categorized:Editorials
