The way that I first found out about its existence no doubt did a great disservice to A Ghost Story. Remember that Guardian newspaper article from July, which argued for something called ‘post-horror’? Post-horror is, of course, simply the latest in a long line of terms invented by people who can’t quite accept that they may have liked or made some horror: we’ve had dark fantasy, social thrillers, and now we have post-horror; Nia has already debunked this more succinctly than I could do here. But the fact is, this was my first introduction to David Lowery’s film, and it could easily have poisoned the well. To anyone in a similar position, I’d say – see the film. It may be the case that it isn’t to your tastes: it’s a quiet, subtle and almost voiceless film, with minimal action and the majority of its quite devastating messages left to audience imagination. But it also manages to be one of the most horrific stories about time that I have ever seen, adding a different perspective to the old staple idea of ‘a haunting’ which has the potential to really get under your skin. It’s certainly got under mine.
The nameless couple at the heart of the story (played by Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) seem to be deeply in love – we start by seeing them cuddled intimately and sharing stories, with ‘M’ (Mara) describing how, as a child, she moved around a lot and would always write and hide small pieces of paper bearing messages – so that she left a little of herself wherever she’d been. Moving forward, the couple now seem to be planning a move of their own, away from the small house which will go on to figure hugely in the film. M seems more engaged by all of this than her partner, ‘C’, but in the rapid-fire way which is a hallmark of this film, we move forward again: C has been killed in an accident, right outside the house. His partner has to identify his body, which she does, in an understated but moving scene. All of this is traumatic in its own right; she pulls the sheet back over his face, and leaves his body behind.
At this point, C sits bolt upright. The sheet which covers him stays in place, referencing the old idea of ghosts wearing shrouds (see the alleged ghost photograph taken at Newby Church in the UK as an example) and also the prevalent idea in Western culture that ghosts remain because of some sort of unfinished business. Instead of walking through what looks like an exit, which is incidentally the only slightest nod to conventional ideas about the afterlife in the film, he walks home. From now, the character is mute and invisible. Whereas in a book like The Lovely Bones, where the deceased narrator is again drawn back towards their loved ones, in the novel we have just that – a narrator. Here. we have to read the ghost’s actions, even gestures, and we can do no more. We do know, however, that C’s ghost is fascinated by M, and desperate to reach out to her. Here. it could easily have segued into something which feels familiar – a Ghost (1990) for the Tumblr generation, where things seem bleaker but more picturesque as a rule. However, the key moment comes when M moves out; the ghost remains, trapped, waiting for her. Weeks – or years, decades? – go by. He observes life unfolding, but it is intermittent; a moment gives way to a different season, different residents. Still the ghost is there, (usually) invisible and unable to voice his thoughts. In this, A Ghost Story is indeed a horror story, because there can be few things more horrifying than the prospect of an eternity in this state.
And it’s time – not any evident God or other force – which drives the quiet horror of the film. C’s ghost is fixated on achieving something in the house, but seems to forget, or time runs away from him, or he begins to observe things around him, which are distracting. The mundane holds sway, he observes day upon day upon day of it, yet he seemingly lacks the ability to focus on things of his choosing. We accompany him in this confused, unsettlingly non-linear state, allowed to tune in only at certain moments; the effect of this is very eerie, almost unpalatable. Things which we see or hear only underline the great powerlessness of this key, yet unspeaking, faceless being, and by proxy, us (though a particularly overt nihilistic speech takes a moment to hammer that powerlessness home). And time is huge – it can wipe everything away, or do worse. The film forces us to contemplate how time is doing the very same thing to us, with some key scenes in particular showing just how tenuous it all is, and how the mundane can easily shift to something cataclysmic. It’s all presented in such picturesque fashion, too, that this only underlines the deep sadness here.
A Ghost Story presents age-old concerns and truisms in an artistic, innovative and finely-detailed form. It takes away many of the markers audiences might be expecting, but in so doing, it casts us adrift in the same settings and states as C, which allows the film to cast a very sombre spell. As I said earlier in the review, its low-pitched approach will be too quiet for some (I heard someone bemoaning this as the credits rolled) but after expecting something rather smug, something deliberately ‘post-horror’, instead I found a film which is imaginative, sophisticated and incredibly affecting. It’s rare – rarer than I’d like – that I see a film which I keep returning to in my head, days after the fact: A Ghost Story definitively achieves this, with next to no dialogue and only little exposition. Sometimes that which speaks least speaks the loudest, and there are no easy answers to be had.
A Ghost Story is now showing in selected UK cinemas.
In a small US theatre, the cast of avant-garde performance The Night Owl are readying themselves for their big opening night. In true Stanislavsky style, the director wants everyone locked in, so that they can really get into their roles. This is a health and safety disaster waiting to happen in its own right, so it’s even more of a shocker when a psychopathic luvvie breaks out of a nearby psychiatric hospital that very night, dons the suitably eerie owl mask being used in the performance and then runs amok, picking off the actors one by one. Yep, this is the film most commonly now known as Stage Fright (or StageFright, but I’ll stick with the distinct words if I may), the first film made by director Michele Soavi as a foray away from his mentor Dario Argento: it carries a lot of the hallmarks of Argento’s work, as you’d suppose it might, but it also shows a director already more than capable of committing his own style to celluloid.
There’s so much to love about this film, and perhaps after an interval of thirty years one of the first things you notice is just how roaringly 80s it is: not the most compelling opening statement to make about a film from this era, true, but for someone who grew up in the 80s, a patterned stocking here, some teased hair there and the addition of a Cramps shirt are all pleasantly familiar, because nostalgia can have a pull as strong as gravity: on a superficial level, Stage Fright starts life as Flash Dance with added weapons, a horror riff on a new on-screen trend. But, at a safe distance, you can see less salubrious elements too – people struggling to make their rent, a woman so hellbent on retrieving her damn gold wristwatch that she will risk death to get it back (several times) and the sleazy, predatory money man who has a say both in how the play is performed and what the girls do for him. Quelle change, I suppose, but for me it has that veneer of its era. Not for nothing does Soavi give us the scene where blood spatters over a stack of dollar bills – it’s like a little symbolic ode to the decade.
For all that, this is a horror film, and by this point in the 80s, horror was established enough and popular enough to be self-referential on a scale not seen before: horror cinema had often become about the knowing nod, relying on audiences to know some of the conventions, or at least to have seen enough of the wealth of films already floating around and far more readily available, thanks to good ol’ analogue technology. Freddy Krueger was doing the rounds by now, wisecracking and gurning for the camera as he terrorized teenagers; Henenlotter was grossing audiences out with his body gore gags; even Romero could afford to reference his own work in the otherwise relentlessly grim Day of the Dead (remember the little jingle from Dawn which plays over the zombie being left in the dark to ‘think about what he’d done’?) Stage Fright, too, is often cleverly self-referential, and deserves more dues for it. The whole film-about-a-play which is itself based on an exploitation script, where in one scene director Peter matter-of-factly announces that it’s time to give the rape scene a go, seems to me to be a spin on the behind-the-scenes elements of many of the films being made under the masked killer banner around this time. It’s an actor who initiates the horror here, after losing his mind in his acting career.
