Suspiria: remake versus original

a quintessential horror movie made in the 70's and then again in the 10's

A month or so ago, I read a Substack article from Final Girl Zine (linked here) with some good female-led horror movies to watch. On this list was the original Suspiria, a 70’s horror movie about a ballerina moving to a German boarding school that unravels into something more sinister and evil. The author also says that there’s a more recent remake of Suspiria, but she urges her readers to watch the original instead. I ended up watching the remake first with some friends since one of them already watched it, and after reading some opinions about it online to debrief I learned that the remake is really different from the original. Clearly, my next move was to watch the original so I could decide for myself which was better. (In case you’re planning on watching these movies soon, note that there will be spoilers ahead!)

The differences that I noticed were pretty similar to the ones I saw online. The most notable difference for me was the length of the movies. The original is a standard movie length, a little over an hour and a half. The remake, however, is about two and a half hours long, and it definitely feels that long. There’s a perhaps unreasonably long exposition in the remake that we don’t get in the original, but I’m not sure if the pay-off of having the background information is worth making the movie almost twice as long as the original. It was very interesting watching the pieces connect together at the end and finally understanding why certain scenes were included, but it was a lot to sit through in the beginning. The remake would potentially be a movie that’s better on the second watch than the first; the original definitely hit on the first watch though.

The other very notable difference was how much better the original looked. I was obsessed with the colorful sets, intricate designs, and enviable outfits in the original. I mean, come on:

thank you to this website for listing out the stills of the original

I’m sure that there could be a really cool analysis done on what the different colors mean for the plot and all, but that would be a whole other piece. Truly, the scenes are mesmerizing even just in how they are lit, colored, and framed. Even though the effects were very clearly fake, as they are in most 70’s movies, it didn’t really take too much away from the awe-inspiring movie aesthetic. I cannot overstate how much the vivid colors really add to how enjoyable it is to watch. On the other hand, the remake has that very subdued and neutral minimalist aesthetic that has unfortunately permeated many artistic spaces around the 2010’s. I can kind of see that they worked towards a specific color palette, so I can appreciate that. Sometimes the scenes were so dark it was hard to see much, which is yet another unfortunate current trend in movies. One thing I liked about the style of the remake was that it seemed like the subtitles changed colors depending on what language the people were speaking even though they were always written in English. Anyway, here’s some stills from the remake so you can get what I mean:

thank you to this tumblr for putting together these images from the remake

After seeing the original, I wondered why the director would step away from what is one of the most popular aspects of the movie from fans. However, I can understand changing the ending and adding the background information because it was an interesting switch from the original plot. In the original, Suzy finds the witch that the teachers worship after talking to people about an old witch that moved to the town a long time ago. Suzy is able to kill the witch before the witch kills her, and she escapes from the school, with the movie ending there. Although a bit abrupt, I thought it was a perfectly fine ending.

In the remake, the occult influence is much stronger. Suzy ends up being the real witch that they worship, revealing that the woman pretending to be her was a fake. There is a gory blood bath as she kills those that worshipped the false witch and grants the wishes of those that stood by her. The witch herself was different as well, this time being an entity older than God. I think both of these endings are pretty interesting in their own right. It was also fun to see famous actors in the remake, including Dakota Johnson and Mia Goth. They even had the actor who played Suzy in the original play a character in the remake, which I thought was a fun addition.

Yet another big difference was the role of dancing in the films. In the original, they are ballet dancers, and the dancing scenes are minimal. Most of the movie takes place outside of the dance classes, and there isn’t any sort of huge dance montage. In the remake, they don’t do ballet, and there are a lot of dancing scenes. We see scenes during the audition, the practices, and a performance for a crowd. Dancing was also a way that they perform witchcraft on some of the students, which I wish they touched on more. I think the dancing scenes were generally fun to watch, but they definitely could’ve cut down a little on them since the movie was SO long. I didn’t miss seeing the dance scenes in the original since they were less connected to the plot, and I think the dance scenes in the remake made sense since they did tie into the plot.

Something that was the same that I thought was fun was the way that the girls find the witch’s lair. Both include some sort of written route that had to be carried out by counting steps, going deep into unknown parts of the school, and knowing the right way to get into the secret rooms. We get a little bit more context of this in the remake since there’s a lot more background, so it did feel a little more random in the original than it did in the remake. It’s not that I feel the scenes were rushed, but we just didn’t get to see every little thing that could’ve been important to the girls. Although it could’ve benefited from fleshing out some ideas a bit more, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.

Despite the fact that there’s more gore in the remake, the deaths are more explicit and permanent in the original. They have typical gory 70’s style deaths with clearly fake blood coming out of their mouths. I think they were a little more shocking because the death scenes were unpredictable. Just when you think they might be okay, something terrible happens that guarantees their death. In the remake, the girls go through some torturous pain and then are basically half-dead slaves for the witches, stuck somewhere deep within the school. This reveal was one of those scenes that explained some flashbacks, so this was also a well done shock in my opinion.

Overall, both movies were fun to watch. However, I think I agree with the Final Girl essay I cited in that I prefer the original. It was easier to watch because it was shorter, it took less time to reveal the horror aspects of the movie, it looked SO MUCH prettier, and it’s definitely a good horror classic to have watched. Still, I’m glad I watched both because it was fun to compare them. I liked how there were major differences so that watching the original and the remake kind of felt like watching two completely different movies that were able to surprise me in different ways. I think I’d still recommend watching the remake, I would just definitely add the warning that it’s a big time investment. I don’t really think the order in which you watch them matters that much since they’re so different. Either way, you’ll notice the easter eggs in the remake that point back to the original.

Thanks for sticking around til the end! If you’ve watched one or both of these movies, let me know what you thought of them. Also, if there’s any other movies you’d like to recommend I’ll definitely add them to my horror movie list. I’ve been enjoying going back to some old classics and watching those.