Aborted US Remake Of Italian Horror Suspiria May Still Happen

Aficionados of Italian horror director Dario Argento may want to look away now: it seems the proposed US remake of his classic ‘Suspiria’ may still be on the cards.

An American take on the 1977 horror film - among the most revered works of the highly regarded Argento - was first announced way back in 2008, with the unlikely candidate of David Gordon Green (’Pineapple Express,’ ‘Your Highness’) in the director’s chair.

The general reaction from fans, critics and Dario Argento himself was fairly hostile, and after suffering various setbacks the project seemed to wind up dead in the water. However, Green now says it may yet come back to life - but with someone else in the director’s chair.

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Green tells Crave Online’s B-Movie Podcast, “I’m actually hopeful that it’s happening… with a great Italian director that I had breakfast with last week.”

Just who this director might be, Green doesn’t say - but he does elaborate on his vision for a reinterpretation of Argento’s famously trippy tale of a ballet student (Jessica Harper) who discovers her new school is secretly run by a coven of evil witches.

Green says his ‘Suspiria’ remake “would have been the s**t… I wrote it with my sound designer. I love Argento’s film and we wrote a very faithful, extremely elegant opera… I don’t mean musical opera, but it would be incredibly heightened music, and heightened and very operatic and elegant sets.

“Isabelle Huppert was going to be in it, [and] Janet McTeer. We had an amazing cast of elegance and prestige that we were engineering for it.”

Prior to the casting of Huppert (’Orphan,’ ‘The Hunger Games’), Natalie Portman had been attached to star and produce ‘Suspiria,’ before moving on to the similarly-themed ballet thriller ‘Black Swan.’ Indeed, the success of ‘Black Swan’ is thought to have had a knock-on effect for the ‘Suspiria’ remake, reportedly prompting a rewrite which removed ballet entirely.

However, Green says the main problem was the studios just weren’t interested in the sort of film he wanted to make at that time.

“At the heart of it, I wanted it to be a horror film. And a horror movie, at the time when we were modeling that movie, meant you’re making ‘Saw’ and ‘Paranormal [Activity].’ You were making these down and dirty, very gory, very economical movies.

“So the economic model for a horror movie was not where I wanted it to be to make a $20 million elegant movie from a guy who was an unproven horror director, you know?”

As such, ‘Suspiria’ fell by the wayside and Green stayed on comparatively familiar territory with fantasy adventure spoof ‘Your Highness,’ which wound up a critically lambasted flop (unfairly, in this writer’s view) on release in 2011.

The commercial failure of ‘Your Highness’ further scuppered Green’s chances of securing a big budget for his next film; as the director jokes, “if people would have given that movie the hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office that it deserved, ‘Suspiria’ would exist for us all to enjoy!”

Many Argento devotees may breathe a sigh of relief that this was the case - but could it be that the project may yet return from the grave, possibly with this unnamed Italian director on board? Time will tell…

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Picture Credit: Seda Spettacoli, WENN, Universal