Director Luca Guadagnino has traded the lush Italian countryside for the stark, chilly streets of Berlin—and sunkissed young love for the terrifying primal forces lurking in the darkness. In his radical reimagining of Dario Argento’s cult classic Suspiria, Dakota Johnson stars as a young American dancer, the newest initiate to a prestigious dance academy that is actually the front for a sinister coven of witches lead by Tilda Swinton’s imperious Madame Blanc.

Guadagnino’s Suspiria is a polarizing blood-soaked and visceral film where Call Me by Your Name was airy and languid. It's probably unfair to compare the two, but it's just too tempting to think of them as mirror images, masculine and feminine extremes. Ahead of Suspiria opening November 2, NewNowNext talked to Guadagnino about that reading of the films and how his vision of these witches evolved since he first saw Argento’s film decades ago.

What was your impression of Suspiria the first time you saw it?

Well, I think few of the things that I felt then—now that I'm being interviewed constantly about this movie and I’m made to sort of self-analyze—must have been the sense of freedom that I got from the movie. You know, a movie that opens with an incredibly violent, relentless 15-minute sequence of thunderstorms, a storm of sound and violence. And at the same time, tries to encapsulate as much formal beauty as possible. Somehow, in the mind of a 14-year-old, it said, "Look, you can do anything you want with this means of expression."

I've read that you've wanted to remake the film for quite some time. Did your take on it change over the years?

It’s not that it changed. You know when you do something, you approach what you’re doing based on the empirical moment in which you are doing it. Probably when I was 14 and 25 and 35 my ideas of the movie were like the ideas of the moment in which I was, but still they were rooted in somehow the desire of exploring a realm of womanhood. Then when we started to work with it, me and David Kajganich, the great writer, we became more consistent and more focused on what was the direction. So, I would say, it evolved.

Do you think your perspective, or your conception of witches is influenced by your experience as a gay man in a homophobic society?

That's a good question, but it's a question I've never thought about. I would say probably the idea that there is a sense of possible persecution for the way you are...I'm not interested in secrecy. In fact, you see in the movie you know that there are witches from minute one. I don't care about secrecy. I think secrecy's a form of control, and worse, self-control, self-censorship. I think that it's more about being indicted for who you are, that’s more important to me. So, if there’s a parallel, it's there. These women through the centuries that have been persecuted and killed by the law of the church and the fathers because they were witches, in reality, they were women who just wanted to be themselves and maybe spend time together with one another.

I've been thinking about this movie as a companion piece to Call Me by Your Name. That film is suffused with beauty and sensuality, Suspiria’s beauty is the beauty of the grotesque. One embodies a kind of easy maleness, the other represents the horrors of womanhood. I'm curious what you think of that reading of these two films.

Well, I don't know. It's interesting, what you’re saying, honestly, but I don’t know...Because I don’t think of my work in retrospective at all, as sort of boxes of themes. I do what I think I am good at doing.

You've talked about turning Call Me by Your Name into a trilogy. Any interest in continuing the story of Argento’s Three Mothers?

The answer would be no because the three movies by Dario—Suspira, Inferno, and The Mother of Tears—are three separate movies that became a trilogy afterward. But...it could be interesting to understand the origin of these people.