Pulling Our Strings: The Gothic Nostalgia of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria

This essay looks at how Gothic Nostalgia offers a window into how a culture, at a particular moment, feels about and engages with the past and its own history. Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is unique in that it is a remake of a Gothic text. As such, it functions as both Gothic text and an example of Gothic Nostalgia, a mirror of a mirror, reflecting back the fear and anxieties of our present moment while still telling a dream-like tale organised around like classic Gothic characters, archetypes, tropes, and themes. This makes Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 classic a unique reflection and commentary on the present day, expressing both the desires as well as the anxieties of an increasingly uncertain age. It is an example of both Gothic and toxic nostalgia due to its setting in the past and its remake status and, as this essay will argue, Guadagnino’s version is a definitive Gothic Nostalgia text that interrogates and satirises certain aspects of toxic nostalgia while still not being entirely free of its influence.