It was in the 1970s that Italian filmmaker Dario Argento surprised with his unforgettable Suspiria, a film that paved the way for what would become known as his Three Mothers trilogy.
The horror genre, and more specifically the giallo, was the basis of Argento’s films, which have long surprised and terrified film audiences.
- If there is a color with which Argento can be easily identified.
- It is nothing more than the color of blood.
- A red very present in his filmography that takes us into an aesthetic dimension of terror and violence.
In Suspiria, Argento adopted a more supernatural, enigmatic, and symbol-filled terror. The filmmaker started from a script written in collaboration with his wife, Daria Nicolodi, and chose to leave much of the plot to the public’s imagination.
The viewer has a responsibility to reconstruct this information that is not explicitly given in the film, to imagine exactly what happened behind the incredible walls of the Markos school.
A few decades later, in 2018, another Italian, Luca Guadagnino, retrieved the script of Argento and Nicolodi to give it a new meaning.
He imagined everything that any viewer could have interpreted, expanded the small universe presented in the 70s and included some elements of the contemporary era.
Thus, the Suspiria de Guadagnino moves far away from the original, but it does not leave behind its roots and, at times, redness so characteristic of the film Argento.
Two ways to understand terror, two ways to create suspense and finally two different ways to tell the same story.
WARNING: The item may contain spoilers
Unfortunately, the female presence in the cinema came a little late, for a long time the presence of women has been delegated to the background, to roles related to purely feminine functions: motherhood, beauty, household chores, etc.
Men, for decades, have been the heroes of cinema, not to mention the rare role women play behind the camera.
However, Dario Argento not only trusted his wife to build Suspiria’s script, but also assembled a cast of women who were largely outside the norm of the time.
Suspiria takes us to a prestigious German dance school, where power is in the hands of women. There are male characters, but most are secondary; therefore, there is a certain inversion in the usual roles.
One of the male characters that stands out (but not much) is that of the young Mark, played by a young Miguel Bosé. Mark is a Markos school dancer who is subject to the leadership of the school’s women.
He also presents himself as a very feminine character, but who arouses the interest of the protagonist, Susie, so the molds of the genre dissolved slightly in the original Suspiria.
Susie is a young American who goes to Germany to study at Markos’ school; what she doesn’t know is that this place is actually kind of a Saturday. Female presence floods the screen; protagonists and antagonists, they are all women.
Guadagnino goes further, in the midst of MeToo and feminist demands, his film echoes all these movements. Chameleon actress Tilda Swinton plays no less than three characters, including a man.
Perhaps many believe that this gender change was not entirely necessary and that a male actor could have been used, however, whether or not it was a necessity, the intention was to reclaim the space of women.
Let us not forget that, for a long time, the stage actors were only men and therefore had to disguise themselves as women to play female roles.
Thus, many of the works created by great playwrights, such as William Shakespeare, were entirely performed by men.
This statement of intent in the most recent ones ends up eliminating the male presence and relegating it to an even higher level. The truth is that witchcraft is something that we associate with women and that also acquires negative connotations.
Guadagnino decided to make her film a feminist claim, shouting back in time and saying that women can play any role.
Today, we have several examples of how witchcraft has served to show a new reality, for example, series such as American Horror Story and Sabrina’s Dark World have already shown us feminist pretensions through witchcraft.
In today’s Suspiria, the political context of history is used to establish a parallel with the instability of Saturday’s government, a kind of dichotomy between the historical patriarchy and saturday’s matriarchy.
The Version of Guadagnino is presented as a renewal or update of values already dormant in the Argento film.
Leaving aside more purely cultural and historical issues, Suspiria remains a horror film. In the original, Argento made great use of the suvout, leaving saturday’s mysteries hidden behind its walls.
Through music and color, the viewer realized that something strange was happening, but could not know what was hiding there.
Susie’s arrival in Germany is absolutely revealing; Argento shows us a familiar space: the airport. The noises of the surroundings and the plans of the young Susie advancing towards the exit trace a realism that contrasts with a series of boards in which we see the exit of the airport.
An outing into darkness, accompanied by Goblin’s exceptional and disturbing music, which seems to alert us to the presence of evil, the fantastic or unknown element.
On the taxi ride to school, kaleidoscopic lights distort reality, music gets louder and the outside shows us a hostile and terrifying nature, so the viewer understands that something is going to happen, that Susie must return to the airport and never again. enter Markos’ school.
In the most common Suspiria, the presence of evil is verbalized during the visit to the psychiatrist of the young Patracia, student of the school, who exposes to the psychiatrist some paranormal facts that occur in the school.
Thus, two possible explanations of the same fact are raised: rational, that is, the psychiatrist’s version, and the paranormal version, according to Patricia.
The Guadagnino version is more realistic; we no longer have distorted reality, there is no more disturbing music, but we are involved in the sounds of the environment, bodies dancing or shaking.
Red, the main protagonist of the original, appears only in Susie’s hair, connecting, in some way, with the collective imagination.
Red hair has always been associated with witchcraft, and in Guadagnino’s film it becomes relevant when witches decide to cut it off susie, however, far from losing her strength as Samson, Susie presents hes heses heses hes as the real Mother Suspiriorum.
Thus, at the climax of the film, red re-stains the images, plunges us back into a blood bath and takes us to the roots of Argento.
Guadagnino is determined to tell us all the details of Saturday, to show what he has left out the original, to seek the link between dance and witchcraft through an astonishing and uncomfortable scene.
Meanwhile, Argento tries to envelop us in a surreal, paranormal and strange atmosphere that troubles and terrifies us.
His camera takes a more voyeuristic stance, as if he were a character and as if he were spying on girls’ movements at school, both performers use images of the collective imagination, but one suggests, while the other does so more explicitly.
Argento imagined his film as a fairy tale in which the protagonists were girls and, not being able to do so, left traces that connect to this childhood vision in the midst of horror.
In short, we are faced with a dreadful fairy tale and a current terror that leaves little room for the imagination; two visions of the same script, but very different, both pleasant and shocking, although we prefer Argento’s, which one do you prefer?