“Movie Remakes Always Suck”

Breaking down your stigma on adaptations

By: Sydney Hainy

It seems far too often that I find myself groaning about another movie remake. Can't Hollywood come up with anything new? Disney, particularly in the past few years, has been spitting out remakes, spinoffs, and new adaptations left and right. “Little Women” has been remade countless times. While we could just disregard remakes, deep down we are drawn to them. They are familiar, comforting, and quite honestly take less effort to consume. Hollywood knows the name itself will draw audiences in, so a remake is therefore a less risky investment. The funny thing is, remakes are allowed to be bad! People will still watch them, just to see how they compare to the originals they know and love. I know I do. However, just because something makes money does not mean it is inherently good. Although there are many (so, so many) terrible remakes that all but permanently scar the original, there are some successful examples. What I have found is that the key to a good remake is not to produce an exact replica, but a tribute to the first piece of art. Here, the artist can take the liberty of digging into prominent themes from their inspiration piece, and update them with more complex thoughts or commentaries, all while maintaining key stylistic features. Such a simple explanation is surprisingly hard to come by. Fortunately, Luca Guadagnino did just that with his 2018 adaptation of “Suspiria.” 

The first “Suspiria,” released in 1977 under director Dario Argento, seems hard to beat. For those unfamiliar with the film, it follows Susie, a young American girl who has been selected to join a prestigious dance company in Germany. The seemingly normal school quickly reveals its sinister inner workings with a coven of witches at its head. It's colorful, invigorating, bloody, and all-around unforgettable. Although considered a highly stylized cult classic, the “horror” aspect of this horror movie is fairly surface level. Fear is driven by the uncertainty and visual discomfort of the protagonist, Susie. Of course, it helps that there are dramatic death scenes, too. The lovable thing about this film is that it doesn't try too hard to be indirect. Throughout its runtime, Susie literally hears people whispering “witch” over and over. Its strengths are in its originality: a chilling score by “Goblin,” an imaginative plot, stunning set design, and let's not forget about the lighting (I'm convinced this movie invented the color red). Other than these points, though, most of its charm is due to its vintage, campy take on our idea of a horror movie. The ending is fairly predictable (spoilers!) as Susie uncovers the secret of the witches and destroys them, burning down the studio and inevitably killing the staff inside. Painting Susie as the unrelenting hero takes the easy path to ending the story. However, Argento leaves a little to be interpreted, as our protagonist produces an unsettling smile. She just killed a mass of people! Why is she smiling? While Argento leaves it at that, it seems as though Guadagnino took this thought and ran with it.

The 2018 version of “Suspiria,” despite being a remake, has more differences than similarities to the original. Both films are set in 1977, categorizing the adaptation as a period piece as opposed to the original's modern-day setting. Director Guadagnino uses Argento's entire rising action as a jumping off point, with the first scene detailing a former dancer's delusions about the company being run by witches. This is one of the only things the audience knows for certain though, as the plot is more than a little complicated. Guadagnino is ambitious in creating more depth than the original, while still borrowing its basic framework. Where the first is uncertain, the second is sharp, serious, and precise. Guadagnino's quick pans, muted tones, and forceful dancing make sure of it. A major difference lies in their final acts, which completely diverge from one another. From the beginning, the audience takes pity upon Susie, doe-eyed and innocent, who walks into this mess of a dance company slash coven of witches. As the film progresses, we are unsettled by Susie's calm demeanor, and we become uncertain where her true alliances lie. She seems a bit too eager to take the top dancer slot, particularly because her predecessor disappeared in a hysteria. As it turns out, our discomfort was correct. She reveals in the last scene, the scene where she is supposed to be sacrificed to the ancient Mother of the dance company—stick with me here—that she is in fact the reborn Mother Susporium, an even more ancient and powerful entity. Luca takes absolute creative liberty here, and perhaps uses Argento's vaguely unsettling ending as inspiration for his giant plot twist. Other than the storyline, in terms of lighting, score, dancing, and themes, the adaptation also strays from the original.

Instead of mimicking the iconic red lighting from 1977, Guadagnino opts for a bleak, colorless palette, accented by Susie's red hair and ritualistic acts during the final scenes. In fact, the scene where Susie reveals her true form, an homage is paid in the form of a room bathed in red light and strewn with blood. The score, too, varies quite a bit from Goblin's fanciful high chiming notes. The head singer and songwriter of Radiohead, Thom Yorke, was begged by Guadagnino to compose his first score, which offers a huge creative shift to the film. His music is filled with swelling string notes, haunting choral voices, and minor keys aimed at instilling paranoia in the listener. Along with score, dancing is another creative decision that invokes seriousness throughout. Even though the film takes place at a dance company, the original almost ignores this fact, with a singular dance sequence in its entire length. In contrast, dance is a driving force in the adaptation, denoting witchcraft with grotesque shots. Choreographer Damien Jalet uses sharp, forceful, and oftentimes sexual movements borrowed from dancers like Pina Bausch to whip the dancers around. The result of his work is disgusting, gruesome dance scenes that made theater-goers throw up. Vomit-inducing to some, but beautiful to others, the film is referencing Lacan's theory of a “mirror stage.” While one dancer is bewitched, creating violent, yet precise dancing, the other, in a secret room encapsulated with mirrors, is utterly mangled with each movement. Lacan discovered there is a moment in an infant's life where they recognize themselves in the mirror. Here lies the divide between our actual self and our ideal self, the one that others perceive and recognize. Lacan theorizes that each person spends their whole life struggling to become a unified whole again. Guadagnino's mirrored room which holds the contorted dancer is our “ideal form,” and the dancer performing the ritual is our actual self. To Mother Susporium, this bloody heap of snapped bones and bruised skin is, in fact, beautiful. It's perfect. This provides an underlying theme to the film, one that values our interpretation of pain and suffering as necessary and preferred. A less overtly complicated theme is the ever-present role of femininity. Guadagnino chose to cast all but two female actresses, both minor roles. Even the male psychiatrist was played by Tilda Swinton, who also played the head dance teacher, again reminding us of mirrored imagery and secrecy. The female cast envelops us in an intentionally anti-patriarchal world of women. Guadagnino has been quoted as saying, “True feminism is something that doesn't shy away from the complexity of the female identity. It's not about sugarcoating and saying, ‘They're good; men are bad.’ That's ridiculous.” The adaptation of “Suspiria” proves just that: women are extremely complex creatures capable of the same cruelty as anyone else. Horror then is drawn from our own perceptions. We look inside ourselves to see the fear and evil that lives within us, which will always be deeply unsettling.

Looking through this incredibly complex example, we can see that Guadagnino has birthed a piece of art which undoubtedly stands on its own. Some may say that it is a more nuanced take on the artsy mashup that is the original. “Suspiria” breaks the stigma that remakes are always worse. It is unfair to say that the creativity of both pieces goes unnoticed. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, but I can say with certainty that they are not one and the same, like many other attempts. The real takeaway (Hollywood, grab a notepad) is that recreation on its own is not good enough. Art is about passion and meaning and interpretation and reflection. Producers can and will keep making money on feeding us the same recycled media, but it's those films that slow down and re-interpret the thoughts of their inspiration that challenge the media's fast output approach. Now if Disney takes adaptations to a new level, that is up for you to decide. But before we cast off remakes as a whole, I beg you to reconsider. Art is not dead; keep dancing.