Argento’s ‘SUSPIRIA’ is the Next Horror Film to Get a 4K Restoration

Digital screenings have become more and more popular. It has come to the point where 35mm screenings have become supremely rare if you don’t live in a major metropolitan area or don’t live on either coast of the United States. I can speak to this as a fan and as a programmer of our midngiht program, Late Nite Grindhouse. You’d be surprised at how many classics of our genre have been given the bare minimum in scanning for digital archiving. Most of the time, the mindset was that once a film was scanned from a 35mm negative or interpositive, that was the best it would get and after the digital scan, the original elements would be handled with less care than they were before the scan. Lately, you’ve probably seen or have heard of recent 4K restorations of classics like Phantasm, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (which is our November Late Nite Grindhouse show) and, more recently, Night of the Living Dead. Recently, you might even recall that there was a 4K restoration of the Dario Argento cut of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. One film that, in booking, that is integral to its audio and visual presentation that I have actually booked as part of our Late Nite Grindhouse program was Dario Argento’s Suspiria. All the 35mm prints were of the U.S. cut and we are still waiting for Synapse Films to be releasing their Blu-Ray, which they have been painstakingly restoring. Today, comes news via Variety that Italy will be showing a 4K restoration of Suspiria at the beginning of 2017 and they cut a trailer to show off their work.

In my opinion, it looks pretty amazing. Per the article, Videa, a studio who owns the rights to Suspiria, hired German lab TLEFilms to do digital restoration on the damaged 35mm celluloid original, which was shot on EastmanColor film and processed using the so-called “Technicolor Dye Transfer” technique that greatly contributed to the film’s garish colors. According to that statement, it seems to be independent from from the restoration work that Don May Jr and Jerry Chandler at Synapse Films have been doing to the film to ready it for the Stateside release. It has been well documented that when Don from Synapse Films got the elements that they were not in the best of shape when looking at the scan – which is why the release has been taking some more time than what was originally expected. For a little background, most Italian films are scanned in Italy instead of shipping the elements overseas to receive a scan. This has resulted in some questionable quality with Italian films released worldwide. I believe Synapse is still on track with releasing Suspiria on Blu-Ray in 2017 so it will be interesting to see if the restorations are any different or if both restorations will be available for Stateside consumption.