Horror Double Feature: The Awakening and The Canal

13 Jul 2017 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

Quite by accident, today’s double feature happens to consist of two films from the UK: the 2011 classically-structured English mystery/ghost story The Awakening, and the more modern-expressionist Irish murder-demon tale from 2014, The Canal. While neither of them was particularly original plot-wise, there was a great deal to enjoy in both films, and I have few qualms about recommending them to interested parties, as long as you’re not expecting to get blown away. Keep in mind that both have pretty significant plot twists that will be spoiled here, so read no further if you haven’t seen them. This is your final warning!

First up, The Awakening is the kind of movie that will probably appeal to fans of neo-gothic ghost stories like The Others, The Woman In Black, The Devil’s Backbone, and The Orphanage (of which I am definitely one), with all the standard ingredients: creaky old mansions, possible spirit kids, a plucky heroine, a kindly matron, a murder mystery, lots of shifty characters, and a repressed and horrific past. There are two really outstanding things about this film, one of which is the gorgeous cinematography, painting everything in hues of blue and gray and setting a bleak and eerie mood with long shots of empty hallways, vast green lawns, and shadowed rooms.

The other outstanding thing is the performance of lead Rebecca Hall (who I also enjoyed in her roles in The Prestige, The Gift, Vicky Christina Barcelona, and Frost/Nixon), who is electrifying to watch, playing a character who is tough as nails and in complete control of her emotions, all the while seething underneath with a naked fragility that she is loath to show to anyone.

That said, the movie also has some significant problems, which I will get to in a bit.

The Awakening is set in 1921, and Hall plays Florence Cathcart, a fiercely intelligent, no-nonsense spiritualist debunker in the Houdini vein. She has written a well-regarded book on exposing fraudulent mediums, called Seeing Through Ghosts, and has become somewhat famous (as well as reviled by the spiritualist community) for her work with the police in raiding fake séances (as if there are any other kind, but I digress). In fact, the first sequence of the film shows us Florence at work, busting up a deliciously creepy séance with ruthless efficiency, showing everyone the wires and parlor tricks used to make the attendees believe they are talking to their loved ones. Predictably, the people at the séance get righteously pissed off at Florence for exposing the fraud, instead of at the fake mediums who are taking their money and fooling them into thinking they‘re communicating with dead people. Typical.

It also comes to light that Florence has lost her lover in the war, and that much like Houdini and his mother, Florence maintains her staunch atheism and disbelief in the afterlife both because she feels that fake mediums are taking grieving people like her to the cleaners for a false promise of communication, but also because she still holds out a tiny spark of childish hope that one of these mediums will actually be real and will be able to contact her lost beloved, so that she can apologize for the wrong she did him just before his death.

A short time after the séance raid, Florence is approached by Robert Mallory, who teaches Latin at a boys’ boarding school called Rookford. He explains to Florence that the school is haunted by a boy who might have been murdered there at some point in the past, and that one of the students has recently died, apparently after being frightened to death by the ghost. At first Florence brushes him off, saying she’s too busy and that the “proof” of the haunting he’s brought looks like bullshit, but since there would be no movie if she didn’t go, she eventually agrees to travel to the school and investigate.

Once she gets to Rookford, she meets matron Maud (Imelda Staunton, who I absolutely loved in Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake), who is almost creepily interested in her and effusively praises her book (which she keeps on the shelf right next to the Bible), saying that she doesn’t believe in any of this haunting nonsense either and that she hopes that Florence will be able to get everyone‘s heads on straight. She also meets a few of the other boys, including the angel-faced Tom (Isaac Hempstead-Wright, best known from “Game of Thrones”), some of the other teachers, like the anger-issue-ridden Malcolm McNair (Shaun Dooley), as well as the requisite sketchy groundskeeper Edward Judd (Joseph Mawle).

One aspect of the film I thought was rather nicely done was the undercurrent of war and the influenza outbreak that was going on in England at the time. At the school, everyone seems either sick or wounded in some way, haunted by the horrors going on around them, and groundskeeper Judd is reviled by all the other teachers because he faked an injury to get out of service. An understated touch, but a welcome one that helps place the story in the context of its times.

Florence wastes little time in setting up all the latest scientific equipment and using her considerable intellect and knowledge of the tricks of the trade to get to the bottom of the mystery. And here’s where I thought the movie was at its best, because Florence is able to easily discover that the “ghost” the dead boy saw was in fact one of the other students playing a prank, and that the deceased child actually died from an asthma attack after Malcolm McNair punished him for his fear by locking him outside, trying to “toughen him up.” When Florence exposes the truth, Malcolm tearfully apologizes, claiming that he was only so harsh on the boys because he was trying to make them tougher than the current generation, since, having seen war, he would know that they would have to be. The other teachers are sympathetic, but Malcolm still gets fired, and rightfully so.

