Women and Queerness in Horror: Suspiria (2018)

Warning: This article contains some adult language, discussion of sex and BDSM, and spoilers for Suspiria (2018).

This article, inevitably, is and isn’t a double feature. My primary focus is on Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 retelling of this equal parts beautiful and unsettling film. Yet it’s hard (if not impossible) to talk about it without reference to Dario Argento’s 1977 original.

In true nerdy academic fashion, though, here’s my core thesis right out the gate: if Argento’s film was “vaguely lesbian,” Guadagnino’s is, to put it simply, queer as heck. It’s a complicated treatise, navigating between conversations about gay men telling stories about queer women and my lingering mistrust of the creators who signed off on Call Me By Your Name’s concerning ramifications.

That being said, I know this reinterpretation of Suspiria wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I get it; if you were hoping for a more faithful remake of the original film and didn’t receive it, I can absolutely see how that’d be jarring. Knowing how mixed some of these responses have been, though, I feel the need to say up front: I love, love, love 2018’s Suspiria.

Having recently re-watched the original and newly acquainted myself with the reimagining, I might love the 2018 version more than the original film. I know, I know. That’s probably a little blasphemous to say. I just really love women, dance, queer women who dance, witches, queer witches, and — okay, moving on.

Suspiria, reimagined, is two things at once. It is an interrogation of the political anxieties of the original film’s time, and a breathtakingly intimate, violent, sexually-charged exploration of the ways that love, power, and queered family structures play out for and between women.

Where the original exists in something of a sealed-off, fairytale bubble, Guadagnino is more keenly interested in power and its abuses. He tackles the idea of queerness as a radical answer to the perils and slights of the political status quo.

Set against the backdrop of the Red Army Faction’s far-left militancy in divided 1970s Berlin, Guadagnino’s Suspiria utilizes the pretext of a dance company-turned-witch coven to grapple with national guilt. He also uses it to touch on the ramifications of nostalgia or denial as inadequate responses to fascism.

The political thread of the film is (admittedly) not always straightforward to find, at least until the film reaches its obvious climax. However, it’s no accident that the coven’s power grows at the same pace as the political tensions and exploitation of anxiety and guilt outside the coven’s doors pick up.

One of the central concerns of Suspiria is, indeed, that of not just aggregation of power but what it’s used for. The film is poised as a sharp criticism of the use of power to exploit others and to achieve your own goals. This is answered back at the end of the film by the use of accumulated power to serve and love others, instead.

Suspiria isn’t afraid to grapple with power as expressed through interpersonal intimacy, either. Indeed, if there was one line that summarized this idea, it would be one from Dr. Klemperer, a psychiatrist who becomes embroiled in the coven’s affairs. He explains that “Love and manipulation, they share houses very often. They are frequent bedfellows.”

Bedfellows is far from an accidental word choice either. Even before that glorious, dizzying sequence where the coven’s dancers are bound in shibari-style knots that evoke both dripping blood and the raw-nerved intimacy of bondage itself; the film crackles with the same push-and-pull power play energy of a BDSM scene.

Inevitably, nowhere is this more visible than in each tête-à-tête between the film’s two arguable leads, Susie (Dakota Johnson) and Blanc (Tilda Swinton). Bristling with familiar subtextual signifiers for queerness — lingering glances, gripping hands, sitting on each other’s beds — their relationship is equally marked out by patterns of dominance and submission.

Significantly, the more Susie comes into her own, the more assertive she becomes. It becomes increasingly self-evident that the control in the relationship, despite Blanc’s manipulations, lies with Susie.

This dynamic begins with Blanc asking if Susie was “punished” at home for her pursuit of dance and intrigue outside her conservative, Mennonite family. It bleeds through a more overt acknowledgment of sexuality between these two women: “When you were dancing, what did it feel like inside you? Inside your body?” “It felt like what I think it must feel like to fuck.”

Finally, it culminates with the submissive party realizing the control is (and has been) hers. “You don’t want to make me choose. Because you love me.” It’s with this new awareness that Susie, in turn, completes her journey of self-acceptance and self-realization.

In many ways, Suspiria is as much a delightfully alien horror film as it is a coming out story. To me, it’s all the stronger for centering on a protagonist who is already an adult. Many of these stories have focused on teenagers and had little interest in queer people who don’t truly find themselves until later in life.

What’s particularly striking is that it’s not just the relationship between Susie and Blanc that follows this trajectory, either. The movie itself invites the viewer to participate in this kink-like structure.

Where the original film holds the witchcraft at the heart of its coven a secret, Guadagnino’s reimagining has no interest in secrecy. It brings the viewer into negotiating and accepting the rules upon which the film is built within the first few scenes. From thence the choice of participation and trusting in the narrative rests entirely with the viewer, to be called off at any time.

The rewards for that trust are high, even and perhaps especially when Suspiria is painful, violent, or unnerving in its intimacy. Accepting the film’s terms and boundaries creates much the same secure space for imaginative play to process emotional experience. It provides a space that is often rendered inaccessible or socially off-limits once one reaches adulthood.

Within that structure, Suspiria is deeply interested in language and communication. Significant, for one, are the number of languages used by the core cast — English, German, and French — and the ways these are used to mark out either inclusion or exclusion.

Shifting from one language to another adds a layer of secrecy or privacy, that might not otherwise be present. For instance, Blanc and Susie switching from English to French neatly excludes other characters from their conversation. This adds an important layer to the queerness embedded in the text.

The dance company and the coven within it, are above all else a collective of women. One that is wholly disinterested in making room for men to participate or intrude. So too is the “vaguely lesbian” premise of the original Suspiria. Unlike its predecessor, the 2018 version feels no need to replicate the original’s problematic (ableist and homophobic) “reasons” for why the male characters need be rendered unwelcome.

The remake simply builds a space where men are deliberately absent simply because they’re men. Their absence is because the collective prioritizes feminine-centered relationships and autonomy. It doesn’t need to imagine that a woman could only be disinterested in men if the men were blind, or gay, or “ugly.” The original film’s suggestion that women only exclude men when society has deemed those men “undesirable” is completely removed from the remake. The film is all the better for it.

This doesn’t mean, though, that the coven is without striation or hierarchy. Both the spoken languages used throughout the film and the physical communication of bodies and dance are used not only to separate the company from the rest of the world, but also to partition off areas of the coven’s life as inaccessible.

Suspiria holds the use of modern dance — in contrast to the original film’s focus on ballet — as a reactionary, expressive, queer communication tool. It is used in tension with the closed doors and hidden rooms (literal and figurative) that occupy the coven’s private spaces.

In turn, when the film reaches its climax, it rearranges the use of language — both spoken and physical — to make for an opening of doors. Susie’s self-realization as Mother Suspiriorum, and as the queer matriarch of a queered family, walks hand in hand with an upheaval of the coven’s power structure.

It’s still a queer collective built among and between women; but gone are its internal hierarchies and secrets, and gone too are its abuses of power for personal gain. Ultimately, Suspiria (2018) interrogates its political anxieties, and arrives at the conclusion that a truly queer approach to accumulation and use of power is to engage in radical acts of love and compassion.

When Susie achieves her desire to “be the company’s hands,” she does so as a servant ruler. She is merciful in her release of those who have been abused and harmed by the former coven’s actions, and is powerfully in love with and loved by the family that remains.