FILM · 2018 · ITALY
Suspiria
31 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (31)
- #001
According to Luca Guadagnino, the now-notorious mirrored dance hall scene, in which Olga's body is contorted and twisted in unbearable pain in sync with Susie's dance, used almost no CGI. Elena Fokina, a trained acrobat and ballerina with hypermobility (flexible joints), performed all of these stunts herself.
- #002
Dakota Johnson completed two years of ballet training to prepare for her role in this film.
- #003
Jessica Harper, who played Suzy in the original Suspiria (1977), appears late in the film as Anke, Dr. Klemperer's wife. In an interview with her and screenwriter David Kajganich at the film's Fantastic Fest premiere in Austin, Texas, Kajganich explained that he and director Luca Guadagnino thought the best character Harper could play would be Anke; Guadagnino contacted her and proposed the idea, and she accepted immediately — then promptly contacted the Berlitz School to learn and practice German for her scenes, because she had lied to Guadagnino about being fluent in the language. The hardest thing for Harper to do was use the dialect correctly while walking backwards.
- #004
Tilda Swinton's 'Dr. Josef Klemperer' came about because both Swinton and director Luca Guadagnino felt it was right for a woman to play the male character in a film centered on women. During shooting, only a few cast members and almost none of the extras knew that he was actually Swinton in heavy makeup. To conceal this fact, they deliberately put forward a fictional German actor named 'Lutz Ebersdorf' as Klemperer. The ruse went so far as to claim in the production notes that Ebersdorf had already died, to explain his absence from the film's premiere, but Swinton and Guadagnino felt that was one step too far. They left a clue in the name linking it to Swinton: 'Eber' means 'wild boar' or 'pig,' and 'dorf' means 'town' in German. Hence Pig Town, or 'Swinton.'.
- #005
For the finale, Chloë Grace Moretz and Elena Fokina's dismemberment makeup took about five hours to apply.
- #006
Unlike the original film, which used exaggerated colors, Guadagnino designed Suspiria to be "winterish" and bleak, devoid of primary colors.
- #007
The score is Radiohead singer Thom Yorke's first film music, following Radiohead and co-composers Jonny Greenwood and Phil Selway into film scoring. Greenwood is known for scoring Paul Thomas Anderson's and Lynne Ramsay's films. Selway recorded Let Me Go (2017).
- #008
November 11, the date on which Josef's wife Anke died during World War II, is the same date as Volk's performance, 11/11/1977.
- #009
As director Luca Guadagnino revealed in an October 2018 interview with Vulture, Dakota Johnson played Susie/Mother Suspiriorum as well as her twin sister Naomi in the opening sequence. Naomi is the pregnant blonde sister in the pink dress who cares for their mother (Malgorzata Bela) along with her other sisters and the farmers; Johnson's face is never shown from behind or in profile under short lighting.
- #010
In the montage in which the coven sends Susie her dreams, a photograph of a seemingly naked woman sitting on a chair beside the imprint of her body on the floor recreates a famous photograph by Francesca Woodman.
- #011
The film's editor, Walter Fasano, was the editor and uncredited co-writer of Dario Argento's Mother of Tears (2007), the third entry in the "Three Mothers" trilogy that also includes Argento's original Suspiria (1977).
- #012
The German subtitles have a red shadow, while the French subtitles have a blue shadow.
- #013
Although Chloë Grace Moretz receives the highest billing among the cast, she has only six minutes of screen time in the entire film.
- #014
The black dress Susie (Dakota Johnson) wears when she goes out bears marks that look like a 'female torso' running from her stomach to the middle of her thigh.
- #015
At the film's Q&A, actress Mia Goth spoke highly of her scenes covered in heavy prosthetics as Sara's undead version, particularly a moment in the coven's group scene when the head nurse, Miss Balfour (Christine Leboutte), disembowels her. Goth also said that Leboutte felt physically sick while handling the fake intestines.
- #016
A sequel (technically a prequel) was planned but was canceled after the film's box office returns fell short.
- #017
A remake of Suspiria was announced in the early 2000s after Guadagnino bought the option from the original film's writers, Argento and Daria Nicolodi. Guadagnino offered the project to director David Gordon Green, but it was canceled due to financing disputes. In September 2015, Guadagnino confirmed his plans to direct the film, which he described as an "homage" to the 1977 film rather than a direct remake. A new script draft was written by Kajganich, who had written Guadagnino's previous project A Bigger Splash (2015). Kajganich set the film in the autumn of 1977 in Germany, after World War II, to explore themes of intergenerational guilt in Germany.
- #018
Luca Guadagnino began shooting four months after finishing Call Me by Your Name (2017) in 2016.
