Within the Velvet Walls

Over the years, the 1977 film Suspiria has accrued a cult following with its vivid colors and unforgettable music. At first glance, one could barely recognize the 2018 remake as having anything to do with Dario Argento's i as it lacks in the dramatic reds, greens, and blues that all but defined the original. However, it brings to the table new elements, highlighting the dance school's witchcraft using dance and setting the story during the 1977 German Autumn.

Suspiria (1977)

Synopsis

When first arriving at the prestigious German dance school, Freiburg Dance Academy, Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) is turned away after witnessing a girl flee into the night. When Suzy comes back the next morning, she meets the Vice Directress Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett) and learns that the girl from the prior night was murdered. During her first day, Blanc tells Suzy there is a dorm available for her, but she insists that she remain at a fellow student’s house. After a bizarre flash, Suzy becomes weak and faints, only to awaken in the dorm room. After Suzy is put on a special diet and acclimates to dorm life with her new friend Sara (Stefania Casini), maggots begin raining from the ceiling and the entire floor is forced to sleep on cots in the main dance hall. Inhuman snoring pervades the night and Sara tells Suzy that she believes it to be from the directress who is supposed to be away. The following morning, the pianist Daniel’s (Flavio Bucci) seeing eye dog bites someone and the teacher, Miss Tanner (Alida Valli), ejects him. That night, Sara and a drowsy Sara hear the teachers leave but they go in a different direction than the exit. Sara jots down the number of steps taken and the direction. At the same time, an unseen force drives Daniel’s dog to kill him. After his death, Suzy recalls that the girl who fled the night she arrived said something about a secret flower, though Blanc claims to have no idea what that means. At night, Sara tells Suzy she fears someone is coming after her and tries to rouse her for help but to no avail. She flees and is attacked. The attacker slits her throat. Hearing that Sara had “packed up and left” Suzy meets with a psychiatrist that was her friend. He and his colleague told her that a woman named Helena Markos was accused of witchcraft and started a dance school. During the night, Suzy finds Sara’s notes of the footsteps and follows them, opening a secret door with a flower. She witnesses a ritual and hides in a room where it turns out Markos herself is. Markos is invisible and raises Sara from the dead to attack Suzy. A bolt of lightning outlines the witch and Suzy stabs her through the neck, killing her and her powers. The school begins to crumble and Suzy escapes into the night, happy to be through.

Background

Suspiria is considered a Giallo film. “Giallo” (Italian for yellow) films are a special genre of mystery/thriller popularized in the late 1960s to 70s that often have slasher type aspects incorporated into them. These were precursors to American slasher films like Halloween and Friday the 13th which became popular in the following decade. According to Harper, Helena Markos was played by an uncredited ninety-year-old ex-hooker that director Dario Argento found on the streets of Rome, Italy. Suspiria is the first part of Argento’s trilogy about the “Three Mothers.” The second part is a film called Inferno and the third is called Mother of Tears.

Rosso, Rot, Red

For a Giallo film, Suspiria is full of red, if you will forgive the pun. The color is more than pervasive in this psychedelic movie; it is almost a character itself. You would be hard-pressed to find a scene that does not have a splash of red in it somewhere. So, what might this represent?

This crimson hue may represent Helena Markos’ witchy area of influence. Simultaneously, green may represent an absence of it or an awareness of Markos’ power. The rouge is present in the very first shot, the very first time we see Suzy, but most importantly, the very first time she sets foot into Germany. Red posters advertising Markos’ ballet school are slapped onto the exit doors of the airport and welcome Ms. Bannion to this new country along with a fearsome rainstorm. The remainder of the film is Suzy being harassed or overtaken by the color and ends with her narrowly avoiding Markos’ wrath.

Green is used as a backlight on Sara as she tries to wake Suzy and asks her about witches right before her death. It is also used later as Suzy talks with the psychiatrist. It seems like the scene is devoid of red until they begin talking about witches, and red flowers peek out of the background behind Suzy. Here is an area where the doctors are aware of Markos and understand witchcraft.

Suzy is one of the only characters to never wear red. Unlike Olga’s nails or Madame Blanc’s lipstick, she is always seen in neutral colors and the only instances of her encountering the color are when light falls on her, or blood, her own or otherwise.

After killing Helena Markos, she has a smear of blood on her right cheek as she flees the academy. She leaves the horrors of the school as she arrives, bathed in a torrential downpour, only this time, it is finally washing away the red.

Not only does this film feature a vibrant color pallet, but Argento also uses sound to make the viewer squirm. The sound of Miss Tanner walking on maggots in one scene is so crisp, you can almost feel them crunch under your own feet. Additionally, the laughter of coven leader Markos’ is layered with overlapping vocalizations adding to her ethereal yet baleful nature. Even the main theme uses the light, enchanting timbre of chimes and the droning rumble of a drum called a “tabla” which simultaneously fights each other and meld in an unsettling way. As I type this, its plinking melody keeps rattling around in my head. “Witch!”

But here is a big “however.” While there are many inventive and creative ways the story is told, there are many different storylines that seem to be either injected for plot convenience or abandoned. Olga and Suzy’s potential friendship? Abandoned. The pianist Daniel and his dog suddenly being targeted? Injected. The story was spread thin between these situations and more. Perhaps it could have been stronger and easier to follow if only these were left out and the story of Suzy and Markos’ more focused on.

