‘Suspiria’ sequel: the greatest movie never made?
In late 2020, acclaimed Italian director Luca Guadagnino was interviewed about his HBO coming-of-age TV series We Are Who We Are. During the course of the conversation, talk turned to potential sequels of some of his works. When it came to Call Me by Your Name – his 2017 tale of the romance between a graduate student and the 17-year-old boy whose family he stays in Northern Italy – Guadagnino revealed he wanted to revisit the characters. He confirmed: “There will be more stories we can tell about Elio and Oliver.”
Perhaps more interestingly, though, Guadagnino also confessed that he originally conceived of his 2018 Suspiria reimagining as the beginning of something grander. Semi-conspiratorially, he told the interviewer, “Well, I’ll tell you something, Suspiria was originally titled Suspiria: Part 1 in the script and in the slate. That’s true.”
He added, “Writer David Kajganich and I had really conceived it as the first half of a bigger story.”
Interestingly, Guadagnino didn’t particularly want to remake Dario Argento’s original 1977 film so much as pay tribute to it. He told The Guardian, “I saw the film when I was 14, and it hit me hard. I immediately started to dream about making my own version of it. So in a way it makes me smile when I hear people say, ‘How dare you remake Suspiria. Typical commerce-driven mentality.’ I was just a boy who had seen a movie that made him what he became. So that’s how I am approaching it: a homage to the incredible, powerful emotion I felt when I saw it.”
On top of this, Kajganich wasn’t actually a fan of the nightmarish original film, so he decided to take a vastly different approach to the material. He confessed to Bloody Disgusting that he told Guadagnino, “I will take quite a practical approach if you’re okay with that. I would want to know how something like this could happen, how it would work, what the hierarchy of the coven would be…”
These two factors are likely why Guadagnino’s Suspiria is such a different beast from Argento’s – and why it makes sense that he originally planned a second part that went to even stranger places. He told The Film Stage that he would have delved more into Mother Helena Markos, the leader of the witch coven and one of three characters Tilda Swinton played in his film. He saw the story being “layered in five different time zones and spaces. One of these was Helena Markos being a charlatan woman in the year 1200 in Scotland and how she got the secret of longevity.”
Sadly for the director and his fans, Suspiria only managed to bank $7.9million at the worldwide box office. Considering the $20m budget was more than double that figure, it made a sequel an extremely remote possibility – even if creatively, it had the potential to be the greatest sequel ever put to film.
Guadagnino himself put it even more bluntly when asked if part two could ever happen. He lamented, “How? How, my dear? The movie made absolutely nothing. It was a disaster at the box office.” However, he did acknowledge, “I know that people are liking it more and more now. I loved making that movie. It’s very dear to me.”
