The horror film Luca Guadagnino called a “masterpiece”
When Luca Guadagnino took on the challenge of remaking the highly regarded horror flick Suspiria, which was originally directed by fellow Italian filmmaker Dario Argento, he would be elevated into the pantheon of the horror greats.
The 2018 version of Suspiria was a fantastic addition to contemporary cinema, adding to the original story of a dance corporation run by a coven of witches with the element of German guilt over the Holocaust and the tragic consequences of love’s loss.
Horror was new ground for Guadagnino; prior to Suspiria, he had traditionally walked the road of drama, be it psychological or romantic. Take, for instance, A Bigger Splash (based loosely on David Hockney’s 1967 painting of the same name) or Call Me By Your Name, starring Timothée Chalamet.
However, Gaudagnino once expressed a profound love and respect for the horror genre, particularly the works of David Cronenberg. He said: “The experience of horror has always been for me one of extreme exhilaration, so I am scared but also uplifted. The Fly by Cronenberg is an all-time masterpiece, one of the very many masterpieces that Mr. Cronenberg has made, and it’s very horror”.
Continuing, the director added: “But the horror of it for me is at the end when you realize that the character of Jeff Goldblum and the character of Geena Davis desperately love each other, but they’re not going to be together. The ultimate horror of that movie was the impossibility of the love between the two of them, which in a way is very close to the ending of Suspiria. When the fly asks her to fire the rifle in its head, that’s an incredibly powerful, terrifying, beautiful moment of horror that explains in one sequence the importance of this genre and its capacity to totally transcend.”
Indeed, the ending of Suspiria was breathtakingly gorgeous. Susie, the film’s protagonist, accepts Mother Suspiriorum into her body and cleanses the dance company of Mother Markos and her followers. Thom Yorke’s beautiful score rings out, and the camera is doused in a red filter.
Summoning an incantation of Death, Susie/Suspiriorum kills Markos and her followers by violently blowing their heads up before acting in benevolence. She mercifully kills several of the other dancers after they beg for death and proceeds to erase the memory of the guilt-ridden Josef Klemperer. The scene is one, as Guadagnino claims, of love, which is all the more impactful after the preceding horror on screen.
