Horror, revisited
“Halloween” picks up the Michael-andLaurie story 40 years later, while “Suspiria” gets reimagined from the inside out.
BY JEN YAMATO
From “Get Out” to “A Quiet Place” to “It,” horror has rarely been hotter in Hollywood. And this October two especially ambitious genre updates hit the screen: David Gordon Green’s slasher sequel “Halloween” (Oct. 19), set 40 years after John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, and “Suspiria” (Oct. 26), a remake of Dario Argento’s iconic giallo, from “Call Me By Your Name” director Luca Guadagnino. Both high-profile reimaginings arrive in back-to-back weeks before Halloween holiday, helmed by trusted filmmakers with respected pedigrees. And both will face the ultimate scrutiny when horror fans put them to the test: Honorable follow-up to a beloved genre property, or straight-up blasphemy? No pressure, right?
“I’m not a fan of the original ‘Suspiria,’ to be honest,” screenwriter David Kajganich bravely admitted over the phone, bracing for the backlash with a laugh. “I’m a fan of it as an art piece, but as a narrative it makes almost no sense.”
Kajganich and Guadagnino were working on “A Bigger Splash” when the Italian director floated his longtime dream of remaking “Suspiria,” to which he had procured the rights. But they knew they had to do it their own way — and “do it right.”
“And by right I mean not to copy the original, not to draft off of its concerns but to really use the situations that are so versatile to talk about a whole range of things thematically,” Kajganich said.
Argento’s influential original 1977 film, a nightmarish kaleidoscope of phantasmagorical electric hues, follows an American ballet student (Jessica Harper) who encounters supernatural intrigue at a German dance academy.
The original “Suspiria” doesn’t much explore the concerns of the tumultuous world outside the school’s doors. Kajganich and Guadagnino sought to recontextualize the bones of its central story to reflect the political chaos happening in the world at the time Argento made his original film.
Their “Suspiria” stars Dakota Johnson as an American student who arrives at t a prestigious avant-garde dance company run by Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton).
The new “Suspiria” deliberately unfolds against the backdrop of 1977’s German Autumn with historic events like the hijacking of a Lufthansa airliner hinting at larger thematic concerns. As research, Kajganich dived into writings by women of the time, watched the films of New German Cinema auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and “listened to a lot of Nico.”
“It was a fascinating moment in history because you had a generation of students and young people who were sick in their souls about how much denial there was in their parents and grandparents’ generations about German culpability in World War II,” said Kajganich.
“The city was immersed in that struggle, and in the middle of all of that — or rather, behind all of that — there is this dance company, where an American is getting her education in a way in how a modern kind of fascism might look.”
‘Halloween’ face-off
In bringing a new “Halloween” to the screen, Green and his collaborators were also mindful of how their film would bridge the decades since the original.
Their film, produced by Miramax and Blumhouse Productions and executive produced by Carpenter, picks up 40 years after the events of the original and canonically disregards the half-dozen other sequels that followed.
In 2018’s “Halloween,” killing machine Michael Myers is back to terrorize the ’burbs — as seen in a gory, atmospheric, unbroken tracking shot in the five-minute reel shown at Comic-Con in July.
First, however, the horror icon also known as the Shape has to go through Jamie Lee Curtis’ older, wiser — and battle-ready — Laurie Strode.
“She has a line in the original film when she’s talking to young Tommy Doyle at the climax of the movie,” Green said of Laurie, who in the new film has been waiting decades to face off again with Myers. “She says, ‘Do as I say.’ And she says this line with a command that she hasn’t had for the entire film. Do as I say.
“We took that to be her mantra for our film. She’s taken that pivotal moment in her life, and her recognition of facing her fears, and now has been chanting that in meditations for 40 years.”
Green, whose credits include “Pineapple Express,” “Stronger” and HBO’s “Eastbound & Down,” may seem an unusual choice to revive the Michael Myers mythology. But he doesn’t see it that way.
“I feel like every movie I’ve made up to this point adds up to be ‘Halloween’ in some strange way, and that’s really important to me,” he said. “To have the ownership of a film that’s following in some extraordinarily significant footsteps.”