Suspiria: Dakota Johnson clarifies claims she ‘needed therapy’ after filming horror movie

The actress revealed in an interview earlier this year that she booked time in therapy after wrapping production.

Now, as the film receives mixed reviews at the Venice Film Festival, she has said the reason was not that the process was especially traumatising.

“First of all, I was not psychoanalysed and I hope I never will be,” she said, as reported by Digital Spy.

“I find sometimes when I work on a project and — I don’t have any shame in this — I’m a very porous person and I absorb a lot of people’s feelings.

“When you’re working sometimes with dark subject matter, it can stay with you and then to talk to somebody really nice about it afterwards is a really nice way to move on from the project.

“My therapist is a really nice woman.”

She added: “It [filming] was the most fun and the most exhilarating and the most joyful that it could be.

“It’s mischievous and play[ful] and I love it more than anything. It wasn’t that this film sent me to a ward, I just have a lot of feelings.”

Suspiria was so terrifying for audiences in Venice that some allegedly walked out of a screening well before the end credits rolled.

Of the critics who saw it through to the end, the verdict was mixed – although more liked it than didn’t.

In a three-star write-up, The Guardian said: “There are smart moments of fear and subliminal shivers of disquiet, the dance sequences are good and of course Guadagnino could never be anything other than an intelligent film-maker.

“But this is a weirdly passionless film.”

The Telegraph gave a full five stars, saying: “Suspiria draws a complex, provocative line through faith, politics, dance and, yes, witchcraft: in all cases, a group of resolute like minds can birth something more powerful and dangerous than themselves.”

TIME magazine, meanwhile, did not take to the movie at all. They said: “This new Suspiria is bland, grisly, boring and silly. There is nothing poetic or erotic about it.”

And The Hollywood Reporter said: “Guadagnino has made an ambitious homage, but it doesn’t really benefit from its more intellectualized gaze, instead draining the stomach-churning thrills of great horror.”

Suspiria out on November 2.