Tellingly, Peter is also insistent that when serial killer Irving Wallace gets loose, a ‘real event’ like this will help him to sell theatre tickets. Again, how many horror films have been either based on real events, or even rumoured to contain ‘real footage’? Peter’s an old crook, but he might even be right – well, so long as there are enough actors left to perform. Also, back when Stage Fright was made, it took its place amongst a number of films where antagonists deliberately broke the specific ‘fourth wall’ of the TV/cinema screen (like The Video Dead, Demons 2) or the horror begins in a theatre or cinema, such as Demons (which has a lot of crossover cast members with Stage Fright). Threat and murder merge with performance: bodies become props, and in Stage Fright the final, most obvious nod to genre film is in the glaringly obvious and literal murder set piece which Wallace eventually puts together. I suppose today we might call all of this ‘meta-‘, but in our jaded twenty-first century parlance, that’s become a bit pejorative, sadly. We’ll just say instead that Stage Fright does more than tell a straightforward story, whilst managing not to forget to tell it altogether.
In many ways, Stage Fright belongs squarely in the by-now-established slasher genre, a place where it’s often filed away: early promotional materials emphasised the goriness, and in fairness, we have the nasty weapons, the omniscient killer and the ubiquitous ‘final girl’. But, this is a Soavi film. Not content to tell a story within a story and just hack and stab a route straight through it, Stage Fright also manages to interweave some of the Gothic elements which had been appearing in the genre since Bava first blazed a trail – linking gialli to Gothic – and which led to Argento bringing his creepy aesthetics to violent gore. Soavi’s adaptation of Gothic elements is gentler and more traditional than Argento, I feel (it’s also quite coy on nudity, as an aside) but the Gothic is undoubtedly there. The pathetic fallacy of an ominous rainstorm had been doing the rounds for centuries, then we have a black cat stalking through the set (completely unperturbed by the human suffering, obviously) and what looks like a Gothic artist Caspar David Friedrichs-style painted backdrop, at one side of the 80s backdrop being used by the Night Owl cast. Oh, and a huge mad owl, which is pretty Gothic too. After cutting his teeth on a Gothic slasher, Soavi went on to make a Gothic zombie movie in Dellamorte Dellamore – so he clearly enjoys using these aesthetics into his work, and does so brilliantly.
All of this, and in a well-paced, taut piece of cinema which doesn’t waste aimless minutes trying to be ponderous or edgy. It’s a roll call of genre stars, too, with Giovanni Lombardo Radice doing a camp turn as a dancer, Barbara Cupisti as Alicia, David Brandon as the sardonic Englishman Peter (catch the future echoes of Francesco Dellamorte) and – though he’s uncredited – it’s the co-writer of the film and Anthropophagus the Beast himself, George Eastman, running around with the owl head on. Keen eyes might also notice the Anthropophagus promo photograph perched in one of the dressing rooms. Just to throw one more name in here, a trivia fact on IMDb suggests that sleaze lord director Joe D’Amato at one time planned to remake Stage Fright under the title Willy Shocks Treatment, where the killer would be clad in light bulbs, but I’m not sure if my mind can fully comprehend this…anyway…
Soavi continued to explore the Gothic in The Church, refining his own visual style and atmosphere, but sadly concluded his forays into the horror genre with Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetery Man) – which is one of my favourite films – in the early Nineties. As my co-writer Ben said when I mentioned writing this piece, Soavi has been residing in the ‘where are they now?’ category ever since, at least as far as film fans would appreciate it: these days, his filmography is awash with TV movies, which don’t look particularly engaging to my (admittedly untrained) eye. So why did such a promising and innovative director pack it all in, when he seemed to be on the up?
This is always a difficult one for me, as I suppose I want directors whose work I like to be as dedicated to genre film as my imagination supposes they are. In actuality, there are lots of other factors at play, one of which might well be a complete distaste for making any more horror, as well as the usual stuff about money and funding. And then, Soavi’s old mentor Argento is still making horror films, and his work has progressed from the sublime to the ridiculous, so…a long career in horror can be a difficult path to take. You never know what the future will hold. But at least I’ve seen a film about a mad killer in an owl mask at least once, and I think we can appreciate, even at thirty years on, what a well-executed piece of horror entertainment Stage Fright really is. Should Michele Soavi ever fancy a return to this kind of fare, it’d be impossible not to welcome it.
Considering their importance to the subculture consciousness – y’know, having probably dismantled hippie culture ready for the start of the 70s – cinematic versions of (or interpretations of) the Manson Family murders have always been…problematic, shall we say. Some of the very vaguest of nods to the case have been played for great, exploitative fun (such as I Drink Your Blood) whilst some have gone for the full art-house treatment (such as Jim Van Bebber’s The Manson Family) and – for me – not quite worked. It’s a different prospect altogether when you actually namedrop the case, as Wolves at the Door chooses to do: the Manson Family inspiration is right there, writ large on the cover art. Openly using such a well-known case has its issues; these are also writ large all over this film.
It all starts fairly no-nonsense, looking for all the world like every other home invasion movie which we may have seen over the past decade or so: some white suburbanites have someone shadowy and apparently very strong break into their home, where they daub words like ‘PIG’ in blood on their doors. The cops arrive, and fill in the gaps for us: it seems that some young hippies, or radicals, or other 60s-style ne’er-do-wells have been doing similar things all over LA – though one cop acknowledges – rather significantly – that this most recent attack seems to show that it’s ramping up a bit. We then cut to a slightly soporific gathering of twentysomethings – where one of their party is about to go away, and so is being given gifts and so on before they head back home together. You know what this means, folks: it’s someone’s Last Night. Alongside a police officer’s Last Shift, this is dangerous territory. I should also say that one of the group is a pregnant actress called Sharon…
True enough, soon the gang of young nasties are on the approach to the soporifics’ house, where they spend an awful lot of time channeling the slasher antiheroes who had yet to appear in cinemas at that stage, by appearing silently in doorways, seemingly defying logic and physics to be everywhere at once, and also moving with the silent certainty of a Jason Voorhees or a Michael Myers. As for the rest of the film, I’d normally be wary of spoilers, but in this case, there’s hardly the need. The nasties get into the house; bad things ensue, but nothing too horrifically recognisable from the Manson case files, which makes the whole thing feel simultaneously a tad disparaging and rather pointless.
See, this is the thing when you oh-so loudly and proudly declare that your film is based on the Manson murders. These murders are amongst the nastiest and most well-known from the era, and to this day, horror films shy away from torturing and killing heavily-pregnant women (as an example) so this leaves the film at an impasse: do you recreate all of the grisly details from the case, dare any disapproval, and also land yourself the task of creating tension around events which many viewers will already know well? Or do you deviate from the case, despite name-checking it – and, if you do something rather different, won’t you be held to account for that? These are issues which dog Wolves at the Door throughout, but, I’m sad to say, they’re only some of the flaws causing issues with the film.
