It makes sense that Suspiria, Luca Guadagnino’s sleek-yet-deranged reinterpretation of Dario Argento’s landmark giallo horror, is hitting American cinema screens on 26 October, five days before Halloween. Scary movies of any commercial stripe benefit from seasonal timing; unless you’re a buff of the genre, to watch David Gordon Green’s Halloween sequel, for example, on 1 November would have the slightly tepid, hungover feeling of hearing Christmas carols on Boxing Day.
Even before the big day, however, some Halloween revellers queueing up for Suspiria will leave the cinema with their spooky spirits a little deflated, a little less buzzed than the promise of Dakota Johnson being terrorised by dancing witches in wintry Berlin may have led them to expect. Some will turn to each other and repeat the three simple words my elderly Italian seat neighbor said to me – or perhaps to the room in general – as the credits rolled on the film’s screening at the Venice film festival back in balmy late summer: “What was that?”
To be clear, I come to praise Suspiria, not bury it. In a genre overrun with workmanlike-or-worse remakes, revivals, reboots and retcons of classic horror properties, Guadagnino’s slow-and-loose spin on Argento’s original comes about as close as it can to being an original itself. Breaking the back of Argento’s narrative and splaying its limbs in disorienting, counterintuitive directions – rather like the fate that uncannily befalls a young dancer in the film’s most dazzling set piece – it fashions a piece of occult exploitation into a more oblique, extended, sensuous study of bodily stress, submission and control, forging connections to everything from the Holocaust to the Red Army Gang in its unpicking of feminine identity and oppression.
If that doesn’t quite make sense, nor does Guadagnino’s gorgeously top-heavy film, which teases fragmented philosophies through the rich, fawn-coloured, heavy-fog mood of its opening two hours – yes, it’s long – before wresting us into a shocking, blood-washed finale that feverishly frays as many threads as it knits together. You leave feeling more raggedly disarranged than frightened; Guadagnino seems more concerned with studying the motions and aesthetics of screen violence in exquisite slow motion than with startling or grossing out the viewer. Suspiria serves its audience a buffet of atmospherically grotesque sights and invites us mainly to feast on their beauty.
As an objet d’art, Suspiria’s brazen, hyper-aestheticised eccentricity makes it a taunting thrill: a film that sets out to divide viewers with its language, that intends its lavish images to be pored over with fetishistic fascination. As a modern horror film, its success is qualified, even questionable. Horror is the most interactive of genres in the way it plays on and feeds audience response, yet there’s glassy hostility in the way Guadagnino’s film gazes back at its audience: it’s not a film for the multiplex fright-night crowd, sure, but even some hardcore horror acolytes, the kind that made a cult property of Argento’s film in the first place, have professed themselves bewildered.
In this regard, Guadagnino’s Suspiria looks set to join a run of recent art-horror experiments that have been major events on the festival circuit, attracting a fierce if not unanimous critical following in the process, only to struggle, once unleashed into the real world, to find much of an audience beyond that. Last year, Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, a scorching artist’s confessional in the sneaky guise of a haunted-house movie, lured traditional horror-heads and Jennifer Lawrence fans alike into watching an infant being torn apart and devoured; horrified if not terrified, ticket buyers made their displeasure with a lowest-possible F rating on Cinemascore – the reliably conservative, usually commercially indicative audience rating metric to which the American industry is in anxious thrall.
Another boldly alternative horror vision of recent years, Robert Eggers’ 17th-century satanic nightmare The Witch, also landed a paltry Cinemascore of C- despite critical hosannas from Sundance onwards. Eggers’ film may be a more disciplined exercise than either Mother! or Suspiria, but its austere formalism and chilly religious inquiry did not win the approval of viewers hoping for jumpier olde-worlde antics; they weren’t much in the mood for its 400-year-old vernacular either. Trey Edward Shult’s It Comes at Night did even worse, with a D. A bleak, sparse contagion drama that looked and posed like a traditional horror film, it turned out to be a work of unremitting feel-bad domestic suffering: its claustrophobia was expertly wielded, but viewers were less willing than critics to sit back in appreciative dread.
With scant box office in inverse proportion to their perceived prestige, these films all paid a predictable commercial price for their avoidance of conventional genre tactics. Yet Ari Aster’s Sundance-feted debut Hereditary, perhaps the most critically celebrated horror film of recent years, rather intriguingly bucked the trend this summer.
In the wake of adulatory reviews, this artful, grief-driven nerve-shredder predictably earned a D+ Cinemascore for, one presumes, the sheer unrelenting despair in its portrayal of family bereavement and the cold extremity of its most visceral jump scares. Commercially speaking, the writing seemed on the wall, yet Aster’s film overcame that toxic word of mouth to scare up more than £61m worldwide, becoming the highest grosser in the indie distributor (and regular art-horror backer) A24’s brief history. Not everyone liked the film, but it proved enough of a conversation piece to get paying audiences arguing among themselves. Hereditary mixes arthouse rumination with enough stylistic and structural savvy to keep viewers engaged, if not wholly appreciative. Suspiria is a work far further out on its own beam, the kind of dazzling, high-end freakout that shivers independently of its stricken audience. If it’s unlikely to be a staple of Halloween movie marathons in years to come, that because it dances very much to its own discordant music.
Suspiria is released in the US on 26 October and in the UK on 16 November
