VENICE - Actress Dakota Johnson admitted Sunday that she had to see a shrink after playing the lead in Oscar-winning director Luca Guadagnino's new horror flick, "Suspiria".

The star made the confession as the movie was premiered at the Venice film festival.

"When you're working sometimes with dark subject matter it can stay with you," she told reporters.

"I absorb a lot of people's feelings," Johnson said.

"Then you talk about it with someone very nice afterwards. It is a really nice to (help you) move on from the project and my therapist is a very nice woman," she said.

Johnson, 28, the daughter of actors Melanie Griffiths and Don Johnson, and the grand-daughter of Hitchcock favorite, Tippi Hedren, plays a young American Amish woman obsessed with a German modern dance group.

After auditioning for them she is drawn into a macabre cult of modern witches as fellow dancers disappear one after the other.

Guadagnino - maker of last year's arthouse hit "Call Me By Your Name" - unleashes his most savagely baroque fantasies onto a stellar female cast that included his regular muse, British actress Tilda Swinton, in one of her best roles in years.

The film, a blood-soaked remake of horror legend Dario Argento's 1977 chiller, is set in a creepy all-female dance school in Cold War Berlin hard by the wall. - AFP