Luca Guadagnino has revisited the idea of adding a sequel to his remake of the horror classic Suspiria, noting that his 2018 version of the film was originally titled Suspiria: Part 1. Don’t get your hopes up though, because the Call Me By Your Name director suggests that the second part is unlikely to ever come to fruition.
Asked whether there will ever be a Suspiria sequel in a recent interview with The Film Stage, Guadagnino replies: “How? How, my dear?” Acknowledging the poor commercial performance of his visceral take on the Dario Argento film, he adds: “The movie made absolutely nothing. It was a disaster at the box office.”
“I know that people are liking it more and more now. I loved making that movie. It’s very dear to me. But writer David Kajganich and I had really conceived it as the first half of a bigger story.”
According to Guadagnino himself, prior to the Suspiria premiere in 2018, the second installment would have expanded on the origins of Tilda Swinton’s Madame Blanc and Helena Markos (the latter as “a charlatan woman in the year 1200 in Scotland”). That’s not all, either. In the interview with The Film Stage, Guadagnino adds: “I can tell you that in part two the storyline was layered in five different time zones and spaces.”
Obviously, it would be a shame if we never got to see those storylines play out, and Guadagnino seems to agree. “Sequels are an attitude of the soul,” he says. “You want to do things because you want to spend time with people that you love, the actors you love, the writers you love.”
He will get to do that with Call Me By Your Name, at least, since a sequel is in the works, and will see Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer reprise their roles as Elio and Oliver. In the meantime, Guadagnino has been keeping busy with his Chloë Sevigny and Kid Cudi-starring TV series, We are Who We Are.