Wolves at the Door plumps for the most simplistic approach possible throughout. Plot markers are thrust home in an unnecessary and rather uncomfortable way, I must say, and any endeavours to make us like characters who are so transparently about to be carved up always fall flat; more time is taken on needless props and jargon words to convince us that yes, this is in fact the late 60s. All of these irritations are magnified by the fact that you already know – more or less – what’s going to happen, especially when you see that some new perspective is not going to be forthcoming. Even at a running time of just 70 minutes, the weight of expectation – together with the dull pains of familiarity – makes the film feel incredibly slow.
In its race to be a HORROR FILM, too, Wolves at the Door also mashes loads of elements from other, quite separate genres together in a way which makes me feel that director John R. Leonetti may know a little about the horror genre (he’s worked in a variety of settings and genres) but doesn’t have high regard for its fans. As already mentioned, some of the scenes look like they’re Straight Outta Halloween, but in other places, the home invaders resemble Japanese ghosts (long hair in face, supernatural silence, moving as if on coasters) and everywhere, there are problems with that whole jump scare thing which only works, if we can call it working, by frying your nerves. Imaginative, this ain’t – and when images and news reel footage finally appear to try once and for all to link this lacklustre film to that horrifying and significant sequence of real events, it feels like the only genuine surprise we get: what a pity it also feels like an insult.
Wolves at the Door is available on DVD and digital download now.
With some films it’s clear, even from the opening seconds, that they are not going to provide an easy viewing experience, and this is definitely the case with Malady (2015), a first feature-length from director Jack James which I’ll confess has left a rather unpleasant aftertaste with me. This emotional effect has been carefully constructed, of course, and it’s there every step of the way. As the opening scenes blend emotional exchanges between a dying mother and her adult daughter, Holly (Roxy Bugler) with the end result – her funeral – there’s an immediate weight and sense of dread here. Holly’s mother spends her dying breath imploring her soon-to-be bereaved daughter to “find love”: left with little else, Holly tries to move on and fulfill her mother’s last wish, pushing herself to go out into the world – though it’s a struggle, and this frail young woman doesn’t seem particularly willing or able to feel at ease.
However, by chance she meets a thoughtful young man, Matthew, who seems to have plenty of morbid preoccupations of his own, though just what these are is left a mystery at this stage. Matthew and Holly’s early courtship is rather unconventional, shall we say, and dinner, drinks and a chatty stroll home are not on the cards – but nevertheless, after an awkward night together, Holly decides to stay. A relationship forms.
The thing is, when people get together off the back of some great trauma, the damage they’ve experienced will probably seep through, somewhere. As Holly – played with genuine frailty by Bugler here – seems to be on the verge of recuperation, as insecure and grief-stricken as she clearly still is, Matthew (Kemal Yildirim) receives a phonecall. His own mother is, apparently, dying. Holly feels herself to be well-placed to offer support on this, given her own circumstances, but after accompanying her almost-silent new partner to his mother’s house, it becomes clear that there’s an altogether different set of maternal anxieties to contend with there. What follows is an oppressive unfolding of family drama, where every line of dialogue and every looks seems imbued with sinister, sickly significance.
There is a great deal to admire in how this film has been shot and soundtracked, each of which show a lot of care and skill. The discordant sound design is superb: it gets going as soon as the film begins and rarely lets up throughout. As for the shooting, the film is underpinned with anxiety, and it keeps the pressure on the nerves by its relentless focus on people’s hands, as well as their facial expressions. The close, often unsteady camera work lends a suitably claustrophobic feel to the film – even the intimate scenes feel unseemly via this technique – but then to balance this, there’s thoughtful shot composition and lighting, often rich with lots of contrasts. Appearances can be deceptive, perhaps: scenes can be warm and inviting, but the human drama unfolding is anything but warm. Human relationships in this film are not straightforward, to say the least, and the film’s style mirrors that.
The overall effect of Malady is unnerving. It’s far closer to art-house than to conventional storytelling with its emphasis on emotional states, not plot. Along those lines, I’d say that you’d need to be in contemplative mood to sit through this slow-paced psychological study. It’s not easy viewing, does not offer any cosy reconciliations or explanations, and it won’t provide you with a neat, linear narrative arc, either. Its subject matter is often (usually!) difficult, and to get at the truth of what’s been going on here, you need to go through some uncomfortable mental gap-filling which won’t make you feel particularly good. All in all then, I’d say that Malady is an excellent example of its kind, one which will stay with you, but should be approached with due awareness of its harrowing subject matter and intense style. This all makes it as hard to review as to watch, but what’s clear is that director Jack James has talent and has here created something bizarre and unique out of bereavement, love and loss.
Editor’s note: this article contains a full discussion of Night of the Eagle and as such contains spoilers.
“I DO NOT BELIEVE” are the first words both spoken and seen in Night of the Eagle. These words are the crux of a lecture being given by Professor Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde), a rational man who is deeply cynical about the new wave of magical thinking already diffusing through society by the 1960s. However, by this point in time, the supremacy of science and rationalism was already fraught with problems; as Taylor acknowledges, magic may have let the genie out of the lamp, but science was by then poised to unleash nuclear warfare. It’s the first acknowledgement of a broader malaise which filters through in the film: although it’s a microcosm, real-life concerns, such as professionalism and promotion, collide with the prospect of older, supernatural forces, and the end result is great anxiety and risk for all concerned.
Taylor is a success story, with a successful career, a beautiful and charming wife (Janet Blair) and two homes, although it’s wife Tansy, in the main, who seems to use their seaside cottage. He’s also in the frame for promotion within the university, despite a few problems rumbling along in his life – a female student who seems to be skating dangerously close to an inappropriate interest in him, her envious (and academically weak) boyfriend and perhaps most insidiously of all, other women in his life – colleagues and the wives of colleagues – who are bastions of passive-aggressive carping and bitter jealousy regarding him, though with characteristic 60s swagger, Taylor brushes this off, perhaps too readily. Tansy is less convinced, regarding one of the wives in particular as a ‘middle-aged Medusa’, but it seems that she has her secrets, too.
Appearances can be deceptive…
After a dreary Friday night playing bridge with a selection of oblivious males and watchful females, Tansy begins to act strangely. After their guests leave, Tansy becomes frantic, looking for something which she claims is a shopping list. Eventually, she finds what she’s looking for: an effigy, like a voodoo doll, woven into the fringes of a standard lamp. Taylor, a little baffled by her panic, continues to get ready for bed, but at around the same time he finds something very strange in one of the bedroom drawers – a dead spider in a ceramic pot. She demurs, saying it’s just a souvenir from their time living in Jamaica, but within a short space of time the Taylors’ quaint, domestic cottage is suddenly turning up a whole host of curios, charms and spells; it’s like looking again at a photograph and suddenly noticing a host of new details that you missed on the first glance. Taylor, the thinker, is decidedly unimpressed. The final straw comes with his discovery of a range of phials of graveyard dirt: he insists that the whole lot gets consigned to the fire, despite Tansy’s by now desperate pleadings that dark forces are poised to destroy him without her protections. True enough, almost the moment that the flames consume the charms (including, accidentally, a locket portrait of himself) Taylor’s extraordinary luck begins to fail. Blind chance, or something more?