- #019
The infamous maggot scene from the original film was ultimately not recreated for this film. However, it is briefly referenced in one of Susy's dreams, where a few worms begin falling onto her face.
- #020
Apart from two detectives and a handful of small roles with little or no dialogue, the entire cast of Suspiria (2018) is female; even Dr. Klemperer, credited in the titles as "Lutz Ebersdorf," is played by Tilda Swinton under heavy makeup. Given the remarks that the visual style of this version was inspired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films, this can be seen as director Luca Guadagnino's tribute to Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), which features an all-female ensemble. Another sign of this Fassbinder homage is the casting of Ingrid Caven as the house mother Mrs. Vendegast. Caven married Fassbinder in the early 1970s and appeared in many of his films.
- #021
In the original Suspiria (1977), it is not revealed that the Markos company is in fact a witches' coven until the explosive climax. In this reimagining, the Markos company is revealed to be witches in the very first sequence (the meeting between Patricia and Dr. Klemperer).
- #022
Madame Blanc is quite different from her character in Dario Argento's original. In the original film, she is the primary ruler of the coven under Helena Markos and wants Suzy to die. In the remake, she appears to have less power compared with the other witches (Vendegast, Tanner and Markos herself) and treats Suzy Bannon in a friendly, teacher-like manner.
- #023
Patricia's diary mentions the Three Mothers: Mother Suspiriorum (the mother of sighs), Mother Tenebrarum (the mother of darkness) and Mother Lacrimarum (the mother of tears). These are the three witches of Dario Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy, each of whom appears in one installment (Suspiriorum in the original Suspiria (1977); Tenebrarum in Inferno (1980); and Lacrimarum in Mother of Tears (2007)). The masks seen in Susie's nightmares were originally meant to play a role in the narrative: during the Black Sabbath scene, three women representing the Three Mothers named in Patricia's diary were to be seen wearing masks. The woman wearing the mask representing Mother Suspiriorum was to remove it after revealing herself as the true mother and hand it to Susie. You can still see remnants of this concept in the Black Sabbath scene in the form of three long robes made of human hair.
- #024
Principal photography began on 31 October 2016 in Varese, Italy, and was completed on 10 March 2017 in Berlin. Additional shooting took place in December 2016 at Palazzo Estense. The Grand Hotel Campo dei Fiori in Varese served as the main filming location for the Markos Dance Academy. Like its predecessor, Suspiria was shot on 35 mm film stock.
- #025
In 2008, Natalie Portman was planned to star in the film, with David Gordon Green in the director's chair.
- #026
The witches' sabbath scene is very different in the two films. In the remake, Suzy reveals that she herself is Mother Suspiriorum (the one Helena Markos has been impersonating for some time) and kills the coven members who side with Markos. In the original, she kills Helena Markos, which causes the entire coven (and much of the building) to explode, and she apparently had no idea until the climax that it was a coven.
- #027
Immediately after the credits there is a short, enigmatic final shot of Susie.
- #028
Luca Guadagnino (who had first been attached to the project as a producer in 2008) was announced as director on 6 September 2015 at the 72nd Venice Film Festival. Guadagnino said he planned to bring the entire cast of A Bigger Splash (2015) to Suspiria, but only Tilda Swinton and Dakota Johnson returned for this film.
- #029
At the beginning of the film, the sign on the left side of the train station where Suzy walks reads "Suspiria."
- #030
The first footage premiered at the 2018 CinemaCon presentation. It was said to be so "intense and disturbing" that some audience members walked out partway through.
- #031
Before the film's premiere, the Ana Mendieta Estate filed a lawsuit against Amazon Studios in federal court in Seattle, claiming the film (distributed in the United States by Amazon) drew too heavily on the late artist's work. According to the suit, Amazon "encouraged, supported, promoted, caused and/or materially contributed to numerous actual or near copyright infringements" through imagery evoking Mendieta's work. The Estate sought compensation from Amazon Studios for its unauthorized use of Mendieta's work; visual permissions for her work are granted only for art-historical contexts such as academic journal articles and informative articles directly concerned with the artist's work and practice, while commercial reproductions are not permitted. The suit specifically referenced the film's first trailer, released in June 2018: an image in the clip shows a pair of hands bound with rope, which the site says is based on Mendieta's 1973 photograph "Rape Scene," and the site also mentions an image of a bloody body on a white page, said to be a reference to Mendieta's 1978 photograph "Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico." The Estate sent Amazon a cease-and-desist letter. The film's second trailer, released in August 2018, did not include the allegedly Mendieta-inspired shots that Amazon Studios said had been removed from the film's final cut.
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