So, problem solved, right? No ghost, no mysterious death. Not so fast. At this point there was still a great deal of the movie to go, so I figured that even though Florence had presumably found out that the ghost was fake, that there would actually be a real one lurking in there somewhere that would melt the black, unfeeling heart of the skeptic. I have to admit, this common plot device always disappoints me somewhat, because it seems as though skeptics are invariably portrayed in horror movies as wrong and damaged in some way, and this film was no exception. While I know that we couldn’t have horror stories without writing about the supernatural, and while I’ve always been a big fan of supernatural-based horror tales myself, I’m always kind of annoyed by the lazy “hardline asshole skeptic finds out there really ARE ghosts, and becomes a better person” trope. It doesn’t ruin the movie, but I just found it an obvious “twist,” and somewhat jarring within the context of the film.

After the fake ghost is unmasked, the boys all leave the school for the Christmas holiday, save for Tom, who has to stay behind because his parents are ostensibly in India. Although Florence initially plans to leave, she ends up seeing something in the school that leads her to believe that the place really is haunted, and she is determined to stay there until she finds out what it is. Another thing keeping her at the school is her budding romance with Robert Malloy, and her connection to the lonely little Tom, who adores her and seems to know a lot about her, for reasons which will become clear later.

And right here is where most of the major problems with the movie begin. Florence, presented in the film as a thoroughly modern, rational woman, begins to essentially have a nervous breakdown, chasing after ghosts, crying uncontrollably, seeing strange visions, even attempting suicide by throwing herself into the lake and subsequently throwing herself at Robert Malloy. It’s sort of a bizarre character shift, and while it wasn’t too egregious while I was watching it, when I thought about it later on, it bothered me a lot more.

There is also a minor subplot with groundskeeper Judd, who attacks and attempts to rape Florence in the woods, before being frightened by the ghost, after which Florence kills him in self-defense and Robert covers it up. I’m not really sure why this subplot is here, because it doesn’t really have anything to do with the main story and doesn’t serve any purpose other than showing the audience that all the other war-hero characters were correct in assuming that the malingering Judd was kind of a scumbag.

And the ultimate resolution of the mystery, which I admit came as something of a surprise, was also unnecessarily convoluted and admittedly a tad confusing. It turned out that twenty years ago, when the school was a private residence, Florence had lived there with her parents, her nanny, and her nanny’s son. Florence’s father had flipped out one day, killed her mother in front of her, and then came after her with a shotgun. Florence hid from him in a hole behind the wall, along with her friend Tom (yep), the nanny’s son. Florence’s father shot through the wall, aiming for Florence, but killed Tom instead, then shot himself when he saw what he’d done.

So basically, Tom has been the terrifying “ghost with the twisted face” all along (which was actually a pretty creepy and arresting visual, though I thought the explanation that most of the time he could control the twisty-faced thing and look like a normal kid was kind of lame), and it turns out that Maud is his mother, as well as Florence’s erstwhile nanny. That’s why Maud and Florence are the only ones who can see Tom (though this isn’t clear until you watch it a second time, just like The Sixth Sense), and that’s why Maud was acting so strangely at first, because she was the one who convinced Robert to summon Florence there; she was looking to see if Florence remembered her or remembered anything about what had happened. So the whole point of Florence being at the school was not so much to debunk the ghost, but to remember and come to terms with the horrible past she had blocked out.

The ending also got a little weird, as Maud decides that she and Florence should look after Tom forever because he’s lonely and he‘s starting to appear to more of the boys at the school, which frightens them. So Maud poisons herself and attempts to poison Florence, though it appears that Tom intervenes and gives her an ipecac. While some viewers thought that Florence really did die and that it was her ghost we saw at the end leaving the school, I’m pretty sure she actually did live, though it could be read either way because of the cryptic way the scenes and the dialogue are shot.

As I said, there were some rather odd tonal shifts and bizarre character 180s going on, the repressed memory angle was way too complicated and silly to be believable, and I thought there were some unnecessary plot threads that could have been eliminated; but all in all, it was a rather enjoyable mystery that looked great and had some interesting twists, even though some of them were a little WTF. If you have a hankering for an old-school Victorian-style ghost story with some Houdini-type scientific skepticism threaded in, and if you can live with some clumsy plot developments that don’t always work, then you may find your fix somewhat sated here.

The second film in our UK double feature is 2014’s The Canal, written and directed by Ivan Kavanagh. Though this one had far fewer plot issues than The Awakening and hence was probably the better film overall, I think I ended up liking it about the same, just because it suffered a tad from an unoriginal storyline and had a more modern, jump-scare-heavy aesthetic. That said, though, it did have a slightly surreal feel to it which I appreciated, some decent scares and disturbing imagery, and at times it reminded me a bit of Candyman, which is always a good thing.

We begin the tale as main protagonist David (Rupert Evans) moves into an old house in Dublin with his pregnant wife Alice (Hannah Hoekstra). Not much happens at first to suggest that anything is amiss, but then we skip ahead five years. David and Alice’s son Billy (Calum Heath) sometimes complains about monsters in the house, as five-year-olds are wont to do. In addition, the love appears to have gone out of David and Alice’s marriage, as he begins to suspect that she is having an affair with one of her clients.

Worse yet, during the course of his job as a film archivist for the National Archives, he is sent a series of police films from 1902, which show the aftermath of a grisly murder that took place in the very house he lives in with his family. The crime spree involved a man who had brutally butchered his two-timing wife and their two children, then later beheaded their nanny before throwing her body into the canal that still runs alongside the street the house is located on.

Soon enough, David becomes obsessed with these films and begins to investigate other murders that have taken place around the canal, and it’s implied that he is seeing parallels between the family dynamic at work in the 1902 murders and what’s taking place in his own life (since David and Alice also employ a nanny, by the name of Sophie, played by Kelly Byrne). Shortly afterward, he obtains definitive proof of his wife’s dalliances when he follows her one night when she is supposed to be “working late” and sees her banging her hunky work colleague Alex (Carl Shaaban).

In fact, on the night he sees the two of them together, he has flashes of the 1902 murder films, and picks up a hammer as if he is going to revisit the past with extreme prejudice. But then he thinks better of it and leaves without the lovers seeing him. On his walk back home, he throws the hammer into the canal, and then starts feeling sick about what he almost did. He enters a nearby Trainspotting-level public bathroom, where he vomits all over the place, but also has disturbing visions of someone standing outside the stall and a creepy man whispering something unintelligible into his ear. As he staggers out of the bathroom, he sees what he thinks is his wife struggling with a dark figure on the banks of the canal, and then falling in, screaming. Thinking he is imagining it, he heads back home.

But wouldn’t you know it, his wife has not come home by morning, and after dropping Billy off at school, he goes to the police to report her missing. He doesn’t tell the police that he knows about her affair, and he doesn’t tell them that he thought he saw her fighting with a man by the canal, since he believes (probably with some justification) that the cops will think he killed her if they find out he was following her and actually did momentarily consider busting in her head with a hammer.

Lead detective McNamara (a wonderful Steve Oram) is still intensely suspicious, since, as he tells David, when wives go missing, it’s ALWAYS the husband. He tries to get David to confess by sticking the knife in about the affair, which apparently everyone knew about but David. David is, however, adamant that he loved his wife and wouldn’t hurt her. And because of David’s visions, the audience is actually not sure either whether he really did kill his wife and then sort of blocked it out by imagining all this trippy stuff with the creepy dudes in the disgusting toilet.

Subsequently, Alice’s body is found in the canal, but in a surprising twist, the coroner finds no evidence that she was murdered, and rules that she was probably walking home, broke her heel, fell into the canal, and drowned. David is heartbroken, but also somewhat relieved, though his grief is tempered somewhat by the revelation that Alice was pregnant with Alex’s child and that she had been planning on leaving David when she died.

There is a funeral, and David hires Sophie on to stay full time to help take care of Billy, but Detective McNamara is still convinced that David is the killer, and his suspicions prompt him to have David watched, as well as contact child services to see about having Billy taken away from him.

It is at this point that the real mindfuck of the movie begins, because although it would seem that David has been exonerated of his wife’s allegedly accidental death, he starts to become convinced that the man who murdered his family back in 1902 is still in the house, or that there is some evil force operating in the house that makes its residents go murderously insane.

Propping up this belief is the sighting of the man (and Alice) at varying times in the house, as well as on the films he makes around the house and near the canal in order to catch the “ghost.” He attempts to rally his work friend Claire and the nanny Sophie to his cause, trying desperately to convince them that not only is there an evil spirit in his house, but that it killed his wife and is going to kill Billy and Sophie next. Sophie and Claire, however, simply think that the grief over his wife’s death has sent him off the deep end, and urge him to get help, which he refuses. It is never really made clear whether the women can see the “ghosts” that occasionally turn up on his films, making the suspense over David‘s supposedly deteriorating mental state all the more compelling. There also remains the intriguing possibility that Alice’s death was simply an accident, and David is blowing it into this batshit demon scenario in order to assuage his guilt about his murderous thoughts.

Meanwhile, police recover the hammer that David threw into the canal on the night of Alice’s death, and since David’s fingerprints are on it, McNamara’s suspicions are reignited. David finally admits to the police that he had known about the affair and that he had seen Alice and Alex together that night, but insists that the ghost in the house is responsible for Alice’s death, not him. Not surprisingly, the police are less than impressed by this outlandish story.

The real strength of the film is that the viewer never really does figure out whether David actually killed his wife (and later Claire) and is so crazy he’s attributing it to spirits, or whether the spirits are real and are making him murder people, or whether the spirits are the ones doing it and then are making him think that it was him. Late in the film, David finds a series of creepy old photographs behind a wall that imply that the former residents of the house were Satanists who sacrificed babies and threw them into the canal, so it would seem that there was some evil jiggery-pokery going on in the place, but then near the end of the film, as David is trying to escape from police with Billy in tow, he is shown visions of himself drowning his wife in the canal and strangling Claire, so we don’t really know if this is actually what happened, or if these visions were shown to him by the evil ghosts.

The ending of this was actually rather dark, which surprised and somewhat delighted me, in a grim way. David dies by drowning in the canal, though Billy is pulled out by Detective McNamara. You’d think that would be the wrapped-up, somewhat happy ending, but there’s a nasty little coda: Billy is back at the house with his grandmother, and he goes into his room to retrieve a few of his toys, since Grandma is selling the house and they are moving away. While inside alone, Billy sees David’s eye peering at him through a crack in the wall, and David tells the child that he is in the house with Mommy, and that Billy can stay with them forever if he wants to. Cut to a solemn little Billy emerging from the house and getting into the car with his grandmother, after which he jumps out of the car while it’s moving and gets crushed under the wheels. The last shot is the real estate agent being startled by Billy’s ghost as it closes the door of an upstairs bedroom.

I’m guessing that this final little twist suggests that the evil ghost (or force or demon or whatever) was manipulating the perceptions of everyone who lived there. So Billy didn’t really see his dad in the wall; that was just the demon persuading him to join the party, as it were. At least that was how I interpreted it.

As I said, this film reminded me pleasingly of Candyman, what with a desperate and sympathetic protagonist trying to convince a skeptical world that a supernatural force was responsible for murders which looked very much like he had committed. The acting was great, the story interesting if nothing new, the cinematography containing nicely surrealistic flourishes. The ghost sightings were also effectively creepy, especially the ones that appeared on old-timey looking film. Another well-above-average recent horror entry in this double-feature series, and one I’d definitely recommend.

Well, that’s all for now, so until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.

Hulu Horror Double Feature: Soulmate and The Legend of Lucy Keyes

17 Apr 201619 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / 5 Comments

Even though I don’t always succeed, I really do try very hard to maintain some semblance of regularity on this blog. Of course, circumstances usually intervene, and I have to be content with simply posting a short writing update or radio show link rather than the more in-depth content I enjoy writing. I really am going to try posting more of that longer stuff, though, and to that end, I actually had a bit of a brainwave yesterday, vis á vis finding fodder for longer posts.

You see, this past week has been a bit of a clusterfuck, to put it mildly, as the God of Hellfire had to be hospitalized for almost a week because of a cat bite, of all things (note to readers: cat bites are absolutely no joke, and will get infected before you can sing the first bar of that Ted Nugent song, leaving you with no choice but to languish in the hospital for days on end, attached to countless IV drips, hoping one does not have to have the bitten limb amputated or at least surgerated upon). Obviously I was in no state of mind for writing, as I shuttled back and forth from work to hospital and back again, breaking only briefly for showers and drive-thru dinners. The GoH is back home now, huzzah, but he’s still convalescing, and needs help with tasks that necessitate the use of his left hand (so, a lot of tasks, really).

ANYWAY, as I spent yesterday watching over him, keeping an eye on the wounds, fetching whatever he needed, keeping track of his meds, and what not, I decided to slap some random horror flick on Hulu and watch that sucker. So I did. Then, when that first one was over, the next one they recommended looked pretty decent too, so I thought hell, I’ll watch two of ‘em; not like I have anywhere in particular to be except right here monitoring my patient.

And then it came to me: Hulu Horror Double Feature blog series! Pick one horror/suspense film at random, watch, see which movie comes up next, watch that one, then review and post. Easy! Painless! Sure to bring about world peace in our lifetimes! Or, y’know, not. Oh, and my Scary Silents and Favorite Horror Scenes series will continue sporadically as well, so don’t worry your little horror heads about that.

There aren’t really any rules to this new Double Feature series; I’m just going to pick a random flick that looks good, watch it, then watch the next one that comes on, unless I’ve already seen it, in which case I’ll skip to the next one until I get to one I haven’t seen yet. Then I will review them here for your edification. You win, I win, we all win, Steve Wynn. And after that insufferably long preamble, we’re off to the races!

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you will know how much I love me some understated ghost story action, particularly if it’s British. Scrolling through the “Paranormal” section of the Horror/Suspense classification on Hulu, I came across Soulmate (2013), which from the brief description sounded right up my alley. I didn’t read any of the reviews before starting it, just clicked play and sat back. In brief, the movie is the story of a violinist named Audrey, who has attempted suicide after the death of her beloved husband. She survives, but feels the need to be alone so she can move on from the tragedy. Without telling her family where she is going, she checks herself out of the hospital and rents a cottage in a remote Welsh village. The cottage, obviously, turns out to be haunted, and there are some intriguing secrets waiting to be discovered about the other townsfolk that tie in with the man who is haunting Audrey’s cottage, as well as some mysteries surrounding the ghost’s motives.

First off, I loved this movie, but it is definitely NOT for everyone. Matter of fact, I don’t know if I would really call it a horror movie per se; it has some creepy moments and eerie imagery, but it’s more like a gothic romance or a spooky character study than a horror film. I want to say it’s like a low-key mashup of The Woman In Black, The Others, and Truly, Madly, Deeply. The acting is fantastic, and the cinematography is gloomily stunning, but keep in mind that the pace of this thing is glacially slow, and even though I was intrigued by the story and stayed with it no problem, I can see how people might get impatient or bored, because it does take a while to get where it’s going. The whole interaction between Audrey and the ghost might also be a dealbreaker for some viewers, depending on how absurd (or not) you find the situation she finds herself in. Personally, like I said, I took it in the same vein as Truly, Madly, Deeply, which I adored, but your mileage may vary. Overall, I found this a really lovely piece of cinema, and I’m actually really glad I chose it, even though I have to say that the American cover art (top) featured on Hulu was really not indicative of its content and looked kinda generic and lame; as you can see below, the British cover on the bottom was much classier and more evocative of its style.

Next up was another ghost story, this one set in New England instead of old. The Legend of Lucy Keyes (2005) starred Julie Delpy and Justin Theroux as a city couple who move to a small town in Massachusetts when hubby is offered work on a project building a wind farm near Wachusett Mountain. This film is actually based on the real legend of four-year-old Lucy Keyes, who disappeared in the nearby woods in 1755, and the subsequent haunting of the area by her mother Martha, who to this day can allegedly be heard calling for her lost daughter in the forest. Significantly, the city couple in the movie also have a daughter named Lucy (as well as another one named Molly, but she doesn’t factor into the story too much), and things start to get increasingly ghostly from there. If you know the legend, you won’t be surprised by the outcome of the movie, but since I hadn’t heard the story before, I enjoyed following along as the mystery was solved.

Gotta say, I didn’t like this one nearly as much as Soulmate, but it was actually a decent enough way to spend two hours. Its production aesthetic was obviously not remotely in the same league as the first film, and in fact reminded me at times of a Lifetime made-for-TV type movie. The acting was fine (though the chemistry between the two leads was rather off, so much so that I was having a hard time believing they were supposed to be a loving married couple), and the little girl playing Lucy was actually pretty adorable (and that’s coming from someone who generally can’t stand child actors or children in general). The plot was suspenseful enough to keep me interested, though it did telegraph the mystery a tad. The ghost effects were a bit cheesy, and some of the “villain” characters (especially Brooke Adams as Samantha) were teetering on the edge of cartoonishly evil, but overall, not bad. This isn’t a film I would necessarily go out of my way to watch, but if you’re into New England-style ghost stories and are bored out of your skull one day, you could certainly do a lot worse.

Hope you enjoyed this first installment! I will probably have more in the coming weeks, depending on how much time I have to sit down and watch two movies in one sitting. Until next time, then, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.

The Goddess’s Favorite Creepy Movie Scenes, or It’s Not Kidnapping, It’s Borrowing

22 Jun 201519 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

I’m ashamed to say I had never heard of the movie I’m featuring today, which is the phenomenal British film Séance on a Wet Afternoon. It was recommended to me by a friend on Facebook, and over the weekend I sat down and spent a chilling two hours with it, marveling at its atmospheric mood and incredible psychological depth. It’s not a horror movie per se, but it is an intensely disturbing, absorbing thriller that garnered gobs and gobs of accolades when it came out back in 1964, including a Best Actress Oscar nomination for lead Kim Stanley. She lost to Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins, which is a terrible shame, though not all that surprising, frankly. Don’t get me wrong, I love Julie Andrews, but I definitely think Kim Stanley got robbed in this case. Her portrayal of a mentally unstable spirit medium was so nuanced and eerie that I found myself completely enthralled by the way her character came across as so sweet and harmless on the surface, while a manipulative, dark insanity lurked just beneath. Incidentally, if you’d like to watch for yourself, here you go, and if you’d like to read further, be warned that there will be spoilers:

The plot basically details a completely batshit scheme that working-class medium Myra Savage concocts to get attention and notoriety for her supposed psychic abilities. The film remains ambiguous about whether her abilities are real, but she clearly believes that they are, and that her stillborn son Arthur is acting as her spirit guide at the weekly séances she holds in their home. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know how much I love this type of ambiguity in films, and it’s especially good here; while we become unshakably certain over the course of the film that Myra is quite insane, we’re never entirely sure whether her mediumship is a cause or an effect of her insanity.

Using her cowed, milquetoast husband Billy (played by Richard Attenborough) to do her dirty work, Myra kidnaps (or “borrows,” as she insists on calling it) the daughter of a very wealthy, connected couple and ransoms the child for £25,000. Initially, Myra and Billy don’t plan to hurt the child or even keep the ransom money; their intentions are far more convoluted and insidious than that, and it’s implied that they’ve been refining the details for years. In a nutshell, they plan to keep the child and the ransom money hidden until Myra has made contact with the child’s parents and the police, whereupon she will claim that she has received messages from beyond that tell her where the child and the money can be found. She is sure that this will make a name for her throughout the land, and she hopes the news of her success will lead to fame and riches down the line.

As should be obvious from the type of film this is, the plan ultimately doesn’t go the way it was supposed to, and slowly sprouts ever more disturbing tendrils as Myra’s fragile hold on sanity begins to crumble away. Because the film doesn’t make clear from the beginning what the specifics of Myra’s plan are, and doesn’t explicitly lay out how she begins to subtly change the details as the story progresses, it’s a rather gripping watch; the tension keeps escalating as the viewer wonders what exactly the endgame is, and what exactly will go wrong.

The creepiest thing about this film, I thought, was the interplay between Myra and Billy, and the unspoken dynamic between them that made the presumably decent but weak-willed Billy go along with his wife’s obviously delusional ideas without too much complaint. Myra does not browbeat Billy into doing her will; she does not threaten him. Their relationship is such that she does not need to; she is able to convince him through the sheer force of her seemingly reasonable wheedling, and her slow escalation of requests that ultimately leave Billy in the same position as that fabled frog in boiling water. He obviously loves her dearly, and because he does, he has accepted that she sees him as nothing more than a tool to facilitate her own desires. In this way, Billy is quite a tragic character, subsuming his own identity and moral compass in deference to hers. At one point Myra tells him that the kidnapping of the child is simply a means to an end for them; no one is going to be hurt, she points out, and they won’t even be keeping the parents’ money, so what harm is there? “You agree with the end, don’t you?” she asks him in her soft, sweet voice, and when he assents, she follows with the seemingly logical conclusion, “Well, then you must agree with the means.” The great thing about this is that from their interactions, the viewer can really feel the weight of the years of their marriage behind them, of how her manipulation of Billy and his passive acceptance of it are simply par for the course. It is only at the very end of the film, when Myra has taken things one step too far, that Billy finally nuts up and blows the whistle on her, at which point she has lost her marbles to such a degree that she is no longer able to protest.

The scenes with Myra interacting with the kidnapped child are also pretty unsettling, as it’s clear that Myra views the girl in the exact same way she views Billy: As a thing that will get her the results she wants. She is never cruel to the child at all, but she is chillingly indifferent and detached, both when she speaks to her and when she speaks about her. That’s the great strength of Kim Stanley’s performance; the viewer is drawn in by her seemingly demure, motherly exterior and only slowly starts to realize that Myra is a sociopathic monster. It’s a fantastic study in the banality of evil.

Aside from the stellar characterization and almost unbearable suspense, the film also looks gorgeous, with lovely, atmospheric shots of candlelit faces around a séance table, or spooky houses reflected in puddles of rainwater. As I said before, it’s not strictly a horror film, but its look and subject matter definitely put it in the same league with the great ghost stories and thrillers of the period, and I would recommend it for any fans of either genre; it’s just a shame it’s not better known.

Stay tuned for more good stuff later in the week, and until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.

The Goddess’s Favorite Creepy Movie Scenes, or Little Red Smiting Hood

30 Sep 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / 3 Comments

If you’ve done even a cursory reading of my other blog posts in this series, you’ll know that the films and scenes I tend to write about are not focused so much on shock or gore as they are on conveying a sense of deep, lingering unease. I feel that movies and scenes that can accomplish this feat successfully are much rarer, for instilling a lasting dread in a viewer is always going to be far more difficult than simply making them jump in their seats or showing them something that turns their stomach. As I mentioned before, I’m not going to belittle horror films that take the easy way out; I’ve enjoyed a great many of them, after all. But my favorite horror is always going to be predicated upon that tightening noose of apprehension, that eerie, nightmarish imagery that sticks with you for sometimes years afterward, that subtly creeping menace that makes you almost regret ever even watching the thing in the first place.

As a case study, I now present a discussion of what I feel is one of the finest horror films of the 1970s. It’s a critically adored piece of filmmaking, but I definitely feel that it sometimes gets short shrift in the “popular” culture of horror films. Part of this may be due to the fact that it’s British, and perhaps more restrained and adult-oriented than the usual horror fare; in fact, it could almost be classified as an “art film.” Part of it may be due to its fractured, confusing narrative and its obsessive repetition of themes. Whatever the reason, though, I hope that those of you who have never seen it will sit down in a darkened room and give it a chance, because I guarantee that you will be in for a truly unsettling experience. One caveat, though: if you’re going to watch it, you might want to wait to read my recap until afterward, because I’m going to spoil the hell out of it. With that warning, let’s continue, shall we?

Donald Sutherland is well-known for having the best epic eyeroll in the business.

1973’s Don’t Look Now was based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier (who also wrote Rebecca and The Birds, both of which, of course, were adapted to film by Alfred Hitchcock) and was directed by Nicholas Roeg, an idiosyncratic filmmaker known for such works as Performance, The Man Who Fell To Earth, and the Roald Dahl adaptation The Witches. Roeg’s signature directorial style (and also his visual style, as he started out in the biz as a cinematographer) is all over Don’t Look Now, from the disjointed plot construction to the recurring instances of symbolism. It’s definitely a film that rewards multiple viewings and reveals hidden layers with each rewatch.

Ah, an innocent little girl skipping along right next to an ominous body of water. What could possibly go wrong?

In brief, Don’t Look Now is the story of a married couple, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) who are grief-stricken after the accidental drowning death of their daughter Christine (Sharon Williams). To help deal with their loss, John accepts a job restoring an old cathedral in Venice, and the couple move from England to Italy in order to get away from their painful memories.

But naturally, things never work out that simply in a horror film. They have only been in Venice for a short time before Laura is approached by two sisters, one of whom is a blind psychic, in a restaurant bathroom. The psychic tells Laura that her daughter is with her and is happy, even describing the distinctive red raincoat Christine was wearing when she drowned. Laura is overjoyed at the news and believes unreservedly, but John is far more skeptical, and gently tries to discourage Laura’s “fancies.”

However, it soon becomes clear that something untoward is going on, no matter how skeptical John may be. Not only is there a murderer running loose around Venice, but John begins seeing fleeting glimpses of what appears to be a child in a red raincoat around the city. Laura, still heartened by the psychic’s pronouncement, agrees to go to a seance held by the two sisters, at which they tell her that her dead daughter has informed them that John is in danger. John gets angry at all of this psychic nonsense, and he and his wife have a blistering argument where much of their resentments about their daughter’s death come to the fore.

The next morning, they receive a phone call. It turns out that the couple’s son, who is at a boarding school back in England, has been injured in a fall. Laura immediately leaves Italy to tend to him, while John stays behind. Strangely, though, John sees his just-departed wife later that very same day. She is dressed in mourning and standing on a funeral boat in the canal, along with the two weird sisters. He passes her in another boat, and calls to her, though she doesn’t seem to hear him. Confused by her presence when she is supposed to be in England, and concerned about the murders happening around the city, he calls the police and reports her missing. Suspicious police decide to have John tailed instead, as he combs the city for any sign of his wife or the sisters he saw her with. Then, in a moment of clarity, he calls his son’s boarding school and is informed that Laura is there, and had arrived precisely when she should have, judging from the time she left Italy. Severely confused now, John informs the police that his wife is fine and not missing after all. Then later, in the street, he sees the red-clad figure again and chases after it. It should go without saying in a movie like this, but it doesn’t end well.

Taking a slight detour on the way to grandma’s house.

Director Roeg is a master at fostering a bizarre sense of dislocation in the viewer, but also at wrenching a cloying sense of menace out of every frame in this film. He does this through means both obvious and insidious. First of all, whenever Italian is spoken in the film, Roeg chose not to subtitle it, so that a non-speaker watching the film would feel just as adrift and confused as the characters. Secondly, he plays heavily on the theme of precognition, refusing to make clear whether what we are seeing on screen is happening in the present, the past, or the future, and deliberately chops up the narrative so that it is presented to us in a largely non-linear way. Thirdly, he uses several recurring motifs as portents of disaster: water, glass breaking, the color red, falling objects and people, the sense that “nothing is as it seems.” There is a constant sense of being stared at by hostile-seeming bystanders, there are subtle references to the murders which are never explicitly shown, and just an overall sense of displacement that contributes to the feelings of loss and relationship breakdown that the characters are experiencing. Roeg also makes great use of the dark, gothic back alleys of Venice to ramp up the creepy factor.

Several scenes stick out, but there are really only two that I’d like to briefly discuss. And before you get your hopes up, no, one of them isn’t the VERY explicit sex scene that caused so much controversy when this film came out in 1973. I may discuss it one of these days if I ever do a series on oddly hot moments that inexplicably turned up in horror films, but for now, let’s keep to the scary. Sorry, horndogs. 🙂

The opening scene is fantastic in establishing many of the themes explored in the film. The family is still in England at this point, and the daughter is not yet dead. Christine, in fact, is playing out in the yard in her red raincoat, while her brother idly rides his bicycle not far away. Inside the house, John and Laura are sitting before the fire. Laura is poring through a book looking for the answer to a question Christine asked her about frozen bodies of water (there’s one of those motifs), while John is looking through slides of the cathedral he is going to be restoring. In one of the shots, he notices a red-hooded figure seated in a pew before a stained glass window. He looks at the slide through a magnifying glass, and suddenly we see what looks like a red arm extending from the figure, though closer examination reveals that it is a tendril of blood, eerily working its way across the slide. The sight of the blood gives John a moment of precognitive dread, and he bolts from the house and out into the yard. Unfortunately, he is too late to save Christine, and is reduced to dragging her lifeless body from the pond and howling in agonized grief.

The second scene I’d like to focus on is the final one, in which all of the director’s leitmotifs culminate in one of the most unsettling sequences in horror cinema. John has seen that elusive red-hooded figure again as he is walking in the street, and begins to chase after it. The blind psychic, of course, has had a vision that John is in mortal danger, and Laura, who has returned from England, begins to run after him. He follows the figure up a spiral staircase to the tower of a cathedral. Laura cannot get in, and is reduced to reaching through the locked gates and yelling for him. John opens a door, and sees the little red-hooded figure standing against the wall, with its back to him. He thinks he hears it crying, and he tells it that he’s a friend, that he won’t hurt it. “Come on,” he says, encouragingly. There is another shot of Laura reaching through the wrought iron gate and calling for him, and then a flashback of the photographic slide with the red-hooded figure sitting in the pew. And then, the red-hooded figure turns around, y’all.

Aww, look, it’s my sweet little dead daughter!

OH HELL NO.

Not a pretty little blonde-haired girl at all, is it? No, it is a disturbingly wizened little woman. She approaches John, shaking her head, and then there are intercut shots of the blind psychic screaming, of the Baxters’ son running across their yard in England, of John embracing a stone gargoyle. “Wait,” says John, and then the tiny, terrifying woman, who in case you hadn’t figured it out is actually the serial killer running loose around Venice, pulls a cleaver from her pocket and thunks John right in the neck. There is a confusing array of images encompassing the past and present: John falling backward, Laura screaming, John holding his dead daughter in the pond, Christine’s red ball, John holding his wife’s hand in a restaurant, a mermaid brooch one of the sisters had been wearing. It’s all set to the discordant sound of church bells clanging. John’s life essentially flashes before his eyes as he lies there and bleeds out upon the floor.

And thus John, who spent the entire film discounting the existence of precognition (even though he experienced it himself just before Christine’s death), has had his second vision fulfilled, even though at the time he wasn’t aware that it was a vision: when he inexplicably saw Laura and the two sisters on the funeral boat, he was seeing the future, and seeing his wife mourning HIS death, not their daughter’s. A fantastically crafted film all around, and one the Goddess enthusiastically recommends.

Until next time, Goddess out.