Suspiria welcomes the Season of the Witch

In Suspiria, a famous dance school in West Berlin is led by an enigmatic choreographer, Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton). “When you dance the dance of another, you remake yourself in the image of its creator,” she tells her protege, newly arrived Susy (Dakota Johnson). Susy’s an American abroad, an innocent from the religious heartland of the Midwest, but with a slight whiff of Salem about her. For anyone familiar with the Dario Argento original, released in 1977, the year the new film is set, it won’t be a spoiler to reveal that this remake is not going to be a European version of Step Up. Instead the film marks the return of a horror staple with an ambiguous history: the witch.

Witches have typically featured on screen as comic figures, suggesting most writers in Hollywood see female empowerment as being a bit daft. Think of the TV show Bewitched – later made into a movie with Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman, who was also a semi-comic witch in Practical Magic. Witches' reputation in cinema never really recover from the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. The cackling green-skinned haridan played by Margaret Hamilton in the 1939 film is the classic archetype: pointy hat, broomstick, flying monkeys and evident delight in malignancy (“How about a little fire scarecrow?”). She is also the transformation of Almira Gulch (also played by Hamilton), the Kansas socialite who owns half the county and steals Toto. But her cartoonish exuberance make it difficult to see her as representative of anything other than a perennial Halloween outfit.

Witches might sometimes appear more subtly than they do in Roald Dahl’s The Witches or the Bette Midler comedy vehicle Hocus Pocus, but even reimaginings like The Witches of Eastwick or Angelina Jolie’s revisionist Maleficent never quite convince. The attempts to balance the misogyny with a good witch – even The Wizard of Oz had good witches of the South and North – seemed doomed to fail. Hermione Granger gives the Harry Potter universe an exemplary witch but Helena Bonham-Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange undoes the revision. In 1996, The Craft sought to do for witches what The Lost Boys had done for vampires in the late 80s – with a dash of Heathers thrown in – but the film never quite got the potion right.

More recently witches have returned in a way that shuns the pantomime version and goes back to historical precedence. The best example of this is Robert Eggers’ The Witch, which reproduces the early American Puritan experience that would be exposed during the infamous witch trials of the 17th Century, but with the twist that the devil actually is walking among the flock and the young woman is in fact a witch. Taken on face value, Eggers’ film slots in with other religious horror films such as The Exorcist, The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby, which exist in universes perfectly recognisable to a conservative Christian outlook. The Conjuring (2013) had a witch possessing a house and needing Catholic exorcism. The recent retrial of the witch is the same species of victim-blaming that sees Native Americans become the most deadly threat in the genre of the Western. In 2016’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe, in a cake-and-eat-it switcheroo, an innocent woman is turned into a vengeful witch by being wrongfully persecuted for being one.

The dark and powerful witches of Suspiria are definitely an improvement over the patronising comedy witches – though an exception has to be made for Anne Biller’s amazing The Love Witch (2017). Those looking for a feminist depiction of witches in this all-female horror might want to consider the Women-Beware-Women violence of the piece first. There’s an amoral glorying in female power even as it comes at the bloody cost of other women. Guadagnino's witches join the recent coven of the likes of Melisandre from Game of Thrones and Fiona Goode from American Horror Story as a new breed of strong, spellbinding women, who have opted to – and as Black Phillip describes it in The Witch – “live deliciously”.

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Suspiria is released 16 Nov by Mubi