Cannibalizing the Past Pt 1: The Suspiria Remake and the Fertility of Reference

The original Suspiria by Dario Argento is a masterpiece of horror cinema. For myself, watching the movie at eighteen sent me down a path of foreign horror films, then foreign films in general, and so opened the universe of great cinema to me. It played such a pivotal role in my personal aesthetic development that the announcement of a coming remake had me feeling two kinds of ways: incredible interest at how the filmmakers would attempt to take a second bite at the apple, and incredible wariness at just what we could expect. Argento’s Suspiria did not seem to me the kind of film you watch and say, “They could have done better. Someone else should take a shot at it.”

It’s worth mentioning that in the last two decades (the length of my film consciousness) there have been a spat of horror classic remakes that were all either bad (like Alaxendre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes) or, at best, shot-for-shot remakes (like Rob Zombie’s Halloween). The one exception, perhaps, was Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, but that film now has the dubious honor of spawning the zombie over-saturation wave that came ten years later — along with Danny Boyle’s zombie-like 28 Days Later. So all the signs pointed to a Suspiria remake being less than good work.

When I finally watched it, I was happily surprised.

What Luca Guadagnino et al achieved was that most difficult task of reenvisioning without abandoning. The new incarnation takes the bare bones of the source material and creates an entirely different kind of horror experience, while still drawing enough one-to-one echoes to feel like a kindred spirit.

Argento’s film uses a neon baroque sensibility to create a world where the characters, story, and logic function on a dreamlike, “oneiric” level — a literal nightmare. Guadagnino’s film switches out the high saturation for a muted, realist palette evoking a divided Berlin at the center of world history, and he switches out the baroque with the modernist. These two underlying aesthetic guidelines travel throughout the remake, and provide a lens with which to see on what terms the two films function. It also provides a guideline to keep the film on its own terms while borrowing from its source.

Carrying out a revived aesthetic (like mid-century modernism) is always a balancing act. The visual references must drive all the way up to the line before crossing over into pastiche. That is, every reference must function meaningfully, must express, must convey information. To the degree a reference satisfies these needs, it escapes pastiche. To the degree it fails, and exists merely as a reference, it is pastiche. For Guadagnino’s remake, there were thus two horizons where this danger existed: reference to the original film, and reference to the guiding aesthetic of modernism.

Guadagnino himself claims that he hopes to have no style, but his Suspiria undeniably does. It uses the visual language of modernism to describe the unsettling logic contained within the coven of witches, a brooding and dangerous situation inside Cold War Berlin (a different kind of brooding and dangerous situation).

We use style to forget ourselves. To eliminate our viewpoint and merge into a reference structure handed to us by a social network. By engaging the style, we join that network and influence the very substrate we are relying on to be separate from ourselves, but this is of little consequence inside the gestation and creation because you don’t join that conversation until it has already influenced your utterance — by the time people see your film, you’ve already made it.

In this way, Guadagnino used style much like source material, two reference patterns working in tandem. His Suspiria is conceptually elevated then, because it has so many added layers of discussion. It speaks with history, with its predecessor, with the audience — even with witches.

And while this kind of referencing can go very wrong (see the general culture right now as it feeds on both a blockbuster film based on the early 90’s video game Sonic the Hedgehog and a live-action children’s mystery starring a character from a popular 90’s trading card game and anime), when we see it work as it does in Suspiria, we see the potential fertility of cannibalizing the past.

How does his film succeed? For one, the deliberate pacing works to its advantage. With so many masters to serve (and it seems to freely add to this list by engaging in excessive world building both in historical and geographic context as well as the fantastical mythology), the film needs time. And let me tell you, it takes it. The film runs for two hours and thirty-two minutes, which is absolutely gargantuan for a horror film. But this time means that no reference needs to stand without support. This is not a simple recombination of signs. There are multiple characters able to pass the through the world, interact, and build a reality inside of the sets and the story. That pacing is the precise antidote for the problems with a culture that has begun to recombine symbols rather than create new myths. Recombination is interesting but thin, so a culture relying on it to generate itself needs rapid production of new combinations. The more you sit with a reference, the more people think, and so something has to stand behind it if your camera lingers over it.

The second way that the film succeeds is more quaint and old fashioned, but it gives us a clue about a good test for a work that relies on references and is embedded in an entire network of style. That is: does the film work if it weren’t evoking the original? Yes. The Suspiria remake goes it alone enough to prove itself, particularly in areas that are the easiest to exploit for nostalgia, like musical themes and iconic shots. The one sin of nostalgia exploitation the remake commits is using the lead actress from the original (Jessica Harper) for a cameo. But the fact that they resisted using the iconic theme of the original and remaking any of the famous death scenes absolves them if there be any justice in this world.

What I took away from the experience of 2018’s Suspiria was a renewed interest in the zeitgeist-dominating nostalgia spectacles over which so much cultural critics’ ink has been spilled. Sure, I noticed it, even hated it, even used it as a symptom to diagnose a terminal cultural disease embedded in late capitalism. Once I’d seen a nostalgic remake done correctly, it all meant so much more. If it were all bad, it would be inherent, inescapable. But remakes can be done well. Our warm and fuzzy cinematic memories can be used and manipulated for new purposes in a productive, generative way.

That means there is more to the story. Cannibalizing the Past is a series of observations on that story.