The One Scene in ‘Suspiria’ That Will Make You Want to Crawl Out of Your Skin

If you cast out for opinions on director Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of the horror classic Suspiria, you almost certainly found them. Guadagnino kept the setting of an elite dance academy in Germany and the conceit of the coven of witches who operate within its walls, but otherwise his film departed drastically from Dario Argento’s beloved original. It was almost certainly inevitable. Argento’s color-saturated visions of young women getting brutally murdered by an unseen evil defined a certain kind of Italian art horror back in its day, but there was no way to replicate that accomplishment without looking like a very dull facsimile.

What Luca Guadagnino does with Suspiria is not to everybody’s taste, and if you go in looking for anything approaching a traditional horror movie, you’re going to be hugely disappointed. Rather than put together something traditionally terrifying, Guadagnino grapples with the underlying horror of a post-Nazi Germany and the haunting specter of generational guilt. And honestly? Sometimes people just want a movie about witches killing dancers.

That happens in Guadagnino’s Suspiria too, of course! In between the Tilda Swinton old-man prosthetics and the Baader-Meinhoff demonstrations, the director put together some truly nightmare visions — often literally! — even if they didn’t make so much sense. But I would say the parts of the new Suspiria that have affixed themselves (positively) to the public consciousness are 1) the “Blanc!”/”Markos!” roll call vote, which became the film’s unlikely meme in the weeks after it s release, and 2) the dance audition scene where Dakota Johnson’s character tries her hand at a physically arduous dance routine, which, at the same time and in equal and opposite force, rains bone-splintering torture on another dancer.

When Olga (Elena Fokina) very loudly declares she’s had it with the witches dance instructors at the Markos dance academy, the audience knows to fear for her safety. We’ve already seen Olga’s disappeared friend Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz) being aggressed by an unseen evil, and now there is no more Patricia. Olga is headed towards the same fate, though the audience is in no way prepared for the how of it all.

After Olga stomps out, new girl Susie Bannion (Johnson) volunteers to try the routine. Susie’s placid confidence in her own ability to step into such a demanding routine is unsettling, even for Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton), her instructor. Susie’s technical perfection in her performance is a marvel … and a horror. The latter because, as Guadagnino cuts from Susie dancing to Olga, having been trapped in a secret mirror room in the academy. And every time Susie’s body executes a taut, sharp, precise movement, Olga’s body is violently moved in tandem. Susie, fully in control of her instrument, snaps her arms into alignment; Olga’s shoulder blades snap as her arms are flung in unnatural directions. Susie’s body swings around; Olga’s ribcage nearly dislodges from her torso. It is quite simply the most horrific, terrifying scene in the movie, and that includes the insanely bloody climax near the end.

The violence of the scene does a great job not only setting a sinister mood at the dance academy and scaring the hell out of the audience, but it also comments on the basic body horror that is all modern dance in a way we haven’t seen since Black Swan. That was another movie where the arduous demands of modern dance — the ways in which it requires the human body to move in ways that lie well past most normal boundaries; the way dancers defy mere physiology to move in a manner that will thrill and affect their audience — were compared to physical violence. Guadagnino picks up that torch again and  this time even further literalizes it. The broken lump that is left of Olga by the end of the scene is hard to watch, but it’s the one moment in the movie where the horrific promise of Suspiria is paid off.