‘Suspiria’ Screenwriter Explains That Wild Ending and Why Dakota Johnson Is a New Kind of Final Girl

https://www.indiewire.com/2018/11/suspiria-screenwriter-explains-wild-ending-spoilers-ideas-for-sequel-1202018427/

To create the unforgettable witches, Kajganich used some body horror inspiration from directors like David Cronenberg, but most of it was rooted in the very real and dark history of accusing women of witchcraft as a means to strip them of basic power and a voice.

“I went into just hard research about the history of witchcraft,” Kajganich said. “About that kind of esoteric iconography. I did a lot of research that was really about how witchcraft and the fear of witches really was a fear of female empowerment. And how those two things… the feminist movement and this fear of the occult had points where they crossed paths, because they exist in a relationship with one another historically, in the sense that people (the patriarchy, if you will) takes its fear of the empowerment of women and creates a mythology for it. Often that has something to do with the occult, what’s hidden.

“So, I just wanted to try to build something that had one foot in actual research about witchcraft, and one foot in… the transgressive and subversive narratives about female empowerment. [I was] just trying to figure out as practically as possible what a real coven in Berlin in 1977 might look like, and how it might behave, and what their rituals might involve.”