Thom Yorke says he wrote the Suspiria score as a way of making spells

Luca Guadagnino's remake of Dario Argento's 1977 horror film Suspiria, the first feature Thom Yorke has scored, had its world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday 1 September. The day before the premiere Yorke had posted a piano clip with no explanation, taken as a first taste of the score.

In Venice he told The Hollywood Reporter that he nearly turned the job down. When the producers and the film's editor, Walter Fasano, first came to him he thought they were mad. He had never written a soundtrack, and Argento's is one of the best known there is, so it took him a few months even to consider it. It was one of those moments in your life where you want to run away but you know you'll regret it if you do.²

He watched Argento's film several times and loved Goblin's intense music for it, but decided it belonged to its time and could not be referenced at all. The lesson he kept was repetition, a motif played over and over until part of the listener's mind begs for it to stop. There's a way of repeating in music that can hypnotize. I kept thinking to myself that it's a form of making spells.² I know it sounds really stupid,² he says, but that's how I was thinking about it.²

The film is set in Berlin in 1977, so he went straight to Krautrock and the music of that time and before, which he loves. It was also the first time he had worked outside the shape of a song, and he found a freedom in it he had not had before, putting things out into the studio and seeing what came back. It was just a really cool way to totally immerse myself in an area I wouldn't normally go with full permission.³