“When you dance the dance of another, you make yourself in the image of its creator. You empty yourself so that her work can live within you.”

Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton), Suspiria (2018) dir. Luca Guadagnino, 1:22:24.

Witches are certainly primeval figures of horror, appearing in ancient Greek literature, medieval texts such as the Malleus Maleficarum (a guide to witch hunting), European folklore, the artwork of Albrecht Dürer and Francisco Goya, among countless others. Their spectre has prompted witch hunts throughout history, unfolding most notably through the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, in Spain, England, France, and—famously—Salem, New England. 1 Yet, as Samm Deighan has noted, witches are strangely sparse in the horror pantheon, in contrast to the countless male serial killers and stalkers, and are often relegated to children’s films, or decidedly lighter fare such as Practical Magic. 2 Among the few genuine horror films dealing centrally with witches, however, are Dario Argento’s 1977 giallo Suspiria, and its 2018 iteration, directed by Luca Guadagnino, the latter of which I will explore in this essay.

Guadagnino’s Suspiria follows the same general conceit of the original: Susie Bannion, an American, is accepted at the prestigious Markos Dance Company in 1977 Berlin—lead by the magnetic Madame Blanc—and discovers that the company’s teachers actually form a coven of witches. Guadagnino’s version, however, darkens the palette of the original in more than just aesthetic ways. For one, it peers more closely at the socio-political context of postwar Berlin, split between two ideologies; rather than Argento’s ballet, Guadagnino’s dance is modern and primal—Suspiria is an expressionistic exploration of both bodily and historical trauma. I am specifically invested, however, in the ways Suspiria concerns itself with the female corporeal experience as a site of horror: as a violent, performative, abject thing, reflective of the ways the female body is manipulated in a patriarchal modernity. Within this framework, I will explore the concepts of self-surveillance, “leaky bodies,” and abjection, particularly the concept of the mother within abjection.

The witch hunts were reflective, as C. Warren Hollister and Judith M. Bennett have argued, of the major transition to modernity unfolding in Europe, in which feudalism eventually turned to industrialism and the scientific revolution began. 3 As Silvia Federici has observed, accused witches were often women who were in control of their own and other female bodies, such as midwives and abortionists, and draws a parallel between the rise of witch hunts and the rise of capitalism—in which women were increasingly relegated to the domestic sphere, away from economic power. 4 I am particularly interested in the idea that the horror of witches, of female corporeal agency, emerges at times of socio-political flux. Considering Suspiria is set in a conflicted modernity—mid-Cold War, 1977—I would like to gesture to Michel Foucault’s critique of modernity, in which he theorizes that the rise of institutions in society is accompanied by new disciplines surrounding the body. 5 Specifically, he writes that institutions, such as the army, or the hospital, aim to mold the body to their needs, a “‘political anatomy,’ which was also a ‘mechanics of power,’ [that] defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies [...] so they may operate how one wishes.” 6

It is fitting, then, that so much of the witchcraft in Suspiria, set during a period of heightened awareness of borders and regulations in West Berlin, surrounds the control—or lack thereof —over the body. As Emily Yoshida aptly noted, Guadagnino’s Suspiria gets at “something [...] impressionistic about the absurd violence of being a woman.” Suspiria’s bodies are things: tools with which to dance, vessels to be occupied, containers that leak. 7

One of the most striking instances of this violence emerges in a scene early on in the film in which Olga, a dancer who has begun to discover the true nature of the company and has fallen out of favour, is brutally killed via voodoo-like sorcery. As Susie, the unknowing “voodoo doll,” dances the lead in Blanc’s Volk dance, Olga’s body is violently twisted and thrown around the adjacent, mirrored studio, bones breaking and limbs warping at odd angles. 8 What Suspiria’s depictions of dance and performance, of what Linda Williams called the “spectacle of [the] body,” highlight as horrific about the female corporeal experience is the sense of being surveyed, or monitored, by ourselves as well as by others. 9 As John Berger wrote in his seminal text Ways of Seeing, a woman “is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself [...] Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another….” 10 Olga, blinded by tears induced by the coven, is lead into a rehearsal room lined with mirrors. As her body is dragged through the violent dance, crashing against the mirrors, utterly powerless, she is constantly surveying her reflection, the sole spectator of a performance of bodily brutality. 11 In her article “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” Sandra Lee Bartky draws from Foucault’s critique of modernity to illuminate the ways the feminine body is made to surveil and manipulate itself under modern patriarchy. She finds a parallel between the woman who moniters herself—her appearance, the ways she takes up space—to “the inmate of [Jeremy Bentham’s] Panopticon [...] a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance.” 12 It is crucial to further note Suspiria’s almost complete lack of the “male gaze,” apart from Guadagnino, though the camera never lingers erotically on the bodies on display. 13 Even Klemperer, the sole male character, is played by Tilda Swinton. This scene stages Suspiria’s concern with examining the ways the female body is policed under patriarchy, often by themselves and by other women.