The overriding feeling in Night of the Eagle is one of the loss of control: for me, it’s very difficult not to sympathise with Taylor – and by extension, the (largely) orderly world in which we live – as rule, principle and procedure dissipate. Suddenly, the world begins to move very fast; emotions spill over, rules are broken, even technology becomes unsafe. In a few deft moves which take place off-screen, the Taylors’ home is suddenly stripped of its modern conveniences. We even get a bit of pathetic fallacy – check out the ominous storm which precedes the first big scare and voila, a picturesque cottage in 60s Britain becomes a Gothic castle, complete with a malevolent thing on the doorstep, trying to get in – whilst making surely one of the most terrifying sounds ever committed to celluloid. But there’s no simple escape: when the lights come back on, even the analogue tech itself has become a conduit for black magic, a theme which returns right up to the film’s climactic scenes. The twentieth century is stripped back and pushed down into the murky past.
The dawning of the age of…
Unquestionably, Cold War era paranoia holds hands with magic in Night of the Eagle, from the moment it’s invoked in the first scene of the film until the very last scenes. It’s signposted once, but it lingers in the film throughout. The idea of people who look like us and act like us, but harbour destructive secrets and want to overthrow us by any means is something integral to so many films of the era. However, this also shows parity with the beliefs of the past, when it was witchcraft which threatened to do the same thing. At this time too, the irony is that the very real fear of the four-minute warning was very likely to have made people drift away from the rationalism which had made such a thing possible, even likely. The early 60s were already seeing a steady resurgence of interest in new-old religions, magic and paganism. This is the difficult impasse which seems to form the backbone of Night of the Eagle: the dark side of rationalism led people to look to the past, but the practices of the past they resurrected brought additional paranoia and the threat of harm. These things cast their shadows over the film, whether overtly or covertly. Night of the Eagle also excels, via its script, at reminding us just how long our relationship with magic has been. It’s thoroughly interwoven with our language, and it’s there in the dialogue: ideas are ‘bewitching’, people act as ‘good luck charms’, people laughingly suggest people ‘sell their soul to the devil’ for a good outcome. The script is simply able to add the phrase ‘we can press a button’, and we know now what that signifies, too.
“Witch or woman, what was it?”
Although Night of the Eagle’s approach to gender (and to race) can feel out of step with modern thinking, it’s an important factor in the film’s plot, and gender is very important in the film. Tansy is a housewife: Taylor implies that boredom has therefore driven her to her magical practices, but she insists – quite vociferously – otherwise. What Tansy is doing is operating within the domestic sphere where she ‘belongs’ to control the external environment, as witches have long done historically. Think about the stereotype of a witch: the cauldron, the broom. Objects which were part of the average home hundreds of years ago were imaginatively ritually re-purposed for witchcraft. Tansy isn’t so different, and even Taylor acknowledges that we – women – still use ritual in our daily lives, whatever form it takes; it’s just that Tansy is performing ritual magic. As much it pains me to hear Tansy castigated as ‘hysterical’ by her husband (oh, that word…) and to also see her on the reverse of that – utterly catatonic and self-sacrificial, that does not ultimately take away from the great power held by women in the film, or the wildly malevolent joy with which Flora Carr (Margaret Johnston) intones the words ‘burn, witch, burn’ as she attempts to kill Tansy – a phrase which gave the film its alternative title. It seems that Flora may have been defending her ward, a student who alleged that Taylor had sexually attacked her – or, she simply believed what she chose to believe. Incidentally, Flora does have a role outside the home, so she can add black magic to her professional credentials – although, by the end of the film, we’re shown in no uncertain terms that women really couldn’t have it all at the time.
If women are harmful sleeper agents, then consider also the impact of the Taylors’ tenure in Jamaica, where – we are told – Tansy first picked up her magical habit from fraternising with the locals. You don’t have too look too far for anxiety about the effects of a more ‘primitive’ belief system on a more developed one, and that could easily form the basis of a completely different article, but I will say this: the impact of this Jamaican magic is of note within Night of the Eagle because, as Tansy says, “it seemed to work”. It’s not simply harmful because it’s Other – it’s simply harmful. As we have seen in Svetlana’s feature on American folk horror, Haitian supernatural practices have become interwoven with American folk beliefs: this is another example of the terrific impact of racial and cultural Others on a Western cultural landscape. In the 1960s, ideas of horror seemed to have to adjust to this ever-changing landscape, poised to degrade at any time and sweep modernity away. Even wives were weaponising; even beliefs were vulnerable and permeable.
Folk horror and Night of the Eagle
This idea of precarious modernity is at the heart of a great deal of folk horror, and to my mind Night of the Eagle does share enough common ground here to qualify as folk horror – even if an outlier in a sub-genre which proves tricky to pin down anyway. First of all, Night of the Eagle does an excellent job of making the viewer feel nettled, uneasy – the way which Things are Supposed to Be is balanced on a knife-edge, and these things come tumbling down in quick succession. The creeping influence of witchcraft is making its way into modern life, content to kill those who stand in its way. In fact, here we have magical practices arriving on British shores thanks to a modern global network and the possibilities attached to an academic career: modernity has created the conditions necessary for this malevolent magic to thrive. The ancient college buildings and the clearly ancient cottage inhabited by the Taylors may now be modern in outlook and trappings, but they still become subsumed by ritual practices and supernatural dangers – those modern trappings even facilitate magic. Old and new are again united in the film.
Where it differs, perhaps, is in the way Taylor has to come to accept that strange things are happening; once he has done this, he can escape, although things cannot be the same again. A man of few words, we are never told how he feels, but we’re in the same position as him, by the end. We don’t know if the eagle falls by chance or intent. We don’t know if Tansy survives by chance or through magical protections. The world is a more uncertain place by the end of Night of the Eagle. In this respect, Norman Taylor is more of a Rosemary Woodhouse than a Sergeant Howie – he encounters a cult, and his rationalism gets modified by the encounter. The Taylors survive. But at what cost?
This tense yet ambiguous film doesn’t waste a frame, yet it still leaves us with questions. At the end of the film, there’s a delicious circularity in seeing Taylor sprawled against the same blackboard where “I DO NOT BELIEVE” is still written. One of those four words is obliterated as he presses, in wild-eyed terror, against it; the muddled message which remains, by accident or design, is perhaps the best way to summarise this fantastic film.
