Discourse

Introduction

The climax of Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 adaptation of the 1977 horror film Suspiria presents the viewer with a mystery. Suspiria’s narrative follows Susie Bannion, an American ingenue who comes to Berlin in the autumn of 1977 to audition for the renowned all-woman Markos Dance Company. Susie’s audition is impressive, and soon she is preparing to dance the lead role in the group’s upcoming performance, a visceral exploration of postwar women’s experience titled Volk. The lead choreographer, Madame Blanc, invests Susie with confidence and more: it turns out that the dance company is a cover for a coven of witches led by Mother Markos, the company’s namesake. The witches groom Susie to participate [End Page 33] in a ritual transfer of Mother Markos’s spirit from the former’s ailing body to Susie’s youthful one, giving her magical dancing power in the process; one kind of training belies another. The witches’ previous protégé, Patricia, was believed to have run off to join the Red Army Faction (RAF)—whose terrorist hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 and subsequent violent implosion provide a narrative backdrop against which the film’s story unfolds—but in fact became suspicious of her matrons and conveyed her misgivings about the Markos group to her psychoanalyst before her disappearance. The analyst, Josef Klemperer, is a Holocaust survivor who still visits his country home in East Germany in the hope that his wife, Anke, who disappeared during World War II, will return. Josef investigates the company and becomes convinced that something is amiss. The witches eventually capture Josef and make him a witness to their grotesque ritual, but the ritual is itself derailed by the revelation that Susie is in fact Mother Suspiriorum, an ancient witch come to exact retribution against Markos, who has usurped Suspiriorum’s occult authority. At the film’s climax, Susie/Suspiriorum kills Markos and purges the coven of her followers, followed by a denouement in which she visits Josef to apologize for his ordeal and magically erase his traumatic memories of both the ritual and his wife.

The mystery of the climax involves the bait and switch between Susie and the ur-witch Suspiriorum. The viewer is left pondering whether the ritual transferal worked as intended but with the unintended consequence that it is Suspiriorum who invades Susie’s body before Markos herself can do it or whether Susie was in fact Suspiriorum all along, and her infiltration of the Markos Dance Company was just a ruse in service to this act of sabotage against Markos. The film, for its part, withholds any clear explanation of a causal sequence leading to the eruption of violence. Either way, one thing is clear: the bloodbath is precipitated by a misreading of the situation and a misrecognition of identity. While Susie’s mentor, Madame Blanc, vaguely senses that something has gone awry with the ritual, Markos fails to recognize the flaw in the ceremonial order that precipitates her own undoing and the evisceration, both symbolic and effusively literal, of the Markos group. Moreover, this misreading involves an inability to see beneath the surface of Susie’s body to recognize the occult alterity within. Indeed, the film’s culminative misrecognition is perhaps only the last in a series of slippages or displacements that structure it. Before assuming the mantle of Mother Suspiriorum (if we take Susie for having been a novitiate at the film’s beginning rather than a master in disguise), Susie mistakes the coven for nothing more than a dance company, [End Page 34] although ultimately the coven’s leadership disastrously mistakes Susie, in the end, for nothing more than a dancer. To this central narrative irony we can add the film’s play of comparisons between dance, witchcraft, and the radical terrorist politics of the RAF; actor Tilda Swinton’s triple performance as Blanc, Klemperer, and Markos; and the various ways that Guadagnino’s film displaces narrative...