Like the film itself, Suspiria’s Bauhaus-inspired title text — a calculated jumble of irregularly sized letters — is alarming and wonderful.
Perri’s goal was to convey the sense of terror and disquiet that the film imparts through its title art.
He created the second S and P by hand, keeping them simple before going “to an extreme” for the I. The rest of the letters are capitalized, but Perri gave the I’s a lowercase dot “to further skew and confuse the emotions for a moment.”
He eschewed a pointy A, threatening as that would be, because he says the word seemed to dictate that it be blockier and less familiar. This letter Perri tilted left and right, until he felt as though it was shuddering in reaction to the rest of the word.
“The comblike element underlining the logo came out of the same series of German post-WWII images,” Perri continued. “Experimenting with size and thickness and proportions and rhythm, I built my own interpretation from scratch. It stabilizes the lockup: the letters are all slightly skewed, some distorted, and nothing is really horizontal or vertical. I wanted to give the design a sense of stability, to allow the letters to interact with one another while staying grounded in a world of chaos. For the 1977 Giallo original, the then wildly popular ITC Serif Gothic was distorted into a liquid typographic treatment reminiscent of psychedelic oil projections—in those days, a popular cinematographic styling used to evoke dreamscapes and nightmares.
The 1977 original poster uses a standardised font that was very popular during the mid and late 70's, the ITC Serif Gothic. This font, designed by Herb Lubalin and Tony DeSpigna in 1972, and was even used for branding in Star Wars film posters. ITC Serif Gothic makes reference to Roman and Serif typefaces, especially in heavier weights with its subtle, sharp serifs. Its rounded counters based on perfect circles create a sense of approachability which is contrasted with these sharp serifs, therefore evoking a feeling of false security which is perfect for tense films.
For the film poster, ITC Serif Gothic is just slightly distorted, showing the lean towards a bespoke type being more communicable for the themes within the film, which is carried on by the completely bespoke and expressive typeface the 2018 Suspiria film reveals.
The 2018 Suspiria's font is based on bauhaus-inspired forms, and the rhythm and rigidness of type from post-WWII German designs. The historical inspiration creates room for semantic associations with both the idea of reinventing and modernity that comes with bauhaus, correlating with the idea of this film being a modern day remake, and the sense of tension and gloom that was reflected in Germany after the war. The typeface is hand-drawn, using differing shapes, weights and sizes within that is not even consistent within the type. This typeface too takes the idea of roundness and blocky shapes, forms that are often associated with kindness, to represent the idea of false security. The unexpectedness and unease of reading it connotes to the audience the sense of curiosity, tension and unpredictability within the film's storyline.
Process
Title designer Dan Perri, who created the famous text crawl at the start of Star Wars, describes the process of creating Suspiria’s title as a constant back-and-forth with Guadagnino, who would send over references he found in magazines and books.
When he describes his design process, he takes it letter by letter. Each one relates to its neighbors and contributes to the unsettling effect of the whole word, which is framed by two bars and a long, rather menacing comb-like shape.
“The first S of Suspiria was part of a design that, I think, Luca sent me a version of,” says Perri. “It felt so right — this blocky, bulky letter with these thinner, graceful ends to it. Then the U was more horizontal but still bulky and thick. It had to crowd the S, right on top of it, but be slightly lower than the height of the S.”
he took cues from some post-WWII German designs that he and Guadagnino found. “The bold, clunky, blocky letters weren’t perfect or precisely edged; the bumps and imperfections lent themselves perfectly to conjuring up the horrific and unpredictable world the film inhabits,” “I explored literally fifty to sixty different approaches in the same vein—some of them more illustrative—that also felt tense and intimidating. They all exhibited a roughness that reflected the storytelling. There is a suggestion of blood in the initial S, and the R, the other red letter, is more like dried blood, toned down, like the result of bleeding. The letters and the bars are all different percentages of gray to create a sense of curiosity, intensity, and unpredictability.”
“It’s all very emotional,” says Perri. “All those subtleties individually are not very important, but collectively they make a statement that conveys a feeling that’s similar to the feeling of the film.”
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/12/18071808/suspiria-sorry-to-bother-you-the-favourite-title-design
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