Friday 13 April 2012

Dario Argento's Suspiria to be Remade


So, it looks like we're soon going to be treated to a remake of Dario Argento's Suspiria. At the risk of falling into the old 'this film really doesn't need remaking' trap - this film really doesn't need remaking.

I mean, it really doesn't. Suspiria, with its bright colours and strawberry jam blood and crazy death scenes and dubbed English and rooms full of barbed wire - it was perfect the way it was. We don't need to see it again in a new and worse light. This is precisely the sort of film that should never, ever be remade. It's directed by Dario Argento. You want to try to remake a Dario Argento? The whole point of a Dario Argento is that it is directed by Dario Argento. Who the hell else could have come up with this:


Or this:


Or this:



Also, is there ever anything more pointless than remaking a horror film? Especially a horror film which has such a great storyline/cinematography anyway that anything you do to it is undoubtedly going to make it worse? It would be like remaking The Wicker M-. No, it would be like remaking Psyc-. Straw D-. The Texas Chai-. The Ome-. Jesus.

OK, it would be like remaking Jaws with a big CGI shark. Even Hollywood is not dumb enough to have tried pulling that shit yet. But they will, won't they? Even as I type there's some besuited executive somewhere trying to think of how he can make the most possible money doing the least possible work. Let's face it, if they can remake Psycho, nothing is safe. Jaws is already on a list somewhere, I guarantee it: 'Films Whose Graves We Plan to Tapdance on in the Next Ten Years Or So'.

I suppose there's no point in even getting angry about it anymore. I'm sure that David Gordon Green's verison of Suspiria won't be all bad. After all, speaking to Den of Geek last year, Green said:

"I've written it with the sound designer, so we've really written it from a unique perspective. We've come at it not from the traditional narrative way, but from the perspective of sound. It's a fun experiment for me, to see how it works out."

Interestingly, given that this version is going to be sound-based, Green has managed to secure the rights to the soundtrack of the original: the surreal, creepy (really creepy) instrumentals written especially for Argento by Italian prog-rock band Goblin.

Wait, hang on a minute here. He's going to remake the film "from the perspective of sound", but the first thing he does is nick the soundtrack (an integral part of the identity and atmosphere) from the original? Yes. Yes, that makes a whole lot of sense to me. That sounds like it's going to be "a unique persepective" alright.

Je renonce.

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