Suspiria is not your typical horror movie remake.
It’s an “homage” to Dario Argento’s 1977 classic, according to director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name). “Every movie I make is a step inside my teenage dreams, and Suspiria is the most remarkably precise teenage megalomaniac dream I could have had,” he said. “I immediately started to dream about making my own version of it. So in a way it makes me smile when I hear people say, ‘How dare you remake Suspiria. Typical commerce-driven mentality.’ I was just a boy who had seen a movie that made him what he became. So that’s how I am approaching it: a homage to the incredible, powerful emotion I felt when I saw it.” There are a lot of similarities, though.
Both Argento’s and Guadagnino’s visually-striking films follow an American dancer (1977: Jessica Harper; 2018: Dakota Johnson, although Harper appears in the not-remake) who travels to a fancy ballet school in Germany, where everything isn’t as it appears. Also, there’s a creepy-as-heck score from then Goblins, now Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. But the new Suspiria has something the original doesn’t: Tilda Swinton, who was born (in an alien spaceship) to star in a movie which involves “witchcraft and gruesome deaths.”
Here’s the official plot synopsis.
A darkness swirls at the center of a world-renowned dance company, one that will engulf the troupe’s artistic director (Swinton), an ambitious young dancer (Johnson), and a grieving psychotherapist (Ebersdorf). Some will succumb to the nightmare. Others will finally wake up.
Suspiria opens on November 2.