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Suspiria (2018)

Synopsis

In 1977, Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) arrives in Berlin, Germany, trading her Mennonite life behind for one of dance at Markos’ Dance Academy. After a successful audition, she learns of the disappearance of a student, Patricia (Chloë Grace Moretz). Patricia had revealed to her therapist Dr. Josef Klemperer (Tilda Swinton) that she believed the school to be run by a coven of witches headed by Helena Markos (Tilda Swinton). Soon after being accepted, Susie befriends fellow student Sara (Mia Goth) and garners the attention of the head choreographer Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton). Outraged by Blanc’s behavior after Patricia’s disappearance, another student Olga (Elina Fokina) tries to leave the school but becomes lost after something goes wrong with her vision and ends up trapped in a large mirrored room. Susie then dances. Unbeknownst to her, her movements simultaneously fling Olga around the room leaving her mangled. The other teachers insert large hooks into her skin and take her from the mirrored room. Later, the teachers all vote between Blanc and Markos for who will head the coven, with Markos winning as she claims to be Mother Suspiriorum. It is decided that Susie’s body will be the host for Markos. Susie trains under Blanc to dance the main role in their next production of the company’s well-known dance Volk. Klemperer becomes suspicious of the dance school and tries to warn Sara. At first, she does not believe him but investigates and finds hidden rooms. The night before the performance, Sara finds Patricia and Olga in near-death states in a hidden occult room called the mütterhaus. She is caught and forced to perform with the others with a broken leg. The dance continues and but fails when Sara collapses, causing the spell to fail. Klemperer heads to East Germany to his summer house when he sees his wife, Anke (Jessica Harper) who supposedly died in the war. The two walk back to the dance school where she disappears, an illusion, and he is taken inside by the witches where he is forced to witness a ritual. Susie comes to the mütterhaus where a ritual is taking place using the dancers and the half-dead bodies of Sara, Olga, and Patricia. All the witches are present including Blanc and a decrepit Markos. Markos becomes enraged at Blanc for trying to stop the ritual and nearly kills her. Susie summons death incarnate to kill the false Mother Suspiriorum Markos and all that voted for her. She then reveals herself to be the real Mother Suspiriorum and helps Olga, Patricia, and Sara die peacefully. After the ritual, Klemperer is sent back home, his mind in shambles where Susie, now the Mother, comes to him and reveals the true fate of his late wife Anke. She then erases his memory of every woman he has ever known and vanishes.

Background

Jessica Harper played the character of Suzy in the 1977 version of Suspiria and was offered the role of Anke by Director Luka Guadagnino in the new film. Dakota Johnson prepared for the film two years in advance by training in dance. The film’s title drop is easy to miss; in the beginning, as Susie steps down off the stairs into the train stations, the sign at the top left says “Suspiria.” Like the original, this film was shot on 35mm film stock. The director of the 1977 film, Dario Argento, has stated that this version “did not excite [him]” and “betrayed the . . . original” but also stated that it was “refined.”

Story

If you want witches, you are going to get them in Guadagnino’s Suspiria. More than witches, the film also focuses on dance, feminism, and the effects of political unrest. It manages to balance these between three storylines: that of Susie, that of Dr. Klemperer, and that of the coven.

The choreography is hard-hitting. The dancers’ movements are sharp and almost unnatural. The song of Volk only adds to the mesmeric quality of the performance.

It was inventive to use the dance itself as the spell. The dance works to not objectify the dancers. While some movements correlate with sex or femininity, it was not made in the male gaze. It reflects how a coven of witches, of women, would define their bodies: powerful, able, enduring, and united.

The only male character throughout the film is Dr. Klemperer who provides the voice of rational thinking but is completely oblivious to the truth. Genuinely, he is concerned for their well-being, but he shrugs off the worries and implications of the women around him as delusion. He represents reducing women to a basic concept incapable of complexity. Susie uses her power to remove his memories of all the women in his life because, after even his love for Anke, he ultimately disregarded their needs. For him to have regrets would be wasteful because, as seen after the night of carnage, the women are left to clean up, not him. They do not want his sympathies; they want the mess cleaned up.

Set in the year 1977 in divided Berlin, Guadagnino purposely places the school face to face with the conflict of the Berlin Wall. Not only was the city split but so was the allegiances of the coven. Slightly more than half of the members wanted to keep Markos at the head of the coven and the remainder wanted Blanc as the new leader. When there is dissent among leaders, it is not those in power that suffer, but the people. As such, no teacher endures violence at the hands of another, even Mrs. Griffin chooses to kill herself. But their disagreements caused poor judgment in the grooming of Patricia, Sara, and Susie and led to students getting hurt in the process.

Comparison

Guadagnino never intended for his Suspiria to be a true remake of the original and considers it more to be his interpretation of Argento’s film which is fair. The most blatant difference is the lack of color in Guadagnino’s film. The color palette is demure but that is not to say red does not play a part in the story; it is merely downplayed. If red is linked to Markos’ power before, in the remake it now signifies the presence of strong magic.

The storyline is also cleaned up a bit in the remake. It is explained why the witches want to use Susie and gives more reason behind everything they do. That does not mean everything is explained. Susie becoming Mother Suspiriorum at the end is abrupt and hard to swallow. Was she always the Mother or did she become the vessel for the Mother? This and many other questions are left unanswered and open to interpretation.

But is that not what made the original so memorable? It was so ambiguous in its inferences and so mysterious that every person can walk away having seen a different film than their neighbor. In watching a film where you can assign personal meaning to its events, it gives you almost a sense of ownership of that film, that it can become yours.

Edited by Miles Ericksen