The most gruesome aspect of Olga’s death, however, is arguably the expulsion of various bodily fluids from Olga’s broken body—blood, urine, vomit, pus. 14 In her death scene, there is no conventional spurting of blood, no such melodramatic effect. This is excrement, debasement, leakiness. Margrit Shildrick examines this concept of the “leaky” female body in her book Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics, an examination of feminine embodiment as well as moral agency—or lack thereof in historical and contemporary western discourse. Shildrick highlights the anxiety centered around the notion of control over the body, specifically the “threat of corporeal engulfment”—in which the mind is overcome by the body. 15 She writes that the female body encompasses these fears surrounding control over the body, noting its “especial immanence,” its containedness, but also, crucially, “its putative leakiness, the outflow of the body which breaches the boundaries of the proper.” 16 It should be noted, of course, that the notion of “woman” as being biologically determined or defined is problematic—femininity is “a mode of enacting and reenacting received gender norms which surface as so many styles of flesh,” as Judith Butler wrote. 17 Speaking historically, however, Shildrick observes that (cisgendered) women’s menses have “been regarded as evidence of women’s inherent lack of control of the body.” 18 Women leak: there is a constant awareness of the biological workings of the body, its inner workings functioning in accordance with rules outside of our conscious control. The horror of Olga’s demise is most strikingly defined by her leakiness, and her lack of control over her body. In addition to evoking Foucault’s concept of the manipulable body of modernity, the scene lays bare this concept of the female body’s susceptibility to corporeal engulfment.

Olga’s body, in many ways, has become an object—separate from herself, one that is vulnerable to violence, uncontrolled leaking. Shildrick’s concept of the leaky female body draws in many ways from Julia Kristeva and her writing on abjection. Kristeva defines and articulates the feeling of abjection as a state of wretchedness, of dislocation from the body, of defilement. Drawing on structures of psychoanalysis, Kristeva sees abjection as defiling the fantasy of sovereignty over the body that we tell ourselves we possess. 19 She further specifies that abjection is “what does not respect borders, positions, rules,” a means of distinguishing between the human and the non-human. 20 The abject at once wrenches us outside of ourselves and plunges us deep into our own rot, intimate yet overwhelmingly foreign, often grotesque.

Suspiria arguably centers itself around this concept of abjection. While, as dancers, the women in the company exert enormous control over their bodies, exhibiting the kind of bodily immanence Shildrick observed, the kind of brutal loss of corporeal control Kristeva writes about is equally enacted by the witches in their use of the dancers’ bodies as tools in their sorcery. As Blanc tells Susie when she is preparing to dance the Volk, “when you dance the dance of another, you make yourself in the image of its creator. You empty yourself so that her work can live within you.” 21 Beyond her use in the destruction of Olga, Susie finds herself blossoming not only into an accomplished dancer in the company, but into a vessel in which the essence of Helena Markos, the elusive matriarch of the company, would be preserved. Throughout the film, Susie is groomed to participate in the ritual that would cement this, at the expense of the other dancers. Caroline, for example, unknowingly sacrifices to Susie her ability to execute perfect jumps, and is reduced to a convulsing otherness, foaming at the mouth, beyond the border of herself: what Kristeva called “a brutish suffering.” 22

Markos herself, practically in her grave, face twisted into a mask, tumors and warts leaking pus, evokes Kristeva’s concept of a body defined by excrement, a corpse:

Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel. 'I' is expelled. 23

Markos exists on this border between living body and corpse, excretor and expelled. There is an uncanniness to her—recognizably human, yet simultaneously, horrifyingly not. Crucially, Markos and Blanc, teacher and student, “mother” and “daughter” rivals, are both played by Tilda Swinton, thus creating another layer of uncanny doubling. Their relationship is mirrored in Blanc and Susie’s intimate mentor relationship, a matriarchal genealogy of sorts. In her essay “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” Barbara Creed outlines the ways abjection unfurls in horror, often in stories that deal with monstrous mothers, such as Alien. She notes that Freud connected the womb to the uncanny, having argued that “whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: ‘this place is familiar to me, I've been here before,’ we may interpret the place as being his mother's [...] body.” 24 As more is revealed about Susie throughout the film, it emerges that she has been drawn to Germany since she was a child; on her deathbed, her mother rejects her, saying: “she’s my sin. She’s what I smear on the world.” 25 Susie’s uncanny connection with Germany, with Blanc and Markos, is thus one of the womb, of the Mother.

