They Don’t Make Trailers Like That Anymore: SUSPIRIA (1977 and 2018)

September 7th marks the birthday of one of my favorite directors, albeit one whose prestige has fallen in my eyes in the last couple of decades, Dario Argento.  He’s a...divisive figure.  He’s certainly the one man I’m grateful got to be a director, because I shudder to think what he would have ended up doing otherwise.  Some people like me really dig on his hallucinogenic, dream-like storytelling (I am convinced Argento begins making a movie by coming up with a few images and sequences, and builds the script around those things), and some people just think it’s a bunch of bullshit.  But most people on both sides agree that Suspiria is one of his masterpieces.

I wanted to include both the International and American trailer, but I could only find a version of the International one with a commentary by Edgar Wright playing over it.  Luckily, the international trailer is composed exclusively of tinted and altered photos from the film with Goblin’s soundtrack playing over it, so nothing is really lost.  It’s very impressionistic, with the camera zooming in and out of the stills, the colors muting and swirling in front of them.  The emphasis is primarily on faces, as we get to look at the various emotions of the various actresses (okay, so most of them are ‘fear’, but...).  There’s only one glimpse of violence in the whole thing!  And yet there’s this sense of peculiar unease that plays over the entire clip that draws us in.

The American trailer...well, it took a different tack.  The American distributor, International Classics, chose to shoot a short sequence involving a woman brushing her hair while reciting a rhyme, placing a flower in her hair--and turning to reveal her fleshless skull face.  Looking at this bit now, it looks really dumb...but I confess, seeing this on a staticy old black and white TV freaked young me out so much that I ran out of the room when it started playing in 1977.  We then get a narration that’s really game--this guy gets into his copy, reading it in a weird whisper that threatens to be over the top.  The trailer only presents clips from three sequences, but the clips they choose do hint at the oversaturated horrorscape Argento has constructed.  Not satisfied with intriguing us with these shots of Jessica Harper wandering down weirdly lit hallways and oddly tinted murders, International Classics brings back their skull-in-a-turtleneck and flashes her image over the title card, then gives us this deathless promise: “The only thing more terrifying than the last twelve minutes of Suspiria...are the first ninety two.”*

Now that's just silly.  Especially since the original American cut was only ninety-two minutes.

Anyway....if you’ve not seen Suspiria, I recommend that you do because it is such a bizarre, not-quite-coherent experience.  It’s kind of pointless trying to describe it, which is why I always would have bet that this film would be impossible to remake.

Flash forward some forty years, and it turns out someone took that bet.  Luca Guadignino, fresh off of the Oscar nominated Call Me By Your Name, decided to do an updated version.  To say I was skeptical was an understatement.  But as the trailers started leaking out, my skepticism has been slowly diminishing.  It seems Guadignino is doing a tonal, rather than literal, remake.  He’s taking the elements and telling a new story with them that has the feel of Argento without trying to mimic him.  The trailer, like a lot of modern trailers, is more linear in construction, trying to give us a Cliff Notes version of the plot without giving too much away.  I’m a little annoyed that it looks like the mythology of the Three Mothers is going to be more rigidly codified, but other than that I am intrigued.  I still have my skepticism, but I also have a hint of optimism that this film may scratch my itch for surreal horror that Dario himself scratched back in the 70‘s and 80‘s with a run of truly amazing horror films.

*--I know that the last few seconds of the American Trailer is cut off--it’s the only version of it I could find save for another Edgar Wright commentary from Trailers From Hell, and since the narration is so important to the overall clip, I chose to accept this truncated version.  Just trust me on how silly the tagline is....

1977 International trailer courtesy of Trailers From Hell

1977 American trailer courtesy of RareCult Cinema

2018 trailer courtesy of Amazon Studios