As horror is increasingly picked up by the academic community, with more seminars, papers and conferences emerging yearly, it’s little surprise that the renewed interest in folk horror is also making its way into print via this new wave of academia and its authors. Adam Scovell’s book, Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, is a meticulous and considered study of the genre – not seeking to rigidly define the sub-genre of folk horror, mind, but rather to spend ample time discussing its themes, ideas and preoccupations. Beginning with the so-called ‘Folk Horror Chain’ – Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw and of course The Wicker Man – Scovell then travels through a wide range of film and television, focusing on the golden age of folk horror (the 1970s) but extending his analysis further where relevant. This approach – not keeping or dismissing material outright, but using the Folk Horror Chain as a start point and then developing flexibly from there – lends the book a useful if broad sense of direction, as it moves through a range of comment, excerpts of analysis, outsider critiques and interviews, anecdotes, and short plot synopses.
Despite being largely academic in tone, with words like ‘diegesis’ and ‘gestalt’ peppering the chapters throughout, this is by no means a straightforward academic tome, even whilst clearly not a coffee table book. I particularly enjoyed the self-deprecating Wicker Man screening anecdote which opens the book, for example, and in places the text is actually rather literary – things which add to the overall variety and therefore the engaging qualities of this book. I’ve long said that academic writing has the potential to be some of the worst written English out there; writing is about communication, even if it’s communicating complicated ideas, so if that’s not happening, then the writing has failed in its job. Happily, that isn’t the case here, though I’ll freely admit that the word ‘Hauntology’ still doesn’t quite sit right with me, and it’s used a lot in the book, even before it gets its own chapter. That, of course, is my issue and not the book’s…
There’s engaging content here throughout, which I feel would intrigue fans as much as academics – though that’s a bit of a false dichotomy these days, I know. For instance, I really enjoyed the section on M R James and his screen legacy which so often comes to us via Lawrence Gordon Clark, a talented figure who has done a great deal to shape our appreciation of ‘folk horror’ (see also: Nigel Kneale, whose work is happily given due consideration.) The 70s themselves are shown as uniquely placed to have given us so much folk horror,and we also see, interestingly, the way that the decade now comes down to us as a kind of folk horror realm itself – other, distant, uncanny, tinged with nostalgia. There is also a section on more modern forays into folk horror (The Witch, A Field in England, Kill List) as well as a whole host of films and TV I’ve never seen, but would now seek out: The Shout sounds fascinating. All in all, the level of research and knowledge showcased in Hours Dreadful is second to none.
Where I would part ways with the book most sharply is in its closing pages. Here, bringing the book up to the current day, the phenomenon of folk horror is tied in at last with Brexit Britain, forging a link between folk horror’s unthinking ‘local people’ who reject outsiders with those who opted to vote Leave last June. I won’t deny that Brexit has changed the political landscape of Britain – it undoubtedly has, and the naff jingoism of right-leaning newspapers (together with the barely-stymied snobbery of left-leaning newspapers) was and is a source of exasperation and embarrassment. Nor do I deny that many people in Britain have problems with immigration, or ‘non-local’ people, to keep it going – of course they do, and during the run-up to the vote nearly every day brought a vox pop with someone who seemed to completely misunderstand what the vote was really about or could do. But if I was to play devil’s advocate, could I not suggest that the unthinking devotion to a system, the inner workings of which are a mystery to many of even its most ardent supporters, could be compared to horror, too? That London really is a different realm with its own rules and practices? That those young people wandering with their placards and their chants could’ve washed up from Quatermass? Or does this kind of hyperbolic commentary only feasibly run one way? Of course, metaphors break down the instant you really begin to examine them, so we need to tread carefully with them – which is perhaps the key point to be made here (even if the book’s closing pages aren’t suggesting Brexit will inform the horror landscape – rather, that Brexit Britain itself it is the horror.)
Overall, however, Hours Dreadful and Things Strange is a fastidious piece of work which deserves due credit. It’s a dense text and not pitched as an easy-come, easy-go page turner – but it’s considered, offers much food for thought and adds scores of its scholarly, but enthusiastic ideas to the current folk horror renaissance. There’s a very useful bibliography and filmography included here too.
Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange is available to buy here.
“COMPLETE US THE CIRCLE!” STORIES OF STANDING STONES
The numerous standing stones of Britain are familiar, beloved points on our landscape: Stonehenge is now an integral part of the British tourism trade, for instance, bringing in visitors from around the world. There are examples of monoliths and circles throughout the country – over 300 in England alone (and far more in Scotland, that old ‘Other’ for so many horror films.) But, still, comparatively little is known about the purpose of these structures. We can glean that they marked, in some ways, the significance of the seasons, but the finer points of this significance are left to educated guesswork – the kind of guesswork which draws people to these sites for solstice celebrations today. Going back in history, only Romans such as Suetonius and Julius Caesar were there to pass comment on the rites of the Ancient Britons, and they were hardly unbiased commentators. Today, standing stones seem to do two things: they function as markers (of when life was different) and they provide mystery (how did our forebears use these places?) In horror, their importance extends further still: we know that they are in some ways temples to the old gods, but even if we have lost sight of those rituals and those gods, have those gods lost sight of us?
Consider the implications of interfering with a stone circle in 1977’s Stigma, written by Clive Exton and directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, who directed several other of the above-mentioned Ghost Story for Christmas TV episodes. It’s also relevant to say that, throughout the TV and cinema of the 1970s, Avebury (the location of Stonehenge and a number of other monuments) crops up several times. In Stigma, a young couple moves into a remote country house, which just so happens to be in the middle of a stone circle. Their renovations – which shift a standing stone – disturb a force that has been long buried, with the resultant action focusing on wife and mother Katherine’s body and what happens to her as a result of this modern transgression. A flawed narrative perhaps, but a story that points directly to the risks of breaking a stone circle, even in the twentieth century – with links arising between Katherine and an uncovered burial beneath the dislodged stone, presumably a ritual sacrifice. This dark side to picturesque and harmless ancient monuments would occur again during the decade.
“HAPPY DAY!”
In Psychomania (1973), the group of bikers thwarting the rules of life and death do so in wide-shot locations that feature a stone circle, just to underline the strangeness and otherworldliness of the plot in a film which we would probably not otherwise consider here. Along similar lines, and something which definitely seems to fit with the current discussion, it’s still incredible to me that The Children of the Stones (1976) was ever aimed at children, although one of the hallmarks of the 1970s seems to be that the distinction between kid-friendly and adult-friendly content was less clear. Even the public information films of the decade, which intended to caution children against dangerous behaviour, are often remembered today as akin to horror film viewings. I saw Children of the Stones for the first time in the mid-eighties, and it really got under my skin. The story of the village of Milbury – built in the midst of a stone circle (and again set, and filmed, in Avebury) makes for a strange new home to son Matthew and his father, Adam. A creepy story of indoctrination and weird psychic phenomena (and yet another sinister patriarch) ensues, with the stones themselves at the crux of the plot, whereby the circle has come to exist in some sort of time loop, making its influence seemingly inescapable. I have not revisited the series in many years; a mish-mash of terrifying music, blank-eyed schoolfellows and that painting usually drift to mind first when I recall it now.
Here, I’d find it remiss not to mention Season of the Witch (1982), a sadly underrated horror story which has long suffered for the baseless link to the Halloween franchise made by the title. It’s not a film usually included in discussions of folk horror (at least to my knowledge) but it’s a neat little nexus for some of the anxieties we’ve been discussing in these features.
