The 50mm Club at CSUN Cinematheque November 20, 2018

An evening with

Writer & Producer (2018) dir.

Suspiria, an Amazon Studios production,

played in competition

in the 2018

This 2018 film is … • A remake … • An tribute … • A reinterpretation … • An update … • An “offspring” …

of the 1977 Suspiria?

David Kajganich, who wrote the screenplay & produced the film should be able to tell us! Suspiria (1977) directed by

• Dario Argento – Italian filmmaker born in in 1940

• Family of film producers – daughter Asia

• Worked as a film critic & screenwriter - Once upon a Time in the West (1968, )

• Cultivates a subgenre of called

Key films

• (1975) • Suspiria (1977) • (1980) • Tenebre (1982) • Mother of Tears (2007) Giallo as a film genre

• Italian subgenre of horror film - 1960s-1970s

• Best described as an hyperbolic serial-killer mystery

• It generally has urban settings & disturbingly creative murders

• “giallo” means “yellow”, & refers to the covers of a popular series of paperback thrillers published by Mondadori. Italian directors that worked in the giallo genre

• • Lamberto Bava • • Sergio Corbucci • • Carlo Lizzani • • Luigi Zampa Giallo outside of

This breed of slasher flick has influenced American directors:

Brian De Palma, Dressed to Kill (1980) , Halloween (1978) Wes Craven, Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) Suspiria (1977)

• Eerie tale of a naïve American ballet student who attends a haunted school in Freiburg, southern Germany

• Mixes the vocabulary of the giallo genre with art-film surrealist esthetics

• Has become a – 2-DVD Criterion edition

• Argento used the standard formula for giallo, more interested in how the movie feels & looks & sounds than in the story.

David Kajganich

• Born 1969 in Ohio

• Studied fiction writing at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop

• Taught writing & literature before moving to Los Angeles in 2003

• Named by Variety as one of the 2006 “Ten Screenwriters to Watch" Writer & producer

• A Bigger Splash (2015) • True Story (2015) • The Terror – AMC miniseries (2018) • Suspiria (2018)

David Kajganich on writing for film • I think aspiring writers should find a script to use as a model for formatting and then watch great films instead.

• I've only read one "screenwriting" book in my life, and the subject of the book was the importance of ignoring typical narrative models taught by other screenwriting books.

• It felt like I'd entered some kind of "how-to" death spiral, so I got the hell out of it and went back to just watching terrific films and taking them apart to learn how they were built.

The Independent (UK), October 4, 2016 Sources: Suspiria (2018)

• Charles Bramesco, “A Beginner’s Guide to Dario Argento”, Vulture, September 2018

• Justin Chang, “Suspiria remake casts a powerfully brutal, sorrowful spell”, , October 24, 2018

• Manohla Dargis, “Suspiria is a gaudy freakout of female violence”, New York Times, October 24, 2018

• Nathan Heller, “Mind and Body. Luca Guadagnino’s cinema of desire”, New Yorker, October 15, 2018

• Anthony Lane, “The Confounding Sadness of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria”, New Yorker, October 28, 2018