Creed writes that the abject is often reconciled through ritual, in which “the demarcation lines between human and nonhuman are drawn up anew,” the non-human element often being “the mother [...] at that moment when the child rejects her for the father who represents the symbolic order.” 26 In Suspiria, it is a literalized ritual that takes place—one that would sacrifice Susie’s body as a vessel for Markos, an abject “body without a soul.” 27

Creed observes that in Kristeva’s theory, “all individuals experience abjection at the time of their earliest attempts to break away from the mother.” 28 Throughout the ritual, Markos urges Susie to reject her “false mother,” to “put down the woman who bore [her],” killing Blanc and arousing visions in Susie of the mother she left in Ohio, dying. 29 This call to reject the false mother—“death to any other mother!”—reflects Kristeva’s concept of the struggle between abject mother and progeny to either separate or become subsumed into each other, hence the need for ritual.

Throughout the film, Susie has several dreams brought about by Blanc, in which she returns to the alienation of her childhood, to memories of her mother, images conflating the sexual with the frightening; while dreaming, she screams, “I know who I am!” 30 In horror, the mother recurs as an iteration of death, “a force that threatens to re-incorporate what it once gave birth to.” Instead of being absorbed by Mother Markos, however, Susie is revealed to be Mother Suspiriorum, a repression hinted at in her dreams. 31 Creed notes that the horror film “[attempts] to shore up the symbolic order by constructing the feminine as an imaginary ‘other’ which must be repressed and controlled in order to secure and protect the social order.” 32 On the contrary, instead of staging a repudiation of the mother and the monstrous feminine, Suspiria’s ritual of defilement unearths the repressed archaic mother—Susie/Mother Suspiriorum—and reorients her as a figure of renewal of the social order of the coven and the company. 33

Creed argues that the feminine “is constructed as [monstrous] within a patriarchal discourse which reveals a great deal about male desires and fears but tells us nothing about feminine desire in relation to the horrific.” 32 I would argue that Suspiria functions in some ways as a response to this deficit. Here, it is fruitful to gesture to what Brigid Cherry observed about the feminine aesthetic in horror—that women tend to enjoy films that reflect the “fragmentation of identity and gender of the Gothic, the aggressive [...] transgressive behaviours of the monstrous feminine and the morbid fascination with sympathetic or sensual monstrosity.” 35

Suspiria distances itself from the kind of explicit patriarchal violence found in the male horror aesthetic, such as slasher films’ juxtaposition of stabbing/penetrative murders and virginal Final Girls (take Halloween’s Laurie, for example). 36 All of the brutality in Suspiria is inflicted by women—mostly to other women—it offers no comfortable narrative of universal sisterhood (though Susie’s relationships with both Sara and Blanc are arguably very tender and genuine), nor a conventional good versus evil story—rather, it seems to exist on a different moral plane. It revels in filth, in rituals of defilement and brutal violence (one thinks not only of Olga’s death but of what Patricia and Olga are later revealed to have become: corpse-like, undone). 37

At one point, Klemperer is confronted with the condemnation that “when women tell [him] the truth, [he doesn’t] pity them—[he] tells them they have delusions!” 38  I would argue that such “delusions” are comparable to Foucault’s theory of the ways (patriarchal) modern structures manipulate the body. This manipulation, this self-surveillance, results in a kind of abjection, an othering of the female body, exemplified throughout the film in Olga’s performance of death and leaky body, in the dancers’ loss of control of their bodies, in Markos’ corpse-like state. Thus, the bloody climax, in which Susie embraces her repressed identity, of Mother Suspiriorum, creates an effect of release, almost of catharsis, of the reunification of female bodies through ritual. 39 Rather than creating a narrative centered around a patriarchal concept of the monstrous feminine, in which the protagonist must defeat the Mother and reject the abject, Suspiria stages a descent into abjection, an acceptance of it. Its depiction of female corporeality as a site of horror—violent, performative, leaky—gets at something expressionistic, more complex about the state of the female body in modernity: the horror that the body is not entirely our own, of the ways it is manipulated, of its constant leakiness, but also a sense of salvation, a powerful sanctioning of the mess of the body.

Bibliography

Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, 61–86. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.  

Bennett, Judith M. and C. Warren Hollister. Medieval Europe: A Short History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006.  

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin UK, 1979. 

Blake, Linnie. The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008.

Butler, Judith. “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex.” Yale French Studies 72, “Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century” (1986): 35–49. 

Carpenter, John, dir. Halloween. 1978; Compass International Pictures.

Cherry, Brigid. “Gothics and Grand Guignols: Violence and the Gendered Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror.” Participations 5, issue 1 (May 2008), http://www.participations.org/Volume%205/Issue%201%20-%20special/5_01_cherry.htm.

Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film – Updated Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” Screen 27 (1986): 44–70.

Deighan, Samm. “Medieval Hysteria, Supernatural Evil, and The Witch: An Interview with Director Robert Eggers.” Diabolique Magazine, June 15, 2016. Accessed March 28 2019,  https://diaboliquemagazine.com/medieval-hysteria-supernatural-evil-witch-interview-director-robert-eggers/.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia, 2004. 

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Guadagnino, Luca, dir. Suspiria. 2018; Los Angeles, California: Amazon Studios.

Kodat, Catherine Gunther. Don’t Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2014.

Kristeva, Julia. “Approaching Abjection.” In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 10, no. 3: 6–18.

Shildrick, Margrit. Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics. London: Routledge, 1997.

Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer, 1991): 2–13.

Yoshida, Emily. “Suspiria is a Bleak, Gorgeous, Radical Reimagining of its Predecessor.” Vulture, October 24, 2018.  Accessed March 22, 2019, https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/suspiria-movie-review.html.

Notes

1. Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 146. ↩
2. Samm Deighan, “Medieval Hysteria, Supernatural Evil, and The Witch: An Interview with Director Robert Eggers,” Diabolique Magazine, June 15, 2016, accessed March 28 2019, https://diaboliquemagazine.com/medieval-hysteria-supernatural-evil-witch-interview-director-robert-eggers/ ↩
3. Judith M. Bennett and C. Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe: A Short History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 325. ↩
4. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 183. ↩
5. Note: While a more in-depth study of Suspiria’s depiction of post-war Germany, not to mention the parallels between Madame Blanc and the German choreographer Mary Wigman (active in Germany during the war) would be fascinating, it is perhaps beyond the scope of this essay, which will focus more on female corporeality. ↩
6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979) 138. ↩
7. Emily Yoshida, “Suspiria is a Bleak, Gorgeous, Radical Reimagining of its Predecessor,” Vulture, October 24, 2018, accessed March 22, 2019, https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/suspiria-movie-review.html. ↩
8. Suspiria, dir. Luca Guadagnino (2018, Amazon Studios), 38:24-41:14 ↩
9. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer, 1991): 4. ↩
10. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin UK, 1979), 46 ↩
11. Suspiria (2018), 39:39. ↩
12. Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 81. ↩
13. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 10, no. 3: 6. ↩
14. Suspiria (2018), 39:57-40:04. ↩
15. Margrit Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics (London: Routledge, 1997), 16. ↩
16. Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries, 16. ↩
17. Judith Butler, “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex,” Yale French Studies 72, “Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century” (1986): 48. ↩
18. Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries, 34. ↩
19. Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2. ↩
20. Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” 4. ↩
21. Suspiria (2018), 1:22:24. ↩
22. Suspiria (2018), 1:15:20; Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” 3–4. ↩
23. Suspiria (2018), 2:03:44; Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” 3–4. ↩
24. Sigmund Freud quoted in Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” Screen 27 (1986): 62. ↩
25. Suspiria (2018) 43:19; 1:34:49. ↩
26. Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine,” 45. ↩
27. Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine,” 47. ↩
28. Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine,” 49. ↩
29. Suspiria (2018), 2:08:21-2:09:03 ↩
30. Suspiria (2018), 1:05:25-1:06:35 ↩
31. Suspiria (2018), 2:09:57, 1:05:54. ↩
32. Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine,” 70. ↩
33. Suspiria (2018), 2:09:57-2:15:00. ↩
34. Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine,” 70. ↩
35. Brigid Cherry, “Gothics and Grand Guignols: Violence and the Gendered Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror,” Participations 5, issue 1 (May 2008), http://www.participations.org/Volume%205/Issue%201%20-%20special/5_01_cherry.htm. ↩
36. Williams, “Film Bodies,” 5; Halloween, dir. John Carpenter (1978, Compass International Pictures). ↩
37. Suspiria (2018), 2:14:05. ↩
38. Suspiria (2018), 2:01:14. ↩
39. Suspiria (2018), 2:15:33. ↩

Volume 28, Issue 11-12 / December 2024 Essays   feminism   german politics   horror   luca guadagnino   psychoanalysis   remakes   suspiria