As a clash between the modern and the ancient, first of all, I’d argue that Season of the Witch is second to none: here, fragments of a Stonehenge stone are being added to mass-produced Halloween masks in order to control the wearers via a mass media trigger – TV. The reason given for this is simply to rejuvenate the festival of Samhain, which we modern folks have co-opted as Halloween, a festival where, as antagonist Conal Cochran sneers, people simply send their children “begging for candy”, ignoring the bloodshed and sacrifice originally associated with the Celtic New Year. Well, no more. Here, not only is a standing stone – from the most famous standing stones in the world – integral to the horror, but also it’s physically been transmitted to the New World, where the intention is to wreak havoc – old against new, misunderstood tradition against crass modern. Moreover, not only is America in danger, despite the distance between it and the British Isles, but its beloved free market and TV media are the things being used to promulgate that danger. Never were old and new brought to bear on one another in such a clear, direct way. Witches, Jack O’Lanterns and skulls – magic, ritual and death – via mass sale – transmit the destructive magic of a British standing stone to a crowd of naive and distant victims. Like Count Dracula and his native earth, as he purchases a property in England via modern and legitimate channels, it seems that this malign monolithic power (as it’s imagined here) can be carried and established in a new terrain simply by manipulating the modern system.
“IT HAS A POWER…”
This set of concerns is at the heart of a great deal of folk horror: a past believed long-buried and ‘safe’ rears its head again, jutting into a world believed to be so calm, predictable and dependable. Rational people are made to reconsider their values in horrific circumstances; closed communities hold sway, and unsound practices either win out or resume (or often, both). At the heart of all of this is the land itself. Whether it’s what the earth conceals, or the powers it can confer; whether it’s what springs from the earth or the ancient monuments upon it, the land itself is key, and something sinister can always be unearthed…
Idylls are not idylls in the British folk horror world, and the land itself hides a multitude of sins – even if ‘sins’ are a relatively modern phenomenon, by its standards. This small, but significant sub-genre derives a great deal of its power by examining the deep unease generated by Britain’s ancient history: the palpable, unshakeable sense that there is more out there to know than we currently do. Moreover, whilst the fear of insularity and pagan old ways jarring against the modern is integral, often the mysteries of the soil itself lead people astray. Something breaks out from beneath their feet; people fall under its sway, or they fight for rationality, but they must fight – against the forces of Nature and their representatives, the old gods.
“GROWS THE SEED AND BLOWS THE MEAD, AND SPRINGS THE WOOD ANEW…”
No film better understood (or embodied) the idea that you could quite literally unearth an evil than The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). In this seminal film of its kind, it’s the process of ploughing the land which turns up something unexpected – the remains of something ungodly. This simple act, in a fraught rural agrarian society, pushes the whole of that society to the edge of a precipice, as the village’s young people begin to fantasise about the remains and turn away from their fraught relationship with the Church towards more carnal forces. (The Church’s shortcomings are also explored in another contemporary film now held up as canon in folk horror tradition, Witchfinder General). It’s interesting that, in her book, Looking For The Lost Gods of England, author Kathleen Herbert identifies two things which are relevant to The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Firstly, the age-old importance of the soil in pre- or very early Christian times, where it was seen as a conduit between man and god, and secondly, accounts of rituals which incorporated the plough as a means of making offerings to the land – by literally ploughing offerings to the gods into the dirt. The spectres of these practices were retained by early Christianity, though – typically – shorn of any pagan significance. In The Blood on Satan’s Claw, the camera acknowledges the importance of the soil, and a deliberate decision was taken to place the camera on ground level or even beneath the level of the dirt. This tactic gives the land a prescience and a menace, which is borne out by later events – the accidental discovery of physical, but supernatural remains.
If something is unleashed simply via turning the land over, then what happens when something is deliberately placed in the ground? The master of quiet English horror, M. R. James, grappled with these possibilities in some of his best short ghost stories: he fills his tales with barely-tangible ancient terrors, which creep into view (almost) when modern interventions permit them. Some of these are summoned, accidentally or otherwise; some are malign entities which simply take their moment to escape. There are a number of stories which process these fears. In An Episode of Cathedral History – bearing in mind that cathedrals were often built on sites which formerly had other, pre-Christian ritual purposes – the tale tells of a mysterious tomb, whose disturbance causes strange phenomena to occur in the town and (possibly) releases a supernatural force, a ‘lamia’ – a term meaning a monster, or a witch. Whatever the creature is, it’s certainly something which Christianity would prefer locked safely away in hallowed ground (and there, we have the idea that the dirt of the earth can be sanctified with a Christian blessing, which speaks volumes to the beliefs of the past.) Perhaps the most famous James story, however, apart from ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come To You’, is A Warning to the Curious; the unearthing a Saxon crown, buried in the earth for the protection of the land, leads to severe repercussions for the amateur archaeologist who digs it up. Albeit in a simplified form, A Warning… was filmed as part of the superb A Ghost Story for Christmas series in the 1970s, as one of several Jamesian yarns adapted for television. The sense of a something relentless, a portent of doom, is married perfectly to a sense of the dispassionate, but harmful British terrain.
More recently, in film, The Fallow Field (2009) returns to the horrors of the soil, providing us with one character, Calham, who owns a farm and is the only person who truly understands his fields’ bizarre and disturbing yield, though keeping his secrets until almost the film’s close. Similarly, in Wake Wood (also 2009) pagan rituals come at a price, allowing a grieving family some time with a ‘rebirthed’ lost child who returns from the grave, but binding them to the land with various edicts – else their beloved daughter will be changed, irrevocably. Alright, this is an Irish film rather than British, but many of the plot elements overlap with other, older folk horrors, particularly the close-knit community whose alpha male acts as a custodian for the sinister magic being employed by the villagers.
This brings us up to The Borderlands (2013), a found-footage style folk horror which isn’t served particularly well, in my opinion, by this ubiquitous shakycam approach, but which introduces some good ideas about the ‘lie of the land’ and what lurks within it. It’s another film where the new God bumps head with the old, as the Vatican explores a secluded church in the Devon countryside. It transpires that the church is built on an old pagan site and that the local community is well-versed in ungodly practices, but the film goes further than that, making the land beneath the church a sentient character in its own right. In this respect, it’s a film reminiscent of The Ten Steps (2011), a brilliantly-economical horror short where a young girl’s fear of the basement means her parents – out at dinner while she’s home alone during a power cut – guide her down the ten steps to the meter in the dark, so she can get the lights back on. However, her descent doesn’t end at ten steps…
The clay can work wonders: it can manipulate people, birth terrors, and remind us all that the old gods hold sway. Perhaps we’re slower to see the significance of the soil in one of the folk horror classics, The Wicker Man (1973). Many of the elements we associate with the sub-genre are of course there – the pagan practices, the closed community and the threat to Christian outsiders, but at its heart, The Wicker Man is as a tussle between science and unreason, with the land of Summerisle itself at the kernel of the clash. The film only really discusses this element at its close. Howie, as he pleads for his life, has a moment where he invokes rational scientific argument to attempt to dissuade Lord Summerisle from doing what he’s about to do. The crops have failed, he points out, because the soil on the remote Scottish island is completely unsuited to growing apples – gulf stream or not. They were bound to fail.
