Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to cinapse.twocents@gmail.com.
The Pick: Suspiria (2018)
No one hates remakes as much as horror fans… or so it seems. It’s really just a vocal minority, because once you start talking to gorehounds and horror nerds, you’ll find that most of us appreciate a good remake and are willing to admit that some of them are as good as or better than the original films. This month, we’re spending spooky season with some of our favorite remakes. Each week, one of us will present a remake we think surpasses its predecessor and invite the ridicule, love, agreement, hate, or whatever comes our way.
This week, I’m standing my ground by going to bat for it off with 2018’s Suspiria. Don’t get me wrong, I love the 77 original. It’s a kaleidoscopic landmark of horror crafted by one of the genre’s masters Dario Argento. Taking this vibrant film and reimagining it in the dirt and grunge of 70s Berlin seems sacrilege, but Luca Guadagnino’s take weaves its own spell, with a grimmer and more substantive take on this bewitching tale.
Stay tuned for our final selection of Revenge of the Remakes, Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, Director’s Cut. Next week’s piece will be defending it as one of, if not THE best, of all Halloween sequels. Agree? Think that’s crazy?
If you want to share thoughts, shoot them over to cinapse.twocents@gmail.com.
Featured Guest
Alejandra Martinez
Luca Guadagnino’s films before 2018 stayed out of horror territory, but the stylish filmmaker went all in with his first foray through his remake of Suspiria. The original, directed by Dario Argento and co-written by Daria Nicolodi, is a sacred text to horror fans who hold the supernatural giallo close to their heart. Guadagnino’s version is distinct from the original, with the director wanting his work to be an “homage” rather than a straight remake. The final product is a film that is unique from its source, but no less stunning or haunting.
Suspiria uses the story of American Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) traveling to join a dance academy in Berlin to probe deeper, darker themes. Emphasizing the story’s time and place (divided Berlin in the German Autumn of 1977) grounds the supernatural horror in the unease and uncertainty of the historical moment in which it takes place. “It’s all a mess, isn’t it? The one out there, the one in here,” Susie asks Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton in one of three roles) after the film’s centerpiece dance sequence. Here, the body is a conduit for magic, and Johnson and company (including future horror mainstay Mia Goth) rise to the occasion of depicting this.
The intense, powerful choreography of Damien Jalet is channeled through Johnson’s determined, focused physicality. A forceful performance that belies the quiet, at times timid nature of Susie. Indeed, the even-tempered, subdued mood of the film belies the darker intentions Guadagnino has for us and for the girls at the Markos Dance Academy. The spell breaks magnificently at several points of the film, especially early on when Susie unknowingly uses her dancing spellwork to mutilate the body of a fellow dancer.
Sound design is important here, too. Guadagnino makes room for bones crunching, the pounding of feet on the floor, and the rasping, sometimes primal breathwork of the dancers on screen. It’s a hypnotic brew that shows us the breaks in the calm of the film, building up until the explosive finale in the basement of the Dance Academy. Bathed in red light, blood spewing from all the orifices, the last 20 or so minutes of Suspiria break open the film we’ve just watched. Unleashing bloody spectacle and horror at the very end of your movie is a gutsy move — one that Guadagnino can fit in as effortlessly as the most skilled dancer showcasing her craft.
The Team
Jon Partridge
Guadagnino shows a reverence for the original, a lurid affair often referred to as “giallo fantastico,” but his is an altogether different beast. The lurid, pulsating colors are gone, replaced by stark architecture and a dowdy palette, reflective of1977 Berlin and an aesthetic that would make Rainer Werner Fassbinder proud. Instead of the emotional madness of Argento, we have restraint and structure, an aspect first alluded to with a title card introducing “six acts and an epilogue set in divided Berlin.” A discordant Goblin score is replaced by an all together more haunting composition, complemented by discordant original works from Thom Yorke.
Guadagnino along with screenwriter David Kajganich keep the bones of the original, but the flesh is starker , there is more connective tissue. The motives of this coven and even their existence is more explicit. Even simple movements and gestures convey far more about their abilities and intent than anything in the original. The backdrop of political and social shifts loom large, making for a film far more dense than the original, a facet complemented by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom who takes starker visuals and imbues them with a wealth of texture, resulting in a ruminative affair dealing with themes of life and death, generational changes, and revolution.
It feels a disservice to call Guadagnino’s Suspiria a remake; themes of rebirth and resurrection are explored, providing more apt terms for what unfolds here. He replaces the vivid ecstasy of the original with something far more stark and unnerving, one that dances its way under your skin. There’s an undeniable richness and depth that will require time to unpack and truly appreciate. We live in a world where there are two glorious movies called Suspiria. Thank mother and rejoice in them both.
Julian Singleton
Where Argento’s 1977 classic is a bloody Technicolor fantasia, Guadagnino’s Suspiria drags that dream into beautifully revolting tactility. Its experimental, body-contorting dance collective rebels not only against the classical ballet of the original Suspiria, but also against the stark Brutalist architecture and explosive unrest of Baader-Meinhof–era Berlin. It applies this cold realism to a magic equally paranoid and vibrant, steeped in anxious touch, awash in bodily fluid–a bloody, churning dance with the universe that puts the physical in metaphysical (and lingers on the dregs left behind). It’s the perfect Halloween film, with a fiery, gory rage that perfectly offsets all the external rainy muck.
