History is What Hurts: Suspiria (2018) and Possession (1981)  

October 31st, 2019

Warning: This article contains some spoilers for Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018) and Andrzej Žulawski’s Possession (1981). Proceed with caution if you have seen neither film.

“Come under my wings, little bird.

Come under my wings, little bird. 

Come under my wings. 

Unmade, unmade.

I swear that there’s nothing up my sleeves.

And then back again.

I swear there’s nothing.

Unmade.” – “Unmade” by Thom Yorke, Suspiria original motion picture soundtrack.  

A few months ago, I screened Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008) for my horror film class. Before I began the film, I asked my students to be mindful of their emotional response to the film, and, in doing so, ask themselves whether there are parts of their emotional landscape that are better serviced by horror than by other genres. Terror, fear, and fright are not the only emotions that horror stories make available to us. They can make us feel sorrow, pity, anger, arousal, and other forms of emotional release as easily as a well-crafted melodrama (in some cases even more so). Here, I ask you to consider this the next time you watch a horror film.

“…this idea of a troupe of witches in a weird form of sadness, trying to cheat death.” – Thom Yorke

Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018) draws upon a deep well of emotions. The film is angry. It is filled with heartbreak. It looks towards the past with deep sorrow, and gazes towards the future with dread. Mostly, it reminds us that historical trauma leaves behind a toxic residue, and horror films and literature, for generations, have constantly reminded us that “history is what hurts.”[1] Set in a divided Berlin in 1977, the film is less of a remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 film and more of a “cover.” The skeletal structure of Argento’s film is retained — aspiring dancer Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) arrives in Germany to attend a prestigious dance academy secretly run by a coven of witches — yet the film deliberately stages the action against real historical events in order to confront uncomfortable realities about fascism in contemporary geo-politics. The film, according to the soundtrack composer Thom Yorke, alludes heavily to Brexit and the rise of Trump, as well as this idea of history constantly cycling forward and crashing down upon itself: “There’s a scene in the film where soldiers are marching, and it…got tied up with…this idea that ‘we won’t let this happen again.’ [And] here we are.”

As I watched Suspiria for the first time, I thought more about Andrzej Žulawski’s Possession (1981) than Argento’s film. Also set in Berlin, Žulawski’s film stages its demonic tale of loss and heartbreak against the backdrop of Cold War tensions and divisions. In both films, the Berlin Wall, according to Zach Vasquez, is not “a force of obstruction” but rather a “fissure, a crack in the world through which the disease of evil is able to pierce our reality.” While Guadagnino uses his film’s historical past as a warning to the present, Possession uses its present to index the generational and cultural anxieties under which it was produced. Both films act as forms of meta-historical documents, speaking to us through a recognizable language of horror and providing history with emotional dimensions. 

“Our great-grandfathers learned more from the novels by Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, or Charles Dickens serialized in papers than from school books. The movies, which were attended by huge audiences, had a prominent part in building of the common knowledge of history. Right from its first days, cinema has been in touch with history and has known how to use it.” – Pierre Sorlin

As I have written elsewhere, films that we would not readily consider “historical films,” but which nevertheless point to a historical past, utilize genre conventions to perform critical assessments of the past and present; the republican uprisings in early Francoist Spain, for example, provide the backdrop for Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), forging an explicit relationship with history through fantasy film conventions. With horror, our relationship with history has traditionally provided the genre with its emotional charge. The original 1818 version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, is steeped in radical Enlightenment politics and a cultural memory of the French Revolution; the 1831 revised edition, by contrast, is largely devoid of these politics and has provided the basis for most film adaptations. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) can be seen as an allegory for the sinister dual face of Victorian British imperialism. In the twentieth century, Stephen King’s The Shining and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House are rooted heavily in multi-generational trauma. Though operating in the same genre, Suspiria and Possession offer up their “counter histories” in different ways.[2] On the one hand, Possession exemplifies the ways that film can serve as a historical document: recording the emotional energy of a moment in time for future retrieval, proposing new modes for understanding history’s cyclical nature. Suspiria, on the other hand, performs what Natalie Zemon Davis describes as “thought experiments about the past”: films set in the past use elements from our present-day understanding of the world and human behavior in order to propose new interpretations on real history and our relationship to it.