The inhabitants of Summerisle have built an industry on something very tenuous, and in their efforts to maintain their industry they are driven to sacrifice life to the ‘old gods’ so encouraged by their feudal Lord. Class and economics are at the forefront of this story, whatever the invocations to gods of the sea and land, and at the heart of it all is a poor soil, which cannot sustain what the community wants from it, regardless of the gods, old or new, being invoked.
SYLVAN FAMILIES
As well as what’s happening below the soil, the trees and structures on top of it have also figured significantly in folk horror. Woodland – which once covered huge swathes of the British Isles – has long been the stuff of nightmares, but it perpetuates British cultural identity, too: most children still know the stories of Sherwood Forest, for instance – an area that is still around today, though greatly depleted. Taking this link further still, the novel Mythago Wood (1984) encapsulates the idea that ancient woodland embodies our history: the woodland described here is a parallel universe, inhabited by archetypes of the British consciousness, from Celts to knights, through to monsters and magic. This can be a thrilling place, but it can also be menacing.
The menacing woods are of course a staple of horror, and today the ‘cabin in the woods’ probably qualifies as a new folklore, known as it is to so many. Interestingly, films like Pumpkinhead (1988) and more recently, The Witch (2015) are set in North America, but show that Old World threats and beliefs accompanied British and other European settlers when they emigrated there. The witchcraft being used in each of those films bears parallels to anxieties about witchcraft already long-familiar in Britain and Northern Europe. The Witch is a particularly telling example of folk horror, where the settlers are (probably?) persecuted by malign forces, practicing witchcraft in ways Christians of that era would recognise and dread. Perhaps the people who spring from the soil take their terrors wherever they go. And, as an aside, the description given of the ‘Blair Witch’ by an interviewee in the ground-breaking (pun noted) found footage horror/’documentary’ The Blair Witch Project (1999) sounds an awful lot like the creature which escapes from the cathedral tomb in M. R. James’s Episode of Cathedral History…
Strange, isolated houses, villages and islands; closed communities, whose initial friendliness seems to mask something deeply sinister; people who have rejected modernity, or have simply been passed over by it; ritual practices; the uncanny; dark magic; pagan symbols; the threat of the old ways spilling over into the new, with devastating consequences…
Welcome to a special series of Warped Perspective articles on the phenomenon of ‘folk horror’.
We owe our use of the term ‘folk horror’, if I’m not mistaken, to the writer and actor Mark Gatiss who used the term in his History of Horror TV programme. Nevertheless, even if Gatiss came up with a pithy, recognisable shorthand, albeit that director Piers Haggard also referred to ‘folk horror’ in describing his own work, then his umbrella term took hold because it described a sub-genre already beloved of film fans. Those three key films chiefly associated with folk horror – The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw – established a new kind of uncanny cinema, where the vulnerabilities of established Christian thought were exposed to unreason. Considering the enlightened times in which these films were made, they seem to represent a hankering for a magical past, or at least for something both more powerful and mysterious than the current order had to offer. It’s possible, too, that the Age of Aquarius and the new wave of magical thinking found its portrait in the attic in at least some of the folk horror which emerged from the late 60s through the 70s. If magic was indeed back, and if young people were turning their backs on the norms of their parents’ generation, then what could all of this mean?
It’s certainly true that folk horror has garnered a considerable amount of attention lately, with some fine publications emerging and a range of interesting voices adding to the discussion. Some of this is undoubtedly nostalgia; perhaps some of it also stems from an appreciation of horror that is (at least seemingly) supernatural in origin, marking a move away from the bodily-fixated horrors of the nineties and noughties. Our fascination with the ghostly and the arcane never goes away for very long, certainly, and the renewed interest in folk horror testifies to that.
However, in the articles we are going to run, we’ll be looking further afield than a handful of key feature films, because – however vital they are – we believe that there’s more to say. As well as examinations of some of those genre-defining films from 70s Britain, we will also be looking at American folk horror, considering its differences and similarities to European (and other) folk tales. Throughout this special, we’ll look at lesser-known films, relevant literature, and other traditions which we feel are ripe for the folk horror treatment. Our intention isn’t to dilute the sub-genre beyond all appreciation, mind, but we do feel that some other relevant and engaging material definitely deserves to make an appearance here. And, if the 70s were a melting pot which led to a harking back to darker, but perhaps not so distant times – then what creative horrors will await those of us today, living through some of the most tempestuous and tribal times within memory?
Folk horror is an appealing (appalling?) concept and a broad church, and we hope that our run of features will reflect these things. We hope that you enjoy them: the first will be appearing later today…
Whilst it’s over ten years since director Park Chan-wook began stepping back from the beautiful, but brutal revenge sagas which first brought him to our attention, it’s nonetheless fair to say that I was surprised by The Handmaiden, his most recent feature. Although in some ways you can see commonality – deceptive appearances, surveillance, sexuality – between this and his earlier works, it’s otherwise a very different beast, a period drama which makes us look and look again at what we are being told before we can really understand its story. However, Park allows himself one minor tentacles/torture set piece. It’s only fair; they’ve done him proud up until now.
The film is set in 1930s Korea: while Europe was grappling with the rising possibility of another war with Germany, the Japanese had already extended their empire to include China and Korea, occupying the latter from 1910. A young Korean girl, Okju, is told that she’s been selected for the role of handmaiden – or a lady’s maid – for a wealthy Japanese heiress, Hideko, who lives with her uncle at a grand Korean mansion. Okju – going by the Japanese name of Tamako for her new role – is both spellbound and intimidated by the place, a weird mish-mash of Japanese and Western architecture, and at first can only gather scraps of information on her new mistress, who is apparently much-afflicted with her nerves. Tamako’s first meeting with her is after Hideko has a violent nightmare, but the new maid can’t help but be warm and informal with her from the outset, doing her best to calm her. Thus, a peculiar friendship is born.
But it turns out that Tamako isn’t as innocent as all that. She’s not Okju, or Tamako, but Nam-Sookee, a likeable little rogue from Korean criminal stock: her mother was hanged for being a thief, and her network of aunties, cousins and young charges keep company with some very crooked people indeed. Amongst these are fellow con-artist ‘Count Fujiwara’, a Japanese nobleman who is really neither of those things, but wants to get close to the wealthy Hideko, so that he can marry her and secure her fortune for himself. Getting insider knowledge from the lady’s maid is all part of this scheme, but he promises Sookee a cut of the profits when he’s done and he has, as he puts it, dumped Hideko in a madhouse. Everyone, it seems, has their price and Sookee has her own ambitions to get far away from her current situation, so she agrees to this set-up.
