How an abandoned hotel became a witch's haunt for "Suspiria"

In 1968, the last paying customers of the Grand Hotel Campo dei Fiori, a 200-room hotel located in Varese, Italy, left the hotel. Since then, the property – a glamorous Art Nouveau retreat perched on a wooded and hard-to-reach Alpine foothill – has remained largely vacant, reserved for guards and their families. The brightly painted walls disappeared and took off. parts of the ceiling collapsed; the furniture, largely left in place, accumulated dust. It is precisely for these reasons that the director Luca Guadagnino was determined to shoot "Suspiria", his new representation of the horror film of Dario Argento in 1977, on the property.

"When we arrived in Italy, we went looking for alternative venues, because it was almost a nightmare logistically," said Inbal Weinberg, the film's production designer. At its peak, the hotel "looked a lot like Greater Budapest, though there was a real one," she notes. However, when she and her team visited the building, there was no electricity or running water. "But there was so much to do at the hotel," she says. She undertook to transform the building into the main site of the film, a fictional dance school in the 1970s in Berlin and an operational production site.

in the "Suspiria" follows a young American student, Susie Bannion, played by Dakota Johnson, as she adapts perfectly to the prestigious and rigorous Markos Dance Academy in Cold War Germany. But nothing of "Suspiria" is simple; The school, as will soon discover Susie's friend Sara (Mia Goth), is led by witches who perform macabre rituals in secret rooms hidden in the building.

Weinberg discusses the transformation of a large hotel into a seat for a stronghold. In a typical twist of "Suspiria", the photographer Mikael Olsson, who captured the accompanying images of the set, also has a small role in the film: he appears as agent Glockner, a German police officer (one of three male characters).

The kitchen

While the turbulent energy of the 1970s in Berlin resonates in "Suspiria," the Markos Dance Academy has a sense of lack of intentional time, says Weinberg. "What we were trying to make clear is that society has existed for generations, as if it were suspiciously long," she says. As a result, the witches' dwelling contains furniture of different decades. Weinberg and Guadagnino have turned to the interiors of early modernism for cooking. The Frankfurt kitchen, one of the first mass-produced fitted kitchens, designed by the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in 1926, was an essential reference, as was the Sonneveld House from 1933 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. While many Academy halls are imposing and imposing, "it's the utilitarian part of their world," says Weinberg. "I loved thinking about the commonplace routines of witches. Yes, they are wizards, but every morning they come down dressed in their robes, make coffee, smoke and eat pretzels and mustard. "

Madame Blanc, a charismatic dance teacher, one of the two characters in Tilda Swinton's movie, sits in some of the most opulent halls in the academy. For the black lacquered dance hall next to the living room, Weinberg commissioned a bespoke carpet from the famous French carpet manufacturer La Manufacture Cogolin (two other drawings of the company appear in other rooms). "At first, we decided to have these secret graphic elements for witches," she says. "One of them was a kind of geometric Bauhaus claw pattern. We used it on posters and on the door of the dance studio. Then I took the claw-shaped element to make it a kaleidoscopic rug. The walls are covered with a textured silver fabric from Italian brand Dedar, who also created textiles "Call me by your name", Guadagnino film, 17th century villa.