Storm Husbands Features Editor

If you have been to a movie theatre within the past year, you have certainly borne witness to the plethora of remakes, sequels, and franchises we have in film.

The Devil Wears Prada 2, Supergirl, The Odyssey, and even upcoming films like Avengers Doomsday and Dune: Part 3 all give us the indication that originality is dead and never resurrecting. I have been this person, a perpetual proclaimer that the book is better that the movie or the older version is much more clever. Yet in the case of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018), I have to disagree.

The original is an influential 1977 film by Dario Argento. In Guadagnino’s retelling, it is reincarnated into a fleshed-out thesis on corruption, with foundations of motherhood and dance. It features political messaging through the Nazi Germany regime, closely mirroring Helena Markos’ authoritarian rule. Her motherhood, ultimately revealed to be pretend in a final act plot twist, is one of brutality. She is parasitic, using the dancers as a vessel, fuel to the engine of her life. This is contrasted in Madame Blanc and Susie’s motherly characterisations; ones of mentorship and mercy, respectively. This spectrum of maternity shows beauty and ugliness; it can be kind, manipulative, loving, toxic, and often a complex combination of them all.

I also deeply appreciate the film’s devotion to dance. While in the 1977 version, the dance academy is just the setting — demonstrated in the hilariously iconic scene of Jessica Harper fainting en pointe — Guadagnino portrays dance as the powerful manifestation of magic, most aptly demonstrated in the grotesque mirror room scene, where choreography projects actual, physical bodily contortion and harm onto another character. The style is raw, controlled, emotional, and powerful; an homage to expressionist dance.

Argento’s film is praised for its vibrant technicolour, Alfred Hitchcock-esque theatrics, and thrilling score. Guadagnino’s version, a box office bomb, was highly criticised for departing from these qualities. The 2018 has dull, gloomy colours, the horror is more unsettling than thrilling, and the fear-inducing score of the original is forgone for the chilling music of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. In a 2018 review for Rolling Stone, author Peter Travers critiques the film, writing that it “keeps announcing it has subtext and you’d better pay attention. There might be a quiz.” The artistic choices, however, are reflective of the film’s setting. The story is shown through the winter of 1977 Berlin. In the post-war society, there are no brilliant primary colours or overtly horrific tones. Blood is viscous, a deep maroon, instead of a perfect hot pink. Argento’s work is a pinnacle of horror, yet it remains hollow. Guadagnino’s slow burn rejects the traditional predictable gimmicks, giving the story substance. There is depth to the 152-minute runtime but instead, writers like Travers claim this desire to add history to horror mars the film’s glory.

This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the 2018 film; it is a rebirth, not simply a remake. Guadagnino’s themes — the long lasting effects of war, the complexity of motherhood, systemic corruption, and fascist ideology — represent the truest form of horror, not that of monsters under the bed or killers in the dark, but rather the visceral, haunting reality of human nature.