The thing is, she’s unprepared for the melancholy and enigmatic Hideko, whose beauty charms her, while she’s troubled by the bizarre relationship Hideko has with her elderly uncle, a bookseller and collector who uses her to perform readings for his invariably male buyers and guests (spoiler: he doesn’t ask her to read The Famous Five to them). Likewise, Hideko is intrigued by this lively new maid who speaks her mind and seems oddly earnest. Gradually their relationship changes, though the extent of these changes is steered in surprising directions. A long film in three separate chapters, Park allows different voices to come to the fore as he – gradually – reveals the truth. Some scenes are repeated and extended as other characters assert how things actually happened, telling us their version of events. The overall effect is very immersive.
“What does a crook know about love?”
Although the way is never left clear, the film really shines as an examination of the redemptive power of the two girls’ relationship, something which blossoms on screen. Park takes his time with this story; nothing is rushed. Sex is a key factor in this – throughout, even the intimation of sex with men is coarse and sadistic, whereas with women it’s gentle and intimate – but minor scenes work just as well. For example, where Hideko laces her maid into a tight corset, so that they each mirror the other (there’s a great deal of this mirroring elsewhere) they can speak to each other as equals for a short time, which encourages each of them to relax their guard a little. These moments of breakthrough eventually guide the two girls to their later actions. Essentially, the machinations of others bring them together, and it’s these little moments of parity which help their relationship to move beyond the strictures imposed on it by other forces – those which underestimate and belittle them. It’s this error of underestimation which is turned to such brilliant effect in the third chapter, something definitely worth waiting for.
The Handmaiden is also a beautiful piece of film, where every fragment of every scene looks sublime. From the characters themselves – I’m sure Min-hee Kim is carved out of marble – to their clothing, to the interior shots and the landscapes, it looks as though some kind of mathematical formula has been used to perfectly compose every moment. Even someone eating a grain of rice turns into a vision. And if you think I’m exaggerating, well – you need to see it, then you’ll believe it.
A film which unveils new ways in which its characters understand the world is always the product of a skilled hand, and Park Chan-wook certainly fits that bill. Whilst links to horror are for the most part subtly unfolded here, all neat aesthetic twists and stock-in-trade unhappy heroines, the film still has an ugly underbelly of vice and criminality. It’s the threat of these forces winning out which really drives the story, but also allows the story to expand as sumptuously as it does. This is another phenomenal and challenging piece of work.
The Handmaiden will be released on Standard and Special Edition DVD/Blu-Ray by Curzon Artificial Eye on 7th August.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m woefully ignorant of the diverse cinema of the former Soviet Union; this goes even for those filmmakers who bridged that East/West divide, such as the best-known of the bunch, I’d say, Andrei Tarkovsky. Stalker (1979) is the first of his films that I’ve ever seen and, yep, I’m afraid that goes for Solaris too. Now, as to whether Stalker is the best starting point remains to be seen; it’s certainly a challenging film, and I can’t help but think that the ‘sci-fi’ tag attached to it may do it a disservice in some respects. When we think of science fiction, we think of the visible presence of the improbable. In Tarkovsky’s work, the improbable is there as context only, and there are no flashy effects or plot developments after the framework is established.
The film begins in a dank, dour apartment with a family – father, mother and child – sharing one bed. Medicines and syringes adorn a nearby table. Dad (Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy) is looking with affection upon his sleeping daughter, but relations between him and his wife seem strained, to say the least: he tries to sneak away, presumably for some sort of employment, but Zhena (Alisa Freindlikh) is angry, doesn’t want him to leave and winds up inconsolably weeping on the floor. It turns out that his employment is that of a ‘stalker’. These people lead others into a mysterious part of the landscape known as the Zone. The Zone simply…appeared one day: some believe that it was the result of an asteroid, some say it was the work of some sort of extraterrestrial intelligence. Soldiers sent to this region disappeared and so, to try to safeguard others, the authorities erected a guarded cordon around it, making it intensely dangerous for anyone to sneak in. Stalkers help people get in – and they do so because it transpires that within the Zone, there exists the potential to make one’s heart’s desires come true.
Together with two other men – known only as ‘The Professor’ and ‘The Writer’ – the stalker takes them through deserted, waterlogged streets and nearer to their destination, avoiding gunfire along the way. The further they go, the more the landscape seems to be post-apocalyptic in some way; everything is broken, or derelict. Absolutely everything is flooded. The route is dangerous, they are low on resources and the soldiers keep up their assault on them, but eventually, they are able to reach the outskirts of the Zone.
Here, the palette changes from sepia to colour. This new area is a lush, but still a war-scarred place, and the stalker insists that they cannot simply walk straight to their destination – somewhere known as the Room. He tells the two others that the whole place is rigged with traps to keep people away, and that they must tread very, very carefully. Many people have, he insists, perished, right on the threshold of the Room. They must go cautiously, and they must also wait, and wait, for the right time to move on.
These three men – although acquaintances at best, rather than friends – spend a great deal of the rest of the film philosophising and pondering just what it is that they want from this ‘Room’. This futile hankering after something unknown has nothing in common with any of the sci-fi I could mention; if anything, this is Waiting for Godot with a science fiction back-story. It’s also similar to Godot in that these similarly, broken, shabby men are hanging around waiting for something which is a possible means through dissatisfaction and hardship, but they don’t really know what this relief will look like when they find it. And, as they don’t know what it looks like, they don’t really know how to progress. Stalker is incredibly oblique, and although there is some intimation of a tricksy intelligence which is keeping them all from what they want, this film is otherwise a long digression on the meaning of life which will, I am sure, test the patience of many viewers. I’d say you would need to have your appreciation of art-house in the ascendant, far more so than any lingering love for sci-fi or indeed any other genre, in order to enjoy this film (which, at a testing two hours forty minutes, may turn out to be rather important…)
Being art-house orientated, Stalker successfully looks very striking indeed, positioning its characters against abandoned places and post-War bunkers (the film was shot on location in Russia and Estonia, each of which still bore the marks of conflict, even in the 1970s.) It also boasts a painterly approach, with lingering shots, creative uses of colour and a camera which deviates from the inner turmoil of the three men to pan over interesting, and clearly composed tableaux of potentially symbolic objects. Stalker is massively lo-fi, however, with an emphasis on rather cerebral dialogue about ‘the meaning of it all’ and an appropriately obtuse Soviet conclusion where we learn only not to ask again in future. La La Land, this categorically ain’t.
So – as a first expedition with Tarkovsky, this was admittedly a challenge for me. Stalker is a strange, hypnotic and well-soundscaped creative enterprise, for sure, as well as being quite unlike anything else I’ve seen (apart from, as mentioned, a certain play by a certain Beckett) but it’s also dreary and motionless for much of the time, a chance to peer through the undergrowth and dereliction at some troubled souls without really being able to see any of them through their plight. I guess this is kind of the point. Should you wish to pick this one up, then, the Criterion Collection are about to issue a special edition which boasts a new digital restoration and a crop of special features.
