The next film from Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino is a supernatural horror movie called Suspiria. Set for release this November, it’s scored by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, and stars Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, and Chloë Grace Moretz. The recent trailer reveals little of the plot, choosing instead to present only a series of nightmarish images showing panicked ballet dancers, bloody silhouettes, and ominous glances exchanged wordlessly while queasy strings and distorted synthetic horns play over the footage.
Despite the talent associated with it, Suspiria’s very existence has been met with a degree of suspicion–not because of its director or stars, but because it’s a remake of a widely revered horror classic. The original, directed by famed Italian screenwriter and director Dario Argento, has enjoyed a hallowed reputation since its 1977 release. Its standing in the genre is well-earned.
Suspiria, like so many great movies, is more than the sum of its parts. Its plot is pretty simple: An American dancer named Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) arrives in Freiburg, Germany to attend a prestigious ballet school. On her first night, a student is murdered; on her first day, she contracts a mysterious illness. Strange, disturbing events happen one after the other in quick succession: Maggots rain from the school’s ceiling, a blind pianist is mauled by his usually gentle guide dog, and a classmate disappears without explanation after investigating rumors that the school was founded by a woman accused of witchcraft.
Detailing Suspiria’s plot does little to explain why it’s so effective, though. From the opening scene onward, it’s the movie’s visual composition and soundtrack that make it so striking. As soon as the credits–black and white titles set to a crescendo of maddeningly squeaky violins and pounding drums–end, Suzy steps out of the airport into a torrential downpour. The theme song, used again and again throughout the film, begins playing as she sits, drenched, in a taxi.
Written and performed by Goblin (who also scored George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead a year later), the theme consists of a spidery harpsichord, a bowed drum beat, incomprehensible whispers, and a man’s voice echoing the haunting melody in a rasping, schoolyard taunt. Along with shots of Freiburg’s deserted, nighttime streets and the forbidding, blackened woods the cab drives through, the effect is both immediately unsettling and evocative of horror as classic as Jonathan Harker’s late night arrival at Count Dracula’s castle.
In one of the best examples of Suspiria’s look, a seemingly mundane conversation about the school director’s strange way of snoring becomes incredibly threatening. The characters discuss the noise while reclining on cots in front of a sheet where the silhouette of the director’s sleeping body lies framed between them the entire time. The room is cast entirely in red light, the shape of the director represented as an indistinct shadow. The music that plays just before their conversation starts–faintly, creeping in just beneath their words–is filled with anguished moans, more harpsichord, and a driving, loose-stringed acoustic guitar, priming the scene to be far more discomforting than a description of it warrants. The director, true to their discussion, breathes like a wolf with emphysema. The combination of the scene’s otherworldly red lighting and Goblin’s haunting score gives it the impression of a waking nightmare.
Describing the construction of the film’s best scenes and use of its exceptional soundtrack is the only way to capture why it’s so admired. Suspiria’s look and sound are what make it work so well, and why it’s such a unique film. While it shares plot points with familiar supernatural horror movies about ghosts and demonic possession, it’s too restrained to fit neatly within the same genre; at least two of its most gruesome character deaths resemble slasher movies, too, but the straightforward thrills of killer chase sequences and inventively repulsive gore scenes are only infrequently indulged. Suspiria doesn’t belong to any category, really, other than the broadest possible one: horror.
This year’s remake, wisely, doesn’t look to be attempting a straightforward adaptation of Argento’s original. Rather than copy Suspiria’s singular visual style or reuse its soundtrack, Guadagnino’s take on the movie seems to be inspired by its source material, rather than a strict recreation of it. This seems like the best possible approach. The 1977 Suspiria has become a classic because it stands apart from other horror movies in tone and style. To honor its legacy, more than four decades later, the 2018 version needs to follow in its predecessor’s footsteps by, paradoxically, refusing to follow them too closely.
Source: GameSpot
GameUP24 