“In films, the process of research, interpretation, and communication are widely dispersed, even if directors put their stamp on the product along the way and in the final editing. Research...[is] made by scenarists, designers, costume and prop specialists, locations seekers, casting directors, actors, composers and arrangers of music, and directors.” – Natalie Zemon Davis[3]

In Suspiria, history operates on two parallel tracks. On one level, there is history that is happening externally, at surface level. We hear about Baader-Meinhof bombings and the Lufthansa Flight 181 hijacking through radio and television news reports. The character of Dr. Josef Klemperer (credited to Lutz Ebersdorf, when in fact portrayed by Tilda Swinton under heavy prosthetics) is a survivor of Nazism and the Holocaust, a link to the past in the film that runs in stark contrast to a link to an even more distant past embodied by the matron witches of Markos Dance School. On another level, there is the film’s internal history, one that is hidden but long running and constant (“lost in time,” according to Klemperer). The witches of the Markos School show little interest in the struggles taking place in the streets of Berlin, as if they’ve seen this all before, and instead show more attention to the struggles of the coven for hundreds of years. The coven is portrayed as a revolutionary organization, and yet their instruments of terror are not petrol bombs but rather baroque meat hooks. Both histories running on parallel tracks contribute to the film’s thought experiment: the idea that fascist insurgencies in our present-day world are grotesque reminders of history’s unfinished business. This thought experiment, as Davis suggest, is filtered through the research of the film’s “scenarists, designers, costume and prop specialists, locations seekers, casting directors, actors, composers and arrangers of music” as much as it is through Guadagnino’s direction or David Kajganich’s screenplay.

Many were quick to point out at the time of the film’s release that Guadagnino’s film is not as stylized as the Argento film – stripped down to a crusty dreariness – when in fact the 2018 version is actually very stylized, just in a radically different way and more attuned to the historical thought experiment that it performs. The film’s production design was realized by Inbal Weinberg (Blue Valentine, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri). To highlight the theme of history operating on two separate tracks, “the set,” according to Weinberg, had “two layers: one is very authentic to the time and place it is based, in 1977 Berlin, whereas the other layer is a witchy underworld where weird things happen.” With the realistic layer, the “theme was authenticity” and required hours of research through films shot in Berlin during the 1970s (documentary and narrative fiction), fashion magazines, and architectural case study books from the era. In stark contrast to the fairy tale and German Expressionist influences in Argento’s film, Weinberg took her cues from Modernist architecture – in particular the ideas of Le Corbusier, Adolph Loos, and Josef Hoffman: “Loos and Hoffman were important, as they were the bridge between the late 19th century and what would become Bauhaus. So, you could still feel the classicism.” This bridge becomes a crucial component of underscoring the dual historical tracks of the film, as well as evoking the gothic as essential to the film’s atmosphere – especially if we are to understand the gothic as what is old-fashioned or primitive as a opposed to modern, wild and barbaric as opposed to civilized, and crude as opposed to elegant.

The film’s historical thought experiment is also underscored by the film’s dance sequences, another contrast to the Argento film as the movements, choreographed by Damien Jalet, are deeply political and rooted in rebellion. The film’s centerpiece dance sequence, Volk was written, according to its creator Madame Blanc (also played by Tilda Swinton), as a reminder of rise of Nazism and as a reminder of how collective thinking can create the same social and cultural conditions for fascism to rise again. “There are two things that dance can never be again,” remarks Madame Blanc to the audience before Volk’s performance, “beautiful and cheerful,” a response to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ quote that “dance must be cheerful and show beautiful female bodies and have nothing to do with philosophy.”[4] Volk’s costumes and dance movements are based on a performance of Les Médusés, also choreographed by Jalet and featuring themes and costuming very similar to Volk – conveying “a sense of being bound and tied up together” and ultimately climaxing in an act of resistance. Thom Yorke, who composed his music in response to Jalet’s choreography, notes that “horror music can fall into the trap of being dark for the sake of it,” and by tapping into the eternal qualities of the film’s dances, both the music and choreography service the film’s meditation on historical trauma in constant motion.

A crucial component of Suspiria’s horror-as-counter-history narrative is how it evokes Freud’s notion of the uncanny. If we are to understand the uncanny as the familiar made strange — driven by both a drive to discover and by a fear of the unfamiliar — then what is made strange in Suspiria is Berlin itself, familiar through spy films, war movies, documentaries, Krautrock, the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Possession. Like Suspiria, Žulawski’s film is emotionally charged horror: angry and filled with heartbreak. It is, after all, ostensibly a story about love. The story of a marriage destroyed through a demonic possession, however, is also a metaphor for a divided Europe and acts as an eerie harbinger for a new European nightmare under creeping fascism. Dopplegängers, as Ignatiy Vishnevetsky observes, are a key part of “Žulawski’s dreamlike vocabulary,” and Possession’s dopplegängers (both for Sam Neil’s spy character Mark and Isabelle Adjani’s character Anna) simultaneously evoke the world of H.P. Lovecraft and remind the viewer of the dual face geo-politics (similar to how British imperialism can be read through Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde story). Unlike Suspiria’s use of the past as counter-history, Possession uses its present, teeming with dark fantasy and allegory, to lay bare the subconscious of a divided Berlin and a fragile Europe. 

In The Other Side of the Wall: The Making of Possession, Žulawski remarks Possession was birthed from two tumultuous events: 1) the dissolution of his marriage to Polish actress Małgorzata Braunek and 2) the termination of his film On the Silver Globe, a science fiction film and one of the most expensive Polish films at the time, halfway through production by the Communist authorities (a restored version of the film was eventually released at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival). Possession was “my private life,” according to Žulawski, “which had just exploded and…I had no home and no family.” The documentary also points out that, for Polish cinema, the 1970s was a “cinema of moral concern,” and, in contrast to Government propaganda which presented evil in material terms, filmmakers like Žulawski tried to conceive of evil as something that is layered, something that we “nurture within us.” Reframed as a historical document of the era, Possession’s central function can be read as a warning that the real geo-political threat, whether in Europe or elsewhere, ultimately comes from within; the evil that will ultimately tear the fabric of our societies apart will first try to convince us that the real danger is external, something monstrous from outside of us.

When reading a film as a historical document of its time and place, it’s important to consider the deliberate decisions that filmmakers and their team of artisans make in order to encapsulate an era and culture’s politics and emotional charge. Analyzing this form of patterning in a film-as-historical-document is similar to analyzing the decisions that go into constructing a film as a historical thought experiment, as we have seen with Suspiria. With Possession, consider the use of the story’s location – how Berlin was shot and how the story’s action is staged against the parts of the city that Žulawski decided to show. This is made clear from the outset of the film, as the opening credits roll over a series of shots that travel alongside the Berlin Wall, establishing both the external and internal divisions at the heart of the film. “It’s a political statement,” according to Žulawski, “I wasn’t shooting the beautiful TV tower of East Berlin. I was shooting the wall. Not [as an] exotic background, but as a profound necessity for this story.” This is further compounded in a scene where Mark, having just recently been asked for a divorce by Anna, is being debriefed after a returning from a recent spy mission to Eastern Europe. The room features no set dressing but for a desk and chairs. The camera moves counterclockwise in a full circle around the room as Mark reports on the handling of an asset to his superiors. In this sequence the internal mechanisms of state power feel hollow and emptied of any real meaning. By contrast, the dark energy of Mark and Anna’s apartment – cluttered, claustrophobic, and decorated in blue – is presented with much more menace than any threat emanating from east side of the Berlin Wall. 

Both Possession and Suspiria are tied to the pre-cinema spectacle form of le théâtre du grand-guignol, or the “theater of the great puppet”: a theater of attractions in Paris during the late 19th century. This was usually a series of plays that elicited audience participation, employed grotesque puppetry, and featured dark humor. Critics of these plays dubbed them a “theater of cruelty,” a foreshadowing of extreme, visceral horror film movements such as the Video nasty and the New French Extreme (as a side note: I think it’s very telling that the opening of Gaspar Noé Climax contains videocassettes of Possession and Argento’s Suspiria). In Possession, the great puppet is literally the hideous, bug-like creature that inhabits Anna’s hide-away apartment – drawn from depictions of golems in paintings and sculpture and from Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien (the creature was ultimately designed by Italian special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi). Yet at the same time, the film performs its “theater of cruelty” as an invitation to honestly look inward. Suspiria also has a literal great puppet in the character of Death, summoned during the film’s gruesome climax to restore order to the coven under the reign of a new Mother, but Guadagnino’s “theater of cruelty” also serves as a warning against societal pressure to fear what is outside rather than tending to our own malice from within. The difference is that Suspiria’s warning is all the more urgent in the face of a looming Brexit and the United States 2020 election.

When we look at horror as exceptional language of emotion, one that imbues history with emotional charge, one question still remains: why are we drawn to things that repell us? Why does horror both repulse us and attract our awe and fascination? For this, let’s consider a 19th century painting that performs a rather macabre historical thought experiment. In the gallery of Royal Holloway, University of London hangs Edwin Henry Landseer’s 1864 painting Man Proposes, God Disposes, a speculation on the fate of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition of 1845. It has been traditionally covered while examinations take place in the gallery, as it is believed to be bad luck to sit an exam directly under this gruesome scene. Landseer’s painting recalls Noel Carroll’s philosophy of horror (or “paradox of the heart”): horror simultaneously evokes an exhilarating mixture of fear, moral revulsion, and wonder. The pleasure that we derive from horror, in part, is linked to the process of discovery – a process that must be disturbing in order for it to be rewarding.[5]The painting, like Suspiria and Possession, reminds us of our position within history and invites us to discover and confront the uncomfortable truths in it. Both films suggest that, in engaging in this discovery, we are heeding the warnings of the past rather than cycling them forward through historical terror. 

Notes 

[1] For further reading, see Fredric Jameson’s History is What Hurts: On Old Materialism (2016)

[2] As Robert Rosenstone notes, filmic depictions of the past serve as “counter histories” to what we often perceive as “official” and “authoritative” history. For further reading, see Rosenstone 2006

[3] Davis 2000, 12

[4] Kourlas, Gia. “Luca Guadagnino Unleashes the Witchy Power of Modern Dance.” The New York Times. November 2nd, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/arts/dance/luca-guadagnino-dance-suspiria-damien-jalet.html?auth=login-email&login=email

[5] Carroll 1990, 185