Guadagnino and regular collaborators Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Walter Fasano channel that magic through Suspiria’s dazzling cinematography and editing. Every shot and cut thrums with energy, the standout being Suzy’s dance as unwitting torture for poor, pretzel-fied Olga. And it remains a crime that Thom Yorke has scored only one other film since his awards-worthy turn here, with a score that blends the natural rhythms of classical and experimental dance with a cacophony of screams and sighs. Living up to Goblin’s iconic original should be impossible, yet Suspiria brims with instant horror earworms, feeling of its period and eerily out of time. Suspirium is still a regular play in these parts.
And holy hell, this coven of an ensemble. Luca Guadagnino once again proves himself uniquely attuned to Dakota Johnson’s understated yet potent delivery, while Mia Goth’s Sara channels Stefania Casini’s original with an added tragic undercurrent. I’m quite taken with Chloe Grace Moretz’s brief, manic Patricia–reimagining her as more than a gruesome narrative pretext for iconic kills into a woman consumed by supernatural persecution. A lovely Jessica Harper returns as a ghost in more ways than one: of Argento’s original and of Klemperer’s lost love, a vanished victim of Germany’s haunting, genocidal past. And then there’s Tilda Swinton, the genius at the center, pouring everything into Klemperer, Blanc, and Markos—a breathtaking range spanning gruesome greed, refined elegance, and heartbreaking loss.
Guadagnino and writer David Kajganich beautifully reckon with the reality of magic and witches in the modern world, but their Suspiria lingers because at its core lies more than a power-hungry coven. In one of Guadagnino’s most exquisite scenes, Suzy offers Klemperer a final mercy–the closure long eluding him–then wipes it from memory. In doing so, the film becomes a meditation on regret and repression: a confrontation with history’s slow, unrelenting march, built on atrocity and buried shame. It understands that to remember is to exhume and resurrect, while acknowledging some regrets and buried impulses dig graves before their time. And through it all, art emerges as both cage and key, a dance of resistance and refuge, escape and inevitable return.
It’s as if Luca made this with the urgency of someone who might never make another horror film. And if that’s the case, I’m glad it’s this one.
Spencer Brickey
Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is still a film that absolutely confounds me, and I say this completely as a compliment. If anything, it is one of the few things it takes from the source material.
I am admittedly of a rare few who actually saw Guadagnino’s Suspiria before Argento’s, even though it was only a few days apart. I first came into contact with the remake during a secret screening at Fantastic Fest in 2018, and found myself completely enveloped by the sinister, cramp winter vibes, the muted tones concealing something rotten in the walls. In contrast, a week later, when I watched the original at the old Alamo Drafthouse Ritz location (RIP), I found myself completely knocked over by the bright, bold colors and the constant electric thumping and bumping of that Goblin score.
Revisiting it for the first time since 2018, I still feel about the same; that Guadagnino did the seemingly impossible and made a spectacular remake of Suspiria, a film that stands as a truly singular piece of cinematic art. The reason why it works so well (and why most of the great remakes work; looking at you, The Thing and The Fly) is that it never tries to be a carbon copy or an “update” of the original. Instead, it allows itself to be something completely different, in many ways upending the themes of the source material, looking at the same story beats and plot points from a different angle, bringing a fresh examination of a known story.
Here, the change is pretty drastic. Guadagnino completely shifts the color palette, moving away from the bombastic colors of the original, instead making his world drab, cramped, broken down, diseased. The ballet school, a technicolor madhouse in Argento’s version, becomes a brutalist haunted house, every corner either a sharp protrusion or hidden pocket of malicious shadows.
The characterizations of our heroin also drastically shift between the two films. In Argento’s film, Suzy, the new American transplant (played by Jessica Harper), is just as much a victim as the rest of the girls within the school, terrified of what brightly colored nightmare she seems to have walked into. In Guadagnino’s version, on the other hand, Sussie (played by Dakota Johnson) is a willing participant to the strange things happening around her, at first seemingly just a naive girl getting in over her head, but quickly growing into something more powerful, someone with their own insidious secrets.
These comparisons are in no way to try and determine which is better, though. Both films are genuinely fantastic and unique, in their own ways. The imagery of the original is some of the greatest in horror history, including one of the best soundtracks of all time. The remake is a film that not only carries the same dread inducing spirit, but also dives more deeply into issues of women’s empowerment, misogyny, and the residual guilt of the German people after World War II. The original has that all timer hanging death and that genuinely perfect theme; the remake has that jaw dropping dance sequence and that absolutely bugfuck insane ending. Comparing perfect apples to perfect oranges here.
As the credits rolled, I again felt a bit confused, in a good way, and a bit exhausted, as the film whipped me around like a sock puppet for the last 20 minutes or so. It’s exactly how one should feel leaving Suspiria, be it the ‘77 original or the ‘18 remake.
This Month: Revenge of the Remakes
All month, we are celebrating spooky season with something a little different. Our staff chose some remakes that we enjoy as much or more than the originals. Each week, one of us will plead our case and we’d love to have you chime in to tell us if you think we’re crazy or we have a point. Or just chime in to share your thoughts on the film! See you nest week!
