Remakes are a dirty word. Mention that a classic movie is getting remade to film geeks and they’ll shrivel up like snails exposed to salt. Why wouldn’t they recoil? Many horror movie remakes have been awful, their quality more frightening than any of their scares! True, horror remakes have technically existed since the dawn of cinema. Just look at the various adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein that disturbed early moviegoers. Plus, 1980s horror masterpieces The Fly and The Thing were themselves remakes, proving this domain isn’t inherently cursed.

Still, most 21st-century horror remakes do not measure up to John Carpenter’s take on The Thing from Another Planet. Most, like The Amityville Horror or The Omen, were just retreads of superior earlier titles. Heaven help moviegoers trapped with 2017’s The Mummy, 2010’s frighteningly misogynistic Piranha 3D, or 2006’s The Wicker Man. Memorably jagged cinematography vanished in favor of shaky-cam nonsense. Retreads of once-novel scares inspired yawns from audiences. Nobody loved these endeavors besides maybe big studio shareholders. But if there’s a model for how to do a modern horror remake right, it’s 2018’s Suspiria.

Those expecting this title to be a typical Marcus Nispel or David S. Goyer retread of an earlier superior horror work, brace yourselves. Challengers director Luca Guadagnino is here to blow your mind and ensure you never look at ballet the same way again.

In 1977, director Dario Argento delivered arguably the most iconic Giallo horror feature of all-time with Suspiria. The project followed an American woman bursting with excitement over joining a hoity-toity dance academy in Germany. Eventually, the truth comes out: All the dancers here are witches. 41 years later, another Italian cinema legend, Luca Guadagnino, offered up a radical new vision of Suspiria. The starting framework (an American woman comes to a German dance academy populated by witches) was kept. However, the scope of the story is expanded greatly to include an array of subplots. This includes one focusing on the elderly Dr. Josef Klemperer (Tilda Swinton credited as Lutz Ebersdorf).

The original Suspiria was a 99-minute head trip. Guadagnino’s take on the same material spans a little over 150 minutes. Expansiveness is the name of the game for this remake, a quality perfectly crystallized in the feature’s extravagant finale. In 1977, protagonist Suzy (Jessica Harper) capped off Suspiria confronting witch leader Helena Markos in a one-on-one confrontation (albeit Markos takes on the form of deceased character Sara to combat our hero). 2018’s Suspiria, meanwhile, goes absolutely bonkers with its finale featuring a gnarly depiction of a witches sabbath. Naked bodies twitch and gyrate on-screen. Deep-throat guttural singing dominates the soundtrack. Eventually, Suspiria (2018) protagonist Susie (Dakota Johnson) graphically dispatches a slew of witches in a gory fashion. The slaughtering of these women contrasts directly with flickering images of them staring into the camera against a radically different background. A mano-a-mano confrontation here manifests as a massacre with avant-garde touches.

It’s great to have two versions of Suspiria that offer exceptionally tasty and unique cinematic delights. If you’re in the mood for something more intimate, the 1977 incarnation is the way to go. The 2018 iteration, meanwhile, can satisfy any cravings for arthouse grotesquerie. These pronounced variations alone signal why the 2018 Suspiria is a brilliant model more horror remakes should follow. This is a feature unafraid to take chances and deviate from its predecessor. Other horror remakes like the 2006 Omen movie rigidly recreate what worked in the past to disappointing results. There’s no urgency or surprises, a fatal flaw for any horror title. 2018’s Suspiria, meanwhile, uses a classic Giallo feature as a springboard for something boldly unique.

That dedication to the fresh infuses Suspiria with a quality most horror remakes lack: verve. Typically, the exploitation of an old brand name in the horror remake realm is an exercise in desecration. A familiar name is retrieved, while the property’s transgressive qualities vanish. A ramshackle piece of grindhouse horror cinema in 1975 becomes the umpteenth IP regurgitation to please studio executives in 2015. The most extreme example of this is the 1978 horror feature I Spit on Your Grave. A disturbing story of sexual abuse and revenge, the original feature was a provocative piece of art that inspired reactions ranging from Roger Ebert declaring it “a vile piece of garbage” to Erica L. Wright of Ghouls Ghouls Ghouls declaring the feature “spoke deeply to my own anxieties as a woman, and validated them as well.”

