For Fans of Suspiria

Argento co-composed the music with the prog-rock band Goblin before he finished editing the film, then cut the visuals to the score rather than the reverse. The result is a horror movie where sound is not illustration but causation: the music does not react to what you see, it creates the conditions for terror before anything has happened on screen. Goblin's other Argento scores, particularly the Deep Red soundtrack, share this quality. Outside the Argento world, only a handful of films have achieved the same feedback loop between composer and director.

The 2018 Suspiria remake by Luca Guadagnino shares almost nothing with Argento's film beyond the premise and title. Where Argento builds a candy-colored fever dream, Guadagnino strips everything back to cold grey Berlin, body horror rooted in political trauma, and a score by Thom Yorke that is as much ambient grief as menace. Seeing both is instructive: they define the outer edges of what horror can do with the same source material. Neither cancels the other.

Suspiria sits at the point where giallo, the Italian crime-thriller genre, tips fully into supernatural horror. The genre conventions are all there: a foreigner arriving in an unfamiliar European city, a mystery assembled from fragments rather than deduction, hyper-stylized violence treated as set-piece. Mario Bava invented the template; Argento expanded it into something closer to pure cinema. Knowing giallo history makes Suspiria richer, but the film is fully legible without it.

Ballet academies, art schools, and conservatories appear repeatedly in horror precisely because they are spaces where the body is disciplined toward an ideal, hierarchy is total, and the gap between what is shown to outsiders and what happens inside can be enormous. Black Swan and Suspiria both use that gap. The institution promises transformation and delivers something darker instead.