David Gordon Green's 'Suspiria' Remake Will Be Faithful, Even Using Original Score

Though we've heard little about it in the past year, David Gordon Green's plans to remake Dario Argento's landmark horror/thriller Suspiria have not died. Much to the contrary. He has a new draft of the script written, and wants to make it his next film. And while he plans to change some elements of the story, in recent interviews he says he is planning a very faithful adaptation. He's even got the rights to the original film's chilling, screeching score from Italian band Goblin, and will use the music in his version.

As David Gordon Green is doing the rounds promoting Your Highness right now, he's being asked about Suspiria fairly often. The most concise set of comments might be at Badass Digest, where the director is quoted saying,

The script is very faithful to the original. It's less about ballet and more of a story about the occult and a boarding school for girls in Germany. Scene for scene it's very similar. In terms of the aesthetic, I haven't really worked [it] out yet. I've just started to get my cinematographer and production designer to look at it, and I'm sure we're all going to bring our ideas to the table. I don't want to emulate him or rip him off, I don't want to do a shot for shot remake of it. But I do feel like it's a springboard to a lot of huge ideas, and a lot of artful, magnificent ideas. Things that aren't in the movie theaters in the genre right now.

He expands upon that to Movieline, saying,

I think fans of that movie will see that we're taking those concepts — and in some cases those scenes, and in some cases those exact shots and dialogue —and expanding on it and making it very artful. And hopefully, horrifying.

So faithful, with some changes, not a shot for shot remake, but directly using some of the same shots and dialogue? I have no idea what to expect. But David Gordon Green has crafted one of the more interesting directorial careers around — he's starting to look a bit like Steven Soderberg thanks to his willingness to jump between genres and styles — and I want to see how he plans to filter Suspiria through his own sensibility.

And he'll have the music of Goblin, such a huge part of the atmosphere in the original, to help out. He won't use the score in its entirety, saying that composer Steve Jablonsky will "integrate the Goblin tunes into a new score." But Goblin's original score is pretty minimal, with respect to the number of unique themes. Its power comes from volume and repetition. So we're almost guaranteed to hear some of the classic Suspiria sounds (like those three key tracks below) in the new version.

Main Theme:

Sighs:

Witch: