By Annie Riordan
Let’s go back to 1995 for a second. Admittedly, it wasn’t the best era for horror. The days of video store rental gems were waning, the internet was brand new, the economy was reasonably well adjusted; there just wasn’t much demand for horror, and certainly not of the DTV variety. Blockbuster was slim pickings. I mean, seriously – look at this list. Pretty pathetic, right? About halfway down that anaemic little list, you’ll see a listing for a film called “Haunted” starring Aidan Quinn and a then-mostly-unknown Kate Beckinsale. It’s a late Edwardian tale of ghosts, set in a grand English manor house, where a paranormal sceptic is sent to investigate (disprove) tales of haunty happenings. It was a “meh” little movie, easily overshadowed by the ghost movies to come in the next decade – The Others, The Orphanage, The Devil’s Backbone, etc. But it is to this forgettable little ghost story of nearly twenty years past that 2012’s The Awakening owes its greatest debt.
The Awakening is a late Edwardian tale of ghosts, set in a grand English manor house, where a paranormal sceptic is sent to investigate (disprove) tales of haunty happenings. The only difference between the first ten minutes of Haunted and the first ten minutes of The Awakening is the fact that the star this time around is a female girl of the woman sex. Other than that, the similarities are uncanny to the point of being plagaristic.
Florence Cathcart is a strong willed, slightly arrogant budding feminist in post WWI England. She’s written a book, exposing the fraudulence at work behind the seances and spirit photography so popular in the tea parlor society of the times. Now she makes a living, crashing occult gatherings and catching false mediums in the act. She’s not a very popular girl, but dammit, she has her reasons. Her boyfriend was killed in the war and somehow she deals with her guilt by busting ghosts.
So it’s surprising that she initially refuses to investigate a large school for boys out in the English countryside. One boy is dead, supposedly at the hands of the ghost. The ghost himself – a young boy – has been caught in several photographs, spanning years during which he never ages. All of the students are frightened by footsteps, whispers, apparitions in the dark hallways. Flo finally agrees. After all, the timing is perfect – the school is closing for a weeks holiday and the teacher sent to fetch her is reasonably handsome, so off she goes with her cameras, her guilt and her lucky cigarette case.
Flo solves the case of the recently murdered boy pretty quickly, and is already packing for her return to London when a series of freaky occurrences persuade her to stay. A spooky dollhouse, a hidden room in the wall and a frightened little boy named Tom all figure into the plot…but is the old school really haunted, or is Florence finally losing her mind?
The answer, as it turns out, is not one I was anticipating. But just because I didn’t see the twist coming doesn’t necessarily mean it was worth waiting for. It was overly convoluted, to say the least, and the resulting revelation PLUS an almost immediate double climax is so bogged down by melodrama that it’s like trying to choke down a deep fried candy bar that’s been marinated in molasses, topped with treacle and sprinkled with pure sugar crystals. It’s simply too much, and capped as it is with an ending that can only be called “ambiguous”, it’s also frustrating as all hell. I wanted answers and an ending, but I only got a little of both.
The Awakening has quite a few things in its favor: lovely atmosphere, solid cast, nice period touches. But it borrows too heavily from its predecessors and never really repays its debts either to them or its audience. It’s also not scary at all, in any way shape or form. It markets itself as a ghost story, but it’s really a psych drama. Which is fine, but when I rent a ghost story I want a ghost story, goddammit. I want to be spooked and startled, not bored and confused.
The Awakening, despite its lofty ambitions, is just slightly less “meh” than Haunted was.