Interviews
‘Suspiria’ Has Been Restored in 4K…and It’s Perfect!
On August 4, 2017, I was lucky enough to attend the U.S. premiere of the 4K restoration of the 1977 Dario Argento classic, Suspiria. In association with one of the great horror conventions in the country, Flashback Weekend, Synapse Films was able to display their hard work on the big screen to a packed house. I was in high school the first time I saw Suspiria and remember it being the gateway drug to Italian horror for me. I was instantly drawn to the rich artistry exuding from my friend’s TV screen. Of course, back then it was a beat up VHS tape on an old tube TV…
Now, I understand the appeal and growing popularity of VHS tapes and 35mm, but seeing this masterpiece restored in all of its glory in 4,000 lines of resolution on a giant screen with modern sound systems absolutely blew me out of my seat. Right off the bat, the title screen appears and it’s an aural assault on your ear drums. It’s a jolt that sends a shock into your body and wakes you up for what’s to follow. The one aspect you would expect to pop more than anything in this movie is the color scheme. Anyone who knows Suspiria knows that the aesthetic pulls the whole movie together. The vibrant colors and intricate set designs take your breath away and put you into a cinematic trance. It sucks you into the world where beauty and horror collide, where terror and elegance become one. From the opening credits to final scenes, I was thoroughly pleased with the restoration. I was able to notice little nuances in the sound that I never noticed before. Small details of the set designs suddenly came out of the darkness and had their moment on the screen. Overall, Synapse Films did a superb job of reviving a classic and one of my favorite horror films of all time.
I spoke with the President of Synapse Films and overseer of the restoration, Donald May Jr. about the whole process and what Synapse has in store for us in the future.
BLOODY: How long did it take to restore the film in 4K?
DMJ: SUSPIRIA was the longest restoration project of my career. We started the film scan of the original 35mm uncensored camera negative in Italy almost 4 years ago, did a lot of the restoration in Poland for about a year and a half, and just finished in Los Angeles in the summer of 2017. We just happened to actually finish on my birthday (July 19th), so it was a great birthday present to myself to finally wrap it up.”
What was the most difficult part of the process?
DMJ: “Pretty much everything [laughs]! The most difficult aspect was the restoration itself, because the 35mm camera negative was not stored well over the decades. There were a lot of splices, fingerprints, and dirt embedded into the actual negative. What was strange was all the fingerprints on the splices. We were confounded at the idea that someone thought it was OK to handle the original negative without gloves. Oil from bare hands was embedded into the negative so badly, that we could probably send the fingerprint pics to the FBI to get a positive ID from the culprit. We had to make sure we eliminated as many of these anomalies as possible. It was a long, stressful process, but I think we’ve remastered the best version of SUSPIRIA ever created.”
Explain how the sound was restored to adapt to modern speaker systems.
DMJ: “In 1977, there wasn’t really anything like 5.1 or 7.1 surround, that is so prominent today. For a select few English language prints, back in 1977, SUSPIRIA was mixed in a discrete 4.0 surround sound. What that means is that there were separate left, center, right and surround channels for the audio mix. Most 35mm theatrical prints of that era were presented with an “optical” sound track, but some prints of SUSPIRIA actually contained four channels of magnetic striped sound on the prints. Not all projectors of the era could play this kind of print, so distribution was limited. This particular mix has never been presented on home video until our version, and our restored DCP for theatrical exhibition also restores this sound mix. It is very dynamic and exciting. If you’ve seen SUSPIRIA before, you need to also see it with this mix. The sound is awesome. We located the original 4.0 magnetic tracks and just HAD to utilize them! It was too exciting not to. There’s so much more to the mix that you never noticed before on SUSPIRIA. Sounds, effects, and even some dialogue.”
What version of the film was this restored from? Were any alternative shots used from the original negative?
DMJ: “The original 35mm Italian negative had everything in it. In the U.S.A., in 1977, the film was trimmed for an R rating (removing some of the more graphic violence), but our version is the complete, uncut, uncensored version of the film as it was originally intended to be seen. We also enlisted the help of SUSPIRIA’s original Director of Photography, Luciano Tovoli. He supervised and approved every aspect of our transfer to his exacting look and specifications.”
Is the film going to be toured to be shown in select cities? Or was this a one time premiere for Chicago only?
DMJ: “We recently made an arrangement with 20th Century Fox, since they own the theatrical exhibition rights to SUSPIRIA. If you own a theatre or run a film festival, you can get in touch with your Fox theatrical representative and show our 4K DCP if you like. Fox says they will create multiple DCPs to meet the demand. All we ask at Synapse Films is that, if you do schedule our 4K restoration to show at your cinema or festival, that you let us know the time/dates, so we can promote it for you and help get as many folks in to see it as possible!”
What can we expect from Synapse coming up?
DMJ: “We are finally finishing up Rene Daalder’s MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH, a film we’ve been working on for a while. We have a pretty amazing samurai-gore animated feature coming to Blu called PATH OF BLOOD, and in September we have a great independent film called THE CREEP BEHIND THE CAMERA, a docu-drama about the real-life Vic Savage, the director of the shlock-classic THE CREEPING TERROR. On that Blu-ray of CREEP, we also include a new 2K scan of THE CREEPING TERROR from original vault materials, too! Also in September, we release our standard version of Argento’s PHENOMENA. Our Steelbook release of that title is running pretty low! Next year, we’ll have a great 80s horror that people have been waiting for (I can’t mention the name… yet), so we’ll announce that soon!”
Since then, Synapse has released an announcement that they will be releasing the restoration on a two-disc, limited edition, steelbook Blu-ray, set to release on New Year’s Eve! What better way to ring in the new year than with your very own copy of the Suspiria revival. Make sure you pre-order your copy here. It’s being limited to 6,000 copies and they will go fast.
So there you have it. If you’d like to see this on the big screen, make sure you lobby to your local theaters and film fests and the experience can be yours too. They’ll even help promote it! Great big thumb’s up to the people at Synapse Films and a big thank you for allowing me to relive the initial sense of awe I felt all those years ago.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
You must be logged in to post a comment.