Such strikingly unique perspectives speak to the profound impact original pieces of horror cinema can have on audiences. But 35 years later, the I Spit on Your Grave remake epitomized the cynical soul of many horror remakes. All this update did was deliver a rigid redo of the original feature. No wonder it faded quickly from the pop culture consciousness. This production only cared about I Spit on Your Grave’s familiar title, not inspiring new audience reactions as visceral as people’s responses to the original. Guadagnino’s Suspiria doesn’t fall into this trap. This is the rare horror remake far more interested in new frights than coasting on a familiarity.

A sequence where each movement of a ballet dancer physically contorts the bones of another woman in a separate room vividly reflects this. It’s a scene that doesn’t immediately evoke memories of the original film, but that’s what makes it frighteningly unpredictable. Audiences aren’t just reassured the set piece will close out with a callback to a line from the original Suspiria. Everything from the body horror on display to the editing to the bright interior lighting sharply contrasting with the physically tortured dancer belongs just to this new Suspiria. It makes its predecessor proud in producing genuinely disturbing new scares rather than just providing a hollow rehash of old provocations.

This dedication to the new even manifests in the wildly diverging endings of Suspiria. True, both titles feature different incarnations of Suzy dispensing with Markos. However, the original Suspiria closes out on an interesting paradoxical blend of closure and uncertainty. The school housing all those witches is obliterated, while Suzy darts out into the night. Where she goes next is uncertain, but the witches who have tormented her will hurt her no more. 2018’s Suspiria, meanwhile, ends with Susie taking over the dance academy. She brutally murders tons of witches, but it’s done out of allegiance to “proper” leadership rather than a quest to destroy all witches.

2018’s Suspiria depicts witches and their mystical powers as something that can’t be eradicated. Its leaders can only be swapped. The enduring depiction of witchcraft here mirrors other elements within Guadagnino’s Suspiria that linger eternally. This includes the shadow of Nazi Germany over the film’s 1977 West Berlin backdrop. Just because World War II ends doesn’t mean either Nazi fascism or trauma experienced from Nazi persecution suddenly evaporated from the world. Klemperer is the center of this narrative detail given all his residual sorrow over the wife he lost in World War II.
2018’s Suspiria caps off its expansive narrative with a conclusion about how things big (genocide-based trauma) and small (initials of romantic couples) persist. It’s a boldly distinct wrap-up compared to the original Suspiria.

The track record of horror remakes is a chilling sight. (Thom Yorke’s Suspiria score alone exudes more personality than the entirety of 95% of horror remakes!) How dreadful it is to see trailblazing and frightening movies kicked back into theaters in hollow modern incarnations devoid of personality. The dismal track record of so many of these titles is only more apparent after watching 2018’s Suspiria. Like the 1980s iterations of The Thing and The Fly, the 21st-century Suspiria exemplifies how to take horror’s past and make it into something fresh.

One also has to wonder if Luca Guadagnino’s queerness is what underpins the film’s unabashedly expansive portrait of femininity and the film’s unorthodox structure. Cishet filmmakers may deliver horror remakes that retain a female protagonist from the original movie, but few have interest in exploring their lead’s internal life. 2018’s Suspiria, meanwhile, delves deep into the feminine psychology.

Guadagnino’s playing with non-linear structure and maximalist visual impulses harkens back to experimental queer auteurs rather than the grim reality of countless cithet horror filmmakers. These qualities help make Suspiria feel right at home in Guadangino’s larger, unabashedly queer filmography rather than an outlier. Such elements make it even more vital to appreciate what a gift this particular Luca Guadagnino title is…and how it puts so many other horror remakes to shame.

Suspiria (2018) is streaming on Prime.

HORROR IS SO GAY is Autostraddle’s annual celebration of